Perceptions and Analysis of Digital Risks

6Towards a Normative Prescription of Information Practices on Digital Social Networks: A Study of Documentary Pedagogical Projects in Middle School

6.1. Introduction

In the French National Education system, an institutional preoccupation with media and information literacy emphasizes the need to train students in order to “enable them […] to exercise their citizenship in an information and communication society¹”. In fact, information practices pose a challenge to the educational community, which attempts to get a grip on its training issues.

Based on the observation that young people’s information practices are concentrated on digital social networks (DSNs) and include communicative, information-seeking and social activities (Aillerie 2008), we focused on a specific context of use: digital social networks. After studying our corpus, we found that pedagogical implementations on digital social networks were often an educational response to digital risk. Thus, we would like to set out the argument that the notion of risk is a common thread in the pedagogical practices encountered and shapes the construction of an information culture.

After defining the risk that concerns us, we will propose a model of our research objects, namely, heterogeneous information practices, DSNs and information literacy. After presenting our empirical methodology, we will show two axes of results relating to the representations of the teacher librarians and the learners of the risks within the framework ...