An approach to digital literacy for adults: The EuNIC proposal

Abstract

Recent surveys point to the need to enhance digital literacy competences among adults. Still, digital literacy courses addressing adults usually face a number of problems due to the lack of common backgrounds and purposes among learners. This paper illustrates NIC (Nucleo Informatico Concettuale - Conceptual Informatics Nucleus), an approach to adult digital literacy that focuses on few key concepts and skills and adopts a problem-based approach. NIC, which was developed and widely tested in Italy, has been recently transferred to a European context by the EuNIC project. The main results of this process are reported together with some reflections about strong points and weaknesses of the suggested approach and, more in general, about critical aspects of adult digital literacy actions. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.