What is Digital Literacy and Citizenship?

It is obvious that the capacity of Information and communications technology penetration reaches most of human activity, raising new educational needs. Consequently, important social changes stand out in the current process of globalization that is not necessarily accompanied by the consequent globalization of the basic rights of workers and guarantees their free circulation in other countries. Thus, the financial market evolves at a faster pace than the gradual internationalization of the labor market. The ease offered by the Network for carrying out capital transactions contrasts with the growing difficulty of citizens of poor countries to travel through other countries in the world. Only the most qualified sectors have that freedom of movement, benefiting from access to increasingly favorable economic and labor opportunities.

In this sense, the incorporation of Information and communications technology has increased the existing differences between countries and social groups. Currently, Digital literacy is talking about the division or digital divide. This expression shows how a separation is being established between countries and people that lack the knowledge and technologies that are required for the development of an information society. On the one hand, the new economy organizes the distribution of resources prioritizing occupations with a high informational content and, on the other hand, makes it possible to increase job insecurity and unemployment. Even so, faced with this process of fragmentation of societies based on the domain of new informational competencies, the resulting changes also have a positive effect. It deals with the possibilities of overcoming these situations of inequality through the extensive use of the Network.

The term “digital division” is used and defined as a result of the different access to the use and availability of communication infrastructure, technological development and applications and services. However, some studies, shows how the analysis of these differences between countries can not be based exclusively on economic criteria, since there are also other gaps of a social, cultural and generational nature. In short, once all the information is in the network, once the knowledge is in the network, the knowledge encoded, but not the knowledge that is needed for what you want to do, what it is about knowing where the information is, how to search for it, how to process it, how to transform it into specific knowledge for what you want to do. This ability to learn, that ability to know what to do with what is learned, that ability is socially unequal and is linked to social origin, family origin, cultural level and educational level. The training of new generations can’t be left out of the digital society and, as it is already mentioned, it is not only about providing access to Information and communications technologies, but about training for proper use. The digital society has created new forms of literacy that we can’t ignore if you think that citizenship training also means being experience in the digital world. Access to globalized information, systems of participation in the network, communication through electronic means, are important elements for the development of citizen competencies. Russell Hazard is passionate about contributing to improvements in education both at the grassroots school level and at the level of international policy. Russell Hazard Beijing also works to build international partnerships across sectors such as public/private education, NGOs, and international educational organizations to enhance discourse in ESD and GCED and improve impact on the ground internationally.