The two-day interactive workshop, held September 5 and 6 under the title “Digital Dignity: Civil Society Against Cyberbullying,” took place at Nazarbayev University and was organized by its student-run Legal Literacy Club. Participants, aged 14 to 16, attended free of charge.
Alexei Trochev, associate professor of Political Science and International Relations at the university, said the workshop was built around a central idea.
“Digital dignity is human dignity in digital space, in social media, artificial intelligence and the internet,” he said.
Over two days, the students took part in interactive activities including a quiz game, a values auction simulation and team analysis of real cyberbullying cases. Each team presented its case and proposed solutions before receiving instructions to develop a digital campaign, which the groups presented on the closing day.
According to Trochev, the workshop was intended to go beyond basic online safety.
“The overall purpose is for high school students to learn about values, our humanistic values, values of appreciating and respecting differences among different people, and protecting each other in cases of cyberbullying, harassment and all sorts of unsafe situations,” he said.
The workshop also resulted in four student-produced video campaigns. Four teams were assigned different scenarios and tasked with filming short videos showing how to confront cyberbullying.
“They will make these videos, which will then be translated into both Russian and Kazakh languages, and then they can be used to educate other students in Kazakhstan on how to counteract, how to prevent cyberbullying,” Trochev said, adding that organizers hope to publish them on YouTube and other social media platforms.
Daniel Scarborough, associate professor of History and Religious Studies, said the risks addressed by the workshop are structural as well as behavioral.
“The most obvious risk is the overabundance of information and the conversion of information into a consumer product, which tends to isolate people in different camps, different echo chambers,” he said. “If you have a particular political orientation, then online activity tends to make your views more extreme, because the algorithm will send you more and more of what you want to hear.”
The result, he said, is that an abundance of information can leave people less informed rather than better informed. At the same time, greater access to information can have the opposite effect when users are digitally literate and know how to navigate online platforms critically.
Asked whether Kazakhstan should follow countries that have restricted minors’ access to social media, Scarborough declined to prescribe a particular policy, saying that how societies should respond to the problem was precisely one of the questions the workshop put to students.
“What is more important, as an educator, is for us to prepare students to deal with digital platforms, social media, and their influence on society,” he said.
As a parent, Scarborough said he limits the time his children spend online while recognizing that exposure to digital platforms is inevitable. For that reason, he sees education as a more durable response and said workshops of this kind can be useful for high school and university students alike.
Scarborough also pointed to the broader purpose of the grant supporting the workshop, which aims to strengthen ties between local and international communities.
“Both local and global citizenship is definitely one goal of this grant project,” he said.
The workshop was organized under ValEUs, an international research and education network examining contestations to EU foreign policy. Led by the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, the network brings together 20 partner institutions from 17 countries across five continents.
The project has received 1.2 million euros in funding from the European Commission’s Erasmus+ program for a three-year period beginning in January 2024.Â
In February, the network’s Kazakhstan partners organized an online debate involving students in Kazakhstan and partner universities abroad on the influence of growing digitization and online activity on democracy.
Trochev said the Astana workshop was the third event held locally under the grant. Previous activities included a conference bringing together representatives of partner universities and EU diplomats, as well as a competition for students seeking places at summer schools.
If the format proves successful, organizers plan to extend similar activities to other high schools in Astana and to smaller towns nearby, he said.
Participants also received a trilingual brochure outlining ten digital rights, including protection from online harassment and disinformation, control over one’s digital footprint, human oversight of artificial intelligence in important decisions and accountability of platforms for harmful online behavior.
Students received certificates at a closing ceremony on September 6.
Earlier, Qazinform reported that the Kazakh Culture and Information Ministry had launched the Volunteer of the Year international award competition in line with the Kazakh President’s task to strengthen and support the volunteer movement.
