Digital maturity of youth

In today's digital world, digital skills play a key role in integration into the digital society, and it is important that they are acquired especially by adolescents, whose everyday lives are digitised practically from birth. As young people are not only entertained, playing and socialising in digital environments, but also creating, learning and informing, it is of utmost importance to identify their needs in the heterogeneous field of digital activities, while addressing the deficits of their experiences and the shortcomings that might discourage adolescents from sovereignly facing the challenges of contemporary societies. One of the ways to understand the contemporary challenges of young people and to find solutions and possible actions in this area is to identify their digital competences.

However, as new technologies are constantly emerging in the field of digitisation and the digitalisation of societies, the concept of digital competences itself is evolving and upgrading, and is consequently multifaceted and encompasses many areas of "modern literacy". As a consequence, digital competences are transversal competences that enable the acquisition of many other competences (e.g. mathematical, linguistic, learning to learn, etc.), which are linked to many 21st century skills.

For well over a decade, the DigComp European Reference Framework has guided digital literacy in Slovenia, which separates digital skills into five key levels: 1. information and data literacy; 2. communication and collaboration; 3. digital content creation; 4. security; and 5. problem solving. However, DigComp is less focused on critical dimensions of digital literacy, such as knowledge of how the digital ecosystem and media landscape work, and civic engagement beyond e-government services (e.g. artistic engagement, civil society activism, protest, etc.). The DigComp framework also fails to take into account opportunities for play, creativity and active leisure in digital spaces, and the potential collective empowerment of young people.

As young people aged 16–24 are a particularly challenging group to address and disseminate digital competences, as they have already left the field of compulsory primary education and there is no single educational space for them to comprehensively address their knowledge needs for a sovereign and emancipated integration in the digital society, it is worth considering alternative non-formal educational spaces in addition to the formal education system, which can act as key channels for the dissemination of digital competences among young people.

The project thus has four overarching objectives:

1. To analyse the social aspects of young people's digital needs, with a mixed-methods approach, combining qualitative focus groups method with quantitative survey.
2. To describe and analyse informal good practices in the field of digital competences, by a meta-analysis of international practices in the field of digital competences in non-formal education.
3. To propose thematically oriented non-formal education courses, derived by synthesising the findings of the first two objectives.
4. To develop guidelines for bridging the digital divide among adolescents, for addressing young people in order to bridge the digital divide required by living in inclusive and just societies of the future.