Digital Competence

First special issue ("Connectivism and Liquid Society" - Year 1, issue 3) - Table of content

Preface
New forms of social configuration have been developed during last years and, recently, they have converged towards the well known “information society” and “access society” (Castells and Rifkin), or, as someone else says, they contributed in the creation of the “knowledge society”; despite of the different appellations used to describe today society, there is a common feature for it, that is to be based on digital communication as “key technology” for the new millennium.
There are many reasons for the evolution which brought to today society, as it is perceived from many sides, but the following aspects will be better analyzed and discussed in what follows:

the impact that digital technologies had, and still have, on information acquisition, on knowledge development and especially on human communication,
the convergence of different fields of investigation, like human sciences and organizational disciplines, in the analysis and the explanation of knowledge phenomena.

As regards the first issue, undoubtedly digital equipment made faster and faster a well known phenomenon accompanying human evolution, the interaction of human beings with their artifacts; it especially influenced the way instruments and processes modified subjects. On one hand, digital information have made easy to store, to modify, to share and, more generally, to manage, any kind of information; they made also possible the development of meta-cognitive skills in the subjects working with digital equipments, and introduced higher levels of thinking in large layers of population. On another hand, they are considered responsible for the gap between subjects, communities and populations, because of the well known phenomenon of “digital divide”, that is the difference between people who know and are able to use digital equipment and those who cannot (i.e., the phenomenon does not only rely on the difference between developed and underdeveloped countries, but can be easily detected in gender, ethnic, cultural, inter-generational differences, in people living in the most developed countries).
By concluding the analysis of the first issue, it can be stated that the high influence of digital technology on knowledge construction justifies the interest for the use of suitable instruments and strategies in education, since the first stages of human development, so that subjects can be helped by digital technologies in overcoming their difficulties and in filling the gap with others.
The only problem with the strategy described above is with their “personal features”, they are in fact planned and made up to intervene on individuals and, do not keep in the right consideration the changes induced from information and communication technology on the whole society.
The second issue reported above has its roots in the studies on the interactions between subjects and corporate or organizations, where the rising of the importance of communities, and especially communities of practice, has been considered very important for the development of firms and their success. The connection between individual’s and organizational knowledge, also led to the analysis of the transformation of work force knowledge (mainly tacit and personal) into corporate knowledge (mainly explicit and social), and vice-versa.
The spreading of computing, networking and, more generally, ICT equipment, made easier the storing, increasing, analyzing and retrieving of the organizational knowledge; as a result, knowledge management has been recognized as a new discipline, and its use and development has been considered strategic for the success of a corporate. The growth of this discipline had its effects also on subjects, it leaded in fact to the identification of individuals’ features with those of the whole organization; main result has been the development of the ideas of personal knowledge management, by which digital equipment and the associated processes, are considered the natural extension of human body and behavior, and are very important, if not essential, to manage business administration.
The above considerations show that human knowledge has to be considered today a multi facet phenomenon, where the analyses of psycho-pedagogical paradigms are very important for the explanation of individual’s experiences and development, but cannot discard the results from the studies on communities and corporate, from an organizational point of view.
In this panorama it has less sense to question on knowledge structure, than to intervene in its development; otherwise stated it is less important to state if knowledge is something external to human beings (absolute and to be discovered) or internal to them (personal, modifiable and mostly to be constructed). In conclusion it looks much more important to integrate the different perspectives on knowledge features and to give people new instruments and strategies for better building their knowledge, so that they can solve problems and face reality more efficiently and effectively.
The last viewpoint can be assumed as the reading key of the present issue of the journal, where the different authors discuss digital literacy and digital competence in a double perspective, the first one coming from connectivism, considered by many researchers the last frontier for the analysis and interpretation of human knowledge phenomena, the other one derived from the fluidity of today society, so rapidly changing to impose the development of special connections with communities and society to subjects, to avoid the exclusion and the sensation to be lost.
The papers in this issue of the journal follow one another in facing the different aspects of the changing society. The first contribution reports of the efforts made in the research of a framework for digital competence assessment and proposes a final model for it; the second one focuses on the importance of technology enhanced learning environments in today education and proposes the development of an operational framework to be adopted for the design and the management of educational processes centred on “design literacy”; the third paper proposes the use of social networking and especially Wikipedia as a training resource for the development of digital competences; the fourth one discusses the use of free software and the implementation of some experiences for the promotion of the liquid society; the fifth and last contribution proposes the topic of digital literacy for health and discusses the importance that it has for the Health 2.0 challenge.

