The Development of the Digital Wellness Toolkit

Abstract

The advent of Information and Communication Technologies have brought with it numerous advantages and disadvantages. One area of concern relates to wellbeing in a digital environment: issues regarding cyber safety and cyber safety, although prevalent, are not frequently addressed in school curricula in South Africa. Faced by a lack of training material for schools and communities on cyber safety and security, and drawing from its experience in the tertiary environment, the African Centre of Excellence for Information Ethics developed the Digital Wellness Toolkit. This toolkit seeks to address this gap on four levels: pre-primary age; primary school; secondary school and local community training. In so doing, the role of the South African government is underscored, since by creating and disseminating training programmes on the ethics of emerging technologies, it realises its responsibility towards eGovernance. This paper provides an overview of the history of the development of the Digital Wellness Toolkit together with a discussion of the theoretical and methodological approaches to the design of the various Digital Wellness curricula which form part of the toolkit.