The social dilemma of surveillance capitalism

The Social Dilemma is a docu-drama movie available on Netlfix, which re-ignited the debate on the meaning, aims, hidden and inner mechanisms of social media platforms and their impact on youth, education, knowledge, and generally speaking, public behavior. The Social Dilemma has two layers: one is the story of a family where three sons and...

Summer camps? Sure, inside Minecraft!

Summer means summer camps: it is the moment when non-formal education can finally have the chance to demonstrate its immense potential: thousands of proposals for groups of girls and boys where socializing, adventure, discovery, become the protagonists of days that many wait for months, and then remember for as many months. This year, the distancing...

VR : virtual reality in a cardboard box

VR [as in Virtual Reality] is the new big thing, they say. Honestly, the idea of a 3D computer-generated reality has been a key aspect of cyberpunk culture, back in the 80s, and Wikipedia says the concept could even date back to the works of Artaud in 1930s. Anyway, the real attempt to get a...

Digital Youth Work: Dig-it Up!

Digital Youth Work: Dig-It up! is the booklet I wrote together with Joanna Wronska and Raphaela Blassnig in 2017. It tells what we discovered, studied and learnt during two editions of our training course aimed at youth workers / educators / etc which is actually called Dig-It Up! – inside you can find the training course’s programme,...

Christmas tech gifts for kids? 5 tips, tested for you

Gifts, gifts … 10 days to Christmas, are you ready? Have you already bought everything? Or have not you even thought about it yet? 🙂 At this point the children will have already written their letters to Father Christmas, and parents will already be grappling with boxes of Lego or other stuff, to be hidden...

eSports – videogames at the Olympics and more

Will eSports go to the Olympics? Apparently the Olympic Committee is thinking about it, and mentioned it in a recent statement . As foreseeable, such news sparked a mountain of reactions from commentators of a certain level , many of whom, as usual, speak of topics they do not know at all. So I thought...

InternetFestival : videogame – based learning – #IF2017

InternetFestival is a very serious thing, probably the most serious in Italy about network-related topics and trends. Yet 😀 the organization contacted me and my partner-in-crime Carmine , involving us in the T-Tour section, a series of public workshops during the festival. Apart from joking, the InternetFestival machine contacted us at the end of June to...

Technology “with a soul”: games and education

Technology with a soul? Whatever this might mean for you, It’s a trend that I noticed, and I see it growing – I realized it especially after my two latest jobs as a trainer, in two very different contexts. I just came home from a residential seminar of 10 days on storytelling and education in Czech Republic, followed by a week on digital creativity...

Thanks Seymour Papert for changing the world

It’ s been a few hours since we got news of the death of Seymour Papert, 88 years old. He seemed immortal to me, this ingenious and funny old man who always embodied , in my story, everything I think and hope and dream and try to achieve, on the frontier that joins technology and...