Within the most recent decades, digital communication technologies have changed the cultural and political institutions that make up our society.

Political processes and cultural participation take place in a new technological framework where traditional notions of knowledge, authority, identity etc. are being challenged.

This, in turn, has created a call for new goals and strategies within our educational systems: If we are to educate our children and young people into responsible and capable ’digital citizens’ we have to reconsider the properties of literacy and citizenship in the 21st century.

This challenge has been met in a range of ways leading to a range of checklists and competence frameworks such as the '21st century skills'. However, such checklists and frameworks tend to instrumentalize the concepts of literacy and citizenship and obscure their more general and historical origins in the democratic traditions of our western societies.

The aim of this international seminar is to reinstate the debate about 'digital literacy' within the democratic tradition and historical ethos of our educational systems.