In a greater detail the authors of the five papers propose what follows.

Theory and Practice in Digital Competence Assessment
Antonio Cartelli
The paper starts form the analysis of today complexity, and from the uncertainty of liquid life which is frenetic, rapidly changing and highly influenced from information and communication technologies, to discuss the digital age and the pervasiveness of computers and IT/ICT equipment, which are influencing learning and knowledge construction. In the discussion the author tries to answer the following questions:

Is there any privileged role for digital competences in the knowledge society?
Is there a framework for digital competence assessment helping people harmonize the different competences and helping them become better persons and citizens?
Are there hints, suggestions, experiments, protocols and/or curricula helping teachers in hitting the above target with their students?

First the evolution of psycho-pedagogical paradigms and their comparison are discussed, soon after a framework for digital competence assessment is proposed and last, but not least, some teaching activities and experiences are suggested.
At the end, the proposal of a teaching-learning process, called OTS (Open Teaching Process) is given.

Beyond the Media Literacy. Complex Scenarios and New Literacies for the Future Education: the Centrality of Design
Carlo Giovannella
In this paper the author states that the advent of new media and web technologies made both “contents” and “containers” more liquid, and deeply reflects on the multi facets concept of literacy. He then proposes an experiential definition of literacy in education. According to such reflection, in the present scenarios, the “Design” becomes central to education, and underlines the need of educational activities which should include among their objectives the dissemination of what can be called “design literacy”.

Wikipedia as Training Resource for Developing Digital Competences
Corrado Petrucco
The contribution first discusses whether Wikipedia could be considered a valid resource for educational institutions like schools and Universities, or not. Undoubtedly, Wikipedia brings with itself the risk of incurring in mistakes, inaccuracies and plagiarism, but the bad reputation of the free encyclopedia is nevertheless false. Wikipedia is reliable and can be used in the curriculum as new approach for social and collaborative construction of knowledge. It can fully enter in educational contexts as an opportunity to reflect on the verification of information, on the ethical use of technology and on the role of democratic participation in social networking. In the author experience, the creation and the maintenance of articles of Wikipedia as classroom activities, gives the opportunity for the activation of higher processes in cognitive development and on-line relationship, allowing the development of essential digital competences for life-long learning.

Free Software Implementation Experiences for the Promotion of the Liquid Society
De Pablos Carmen and López David
The paper first discusses the changes induced by information and communication technologies on citizens inter-operation with Public Administrations. Digital literacy is the key for the development of the Liquid Society and, Public Administrations must lead the actions for promoting more efficient, universal and user oriented public services. The migration to open source standards allows Public Administration offering more democratic, universal and efficient channels for establishing relationships with citizens. To support their hypothesis the authors report of some international experiences which describe the migration of Public Administrations towards open source software, in order to promote digital literacy in the contexts they operate. They also report that the results depend at a great extent on contextual and organizational factors, as for example the need to change, the political support, the existence of available technological resources, the organizational climate, the motivation of the human resources and the kind of leadership for the project or the organizational complexity.

Digital Literacy for Health: The Promise Of Health 2.0
Ela Klecun
The author outlines and challenges expectations and promises regarding the potential of the internet and in particular Web 2.0 for empowering patients and citizens. It focuses on literacies required to make a meaningful (to the individual) use of these technologies for health and health care related purposes and briefly discusses how these should be taught. The author concludes that these literacies, including digital literacy and health literacy, are complex and challenging to many, and that the empowering claims are over-stated. Traditional sources of information and advice will remain essential to maintaining quality of health care.

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