DIGITAL COMPETENCES’ DIAGNOSIS IN HIGHER EDUCATION: AN OVERVIEW OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE FIRST FEMALE AND MALE DIGITAL NATIVES STUDENTS’ TECHNOLOGICAL ACCESS IN MONDRAGON UNIBERTSITATEA ON TWO YEARS

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) have brought a vital revolution to all citizens within the Information society we live in. This emerging model also coincides with the implementation of The European Higher Education Area (EHEA), and also with the fact that “digital natives” (Prensky 2001) are beginning their Higher Education studies. This generation, which was born together with the Internet, is ready, a priori, to cope with the changes arising from this new model.

Thus, digital competencies are not only taking their full role in the society but also in the academic field, as it can be 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 though there is a gap in the definition of the digital skills in Higher Education, we have decided to focus on the technological instrumental skills. This decision was taken due to the huge amount of documents in the field of Secondary Education claiming that, as Area (2008) states, first of all the instrumental dimension should be acquired in order to develop all the other aspects related to the digital competences, such as the analysis, selection or communication of different data and information.

Therefore, 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 instrumental skills of the 2009 / 2010 enrolled Teacher Training and Audiovisual Communication students, and also find out how they use them. We have translated into Basque the questionnaire designed by the University of Melbourne in their research Educating the Net Generation (2009) which is focused on this first stage of the digital literacy (instrumental skills).

This paper will analyze preliminary data about the differences between male and female students when it comes to access to technology, the possible changes from their first year to their second year, and will also draw some conclusions on the issue, before describing some future research-lines.