DIGITAL COMPETENCIES’ DIAGNOSIS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW OF THE FIRST DIGITAL NATIVES TEACHER TRAINING STUDENTS IN MONDRAGON UNIBERTSITATEA

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) implementation coincides on one side with the full development of the Knowledge Society in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are vital, and on the other hand, with the beginning of Higher Education studies of the "digital natives" (Prensky, 2001) generation, born together with the Internet and prepared, a priori, to cope with the changes arising from this new model.

Digital competencies take their maximum importance in the academic field as seen in the Basque Government 175/2007 Decree and the1631/2006 Decree of the Spanish Government. Apart from those ones, different world wide organizations such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2005), Association for Educational Communications and Technology (EGCC, 1998) and International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE, 2000) have accepted these skills as basic for any educational system.

Even if digital skills are well defined in the scope of the Secondary Education, a gap is found in higher education. In this paper we present the beginning of an investigation conducted in the Faculty of Humanities and Education of Mondragon (HUHEZI) in order to make a diagnosis of the technological skills of these newly enrolled Teacher Training students and know about how they use them. Therefore, we have translated into Euskera the questionnaire designed by the University of Melbourne in their research Educating the Net Generation (2009) focused on the instrumental skills. It needs to be mentioned that this research is focused on this first stage of the digital literacy because as Área (2008) states, this instrumental dimension should be acquired in order to develop the other aspects related to the digital competencies such as the analysis, selection or communication of different data and information.

Preliminary data, first conclusions and future research-lines will be described in this paper.