Promoting Digital Skills and Critical Awareness through Online Search and Personal Knowledge Management: A Case Study - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 10

processes. Issues connected with identity management and protection, reputation
management, information overload, 'fair' and effective use of network resources,
are becoming crucial.
In order to promote “effective uses” of web resources, we need to reflect on the
way technologies are used in education. In this paper we present a research case
study carried out at the University of Udine with a group of first year students of
Multimedia Communication following the course of English as a foreign language
(course title: Englishes and Media Communication in a World Context ). The main
aim of this case study is to gather information on the possibility of enhancing -
through searching activities on the Internet - the skills of the students in terms of
learning strategies, motivational variables and learning outcomes. After the theo-
retical background (Section 2), Section 3 illustrates the project development and in
Section 4 some results are analysed. A four-step process for Evidence Based Prac-
tice is provided in the conclusions (Section 5).
2 Background
As the “digital natives” debate has demonstrated, there is a discrepancy between
myth and reality of students' seemingly widespread use of technologies [1] and
there are also clear disparities between the education rhetoric and educational re-
alities of social media use [2]. Many studies [3, 4] have pointed out that digital na-
tives are not necessarily digitally competent.
Digital competence is recognized as one of the eight key competences for life-
long learning by the European Union. As [5] points out there are many definitions
of digital competence and there are many overlapping concepts, such as digital lit-
eracy , ICT literacy, media literacy etc. Digital literacy is the broadest concept: it
includes the main aspects of the two other fields but also responsible and effective
use of digital tools for personal tasks while benefiting from people's networks.
Digital competence is a transversal key competence that enables acquiring
other key competences (e.g. language, mathematics, learning to learn, cultural
awareness). It is related to many of the so-called 21 st century skill s which should
be acquired by all citizens, in order to ensure their active participation in society.
There are many different versions of the 21 st century skills framework.
Ananiadou and Claro's work [6] elaborated for OECD (Organisation for Eco-
nomic Co-operation and Development) focuses on three dimensions: information,
communication, ethics and social impact. We used this framework to analyse digi-
tal tasks produced by students during our case study.
Our work also refers to another wide area of study, PKM (Personal knowledge
management), which is defined as a collection of processes that a person uses to
gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his/her daily activi-
ties [7] and the way in which these processes support work activities. It is a
response to the idea that knowledge professionals increasingly need to be respon-
sible for their own growth and learning [8].
The case study we present is based on a PKM framework [9] in which such
competences are divided into two main groups: Basic and Higher Order PKM
skills. The former include three macro-competence categories: create, organise