Author: Mira Bekar

The closing conference of the "Digital Skills for Civic Engagement" project was held on October 27, 2022, in Skopje. The project was implemented last year by MAAA together with the Social Tech Organization, Blink 42-21, and was supported by the US Embassy.

After the welcoming speeches by Ms. Verica Jordanova, the President of MAAA, Milan Tanchevski, the Executive director of Blink 42-21, and Mrs. Marlene Nice, the Head of the Public Affairs Department at the US Embassy, three sessions took place. The first one was a talk by prof. Nikos Panagiotou, Associate Professor, at the School of Journalism and Mass Media Communications, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and President DCN Global. The second session was devoted to four initiatives for civic engagement implemented by youth teams from two high schools in Republic of N. Macedonia (“Orce Nikolov” and “Vasil Antevski - Dren”), from one Civil Society Organization and from the Blaže Konski Faculty of Philology. The third session was a panel discussion on the importance and implantation of digital skills for education and training in the Republic of N. Macedonia, which was moderated by Bojan Kordalov, an expert on digitalization.

The topic of civic engagement was wonderfully introduced and covered in the talk by professor Pangiotou, who defined what “community engagement” means, pointing out that all the strategies and processes must be sensitive to the community-context in which the civic engagement occurs. Additionally, he pinpointed how connection and trust help community become more open and receptive to discussing and understanding issues to which initially the community might feel opposed.

The second session was colored by youth energy. It was opened by Sanja Shankovska, an English teacher, who together with seven high school students from “Orce Nikolov” presented their project titled “Youth Together”. They showed their vision of creating a website which will serve as an aggregator for useful information for students. Their motivation sparkled from the fact that the students do not know where to look for information relevant for their education and future development such as information about projects, volunteering programs, school clubs, competitions, Matura exam, stipends, workshops and trainings, educational resources and opportunities for studying abroad. The aims of the project are to overcome the problem of lack of information and resources for students, to collect data, relevant news and announcements from all the institutions and organizations aimed at youth and education, and to make them easily accessible. Basically, this team presented an idea on how to increase the visibility and transparency for students, teachers, parents, and the employees in the institutions and organizations. Students and teachers from all the schools within the country will have the opportunity to communicate and share ideas on forums on the website.

The second initiative was presented by students from the Department of English Language and Literature, at Blaže Koneski, Faculty of Philology in Skopje and by their mentor Mira Bekar, Associate professor. The project titled “Critical discourse analysis of online news headlines,” presented in a short video format, demonstrated how digital media possesses the utmost power in the process of informing people about major political issues of the century due to advents in technology and access. Using a scientific method (critical discourse analysis), they analyzed headlines from Croatian and Macedonian newspapers to show that despite serving as informative sources, online newspaper articles including their headlines, have the power to shape and alter public opinion on the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a current major world issue. The idea was to demonstrate how using science (Applied linguistics) can help us as community members to develop our digital literacy skills. Six students Mila Vilarova, Andrijana Taseva, Darko Micevski, Jovanka Markoska, Magdalena Stojanova, Angela Milic explained their motivations to participate in this project ranging from personal curiosity to reaching scientific goals using digital tools.

Ivan Durgutov, CSO representative, together with five other young people have worked on a project titled “Youth leaders today, agents of change tomorrow”. The aim of the project is to unify the different institutions which are providing youth opportunities for education and culture, and to provide a centralized way of informing the young people about them. As Mr. Durgutov pointed out, their outcome would be a digital solution, a mobile app for sending these opportunities to the users.

The team led by Dragana Gjoreska, English teacher at “Vasil Antevski-Dren” consisted of seven students who worked on a project "Healthy, wealthy and wise". The students Angela Bogatinova, Andrej Donevski, Eva Blaževska, Urosh Markoski, Borjan Kochoski, Tanja Rusmir, and Marko Sekuloski stated that the aim of the project, presented in an engaging video format, is to enable the youth to discern facts from opinions on the topic of health. Specifically, they showed how to distinguish between facts and opinions in general, on phenomena such as microplastics, healthy life, eating habits, psychological and physical well-being of young people. What they are expecting to develop further as a part of their digital skills improvement is a mobile application with links to relevant sources and information on all the above mentioned topics, serving as an eye opener, i.e., fact checker or even an alarm to all the youth exposed to “unhealthy” content in the digital world.

The final session of the conference was a panel discussion on the importance of digital skills and the opportunities they offer for education and training globally and in the Republic of N. Macedonia. The panelists Milan Tanchevski, an Executive director of Blink 42-21, Vesna Ivanoska, a Deputy president of the MASIT Board of Directors, Dejan Zlatkovski, a Project manager at UNPD, Azir Aliu, a University representative and Head of Future Skills Center Tetovo, Dr. Dimitar Jovevski, a Professor at the Department of e-business at the Faculty of Economics in Skopje and Mila Josifovska Danilovska, a Program coordinator at the Foundation for Internet and Society "Metamorphosis" presented their views on the benefits, inevitability and the necessity of implementing digital skills in the new era in any segment of community life. Inspired by all the valuable presentations, the audience consisting of thoughtful young individuals developed a fruitful and vivid discussion. In an exceptional atmosphere many young people expressed concerns but also their vision of what it means to be a human in the 21st century.