PLATO'S EU: Philosophical Learning Applied To Online Surroundings in EU

European Union recognized the need for more cohesive and inclusive society, with greater integration of its citizens embracing their active role in democratic life. Within this recognition, key ar...

By combining theoretical and practical approach, intertwining philosophical methods such as critical thinking and Socratic dialogue with digital resources, we aimed to tackle more cohesive and inclusive society, with greater integration of its citizens embracing their active role in democratic life, and not only strengthed capacity of individuals for adequate adjustment to digital challenges, but built a basis for enhancing the notion of shared European values, social integration, interculturality, and democratization.

European Union recognized the need for more cohesive and inclusive society, with greater integration of its citizens embracing their active role in democratic life. Within this recognition, key areas such as education, training, and youth work are designated to support and develop the sense of common European values, social integration, interculturality, and notion of community affiliation. Taking this into consideration, as well as the urgent need for adjustment to the new and unexpected ways of life caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, European Union underlined the importance of new horizontal priorities: innovative practices in digital age. This paradigm of innovative practices in digital age includes the use of digital technologies, innovative and open pedagogical practices in education and training, as well as development of open education resources, open textbooks, and open source educational software. In our project we tried to answer on this need, and offer a way to respond to the demand of developing open society through the use of innovative practices.

We created Online educational platform as a digital basis not only for resources created through the project’s lifetime, but also as a archive of other available materials, shared by willing parties. We also created the course of online workshops (2 moduls), which provide participants with necessary tools and strategies for better understanding of technological potential, and all benefits (but also dangers) which are offered with it. As project consortium was intended to function through close inter-sectoral cooperation, experiences of the partners, examples of good practices and feedback from the workshops was gathered and developed into digital open source manual CULTIVATING RESILIENT AND RESPONSIVE PERSONS: A Teacher’s Manual for Utilizing Philosophical Methods for and in Digital World. Another output of our project is THE PHILOSOPHICAL COOKBOOK: Recipes that Help you Remain Safe and Sane in Digital World - the non-formal manual for philosophy, designed to serve as a type of “philosophical cookbook” with “philosophical recipes” which general public can use to properly enjoy benefits of digital resources.