Abstract:

Digital revolution has deeply influenced and changed the way we learn and work, often blurring the boundaries between these two fields of human activity. Bearing in mind that modern ICT are providing access to an immense stock of knowledge and information that is freely available online, knowledge workers, as ambassadors of the 21st century workforce, must possess a high degree of digital skills and competences. In order to prepare students for digital era labor market, educational institutions (higher education institutions in particular) are obliged to respond to the challenges that our highly digitized knowledge societies are imposing by incorporating digital literacy courses into their curricula. Such courses strive to instruct students as to how to critically use modern ICT for retrieving, assessing, storing, producing, presenting and exchanging information, as well as for participating in collaborative networks in online environment.

Under the Key Competences for Lifelong Learning – European Reference Framework, digital competence is set as one of the top priorities, along with the competences of communicating in mother tongue and foreign languages, mathematical and basic competences in science and technology, entrepreneurship and civic skills, the ability to acquire new knowledge and achieve a high degree of cultural awareness and expression. Working diligently to join the European Union, Serbia has adjusted its laws on education with those adopted in the EU.

This particularly refers to the Serbian Law on Higher Education, which has been aligned (to the greatest extent possible) with the guidelines stipulated by the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Moreover, Serbian laws on education are advocating for an increased level of utilization of modern ICT in the classroom. Hence, in 2013, the National Education Council of Serbia has adopted the document entitled Guidelines for promoting the role of information and communication technologies in education, the same year that the European Commission published DIGCOMP – a Framework for Developing and Understanding Digital Competence in Europe. The Education Development Strategy in Serbia until 2020 also recognizes the significance of using ICT in teaching in order to improve Serbian education system.

As one of the essential 21st century skills, digital literacy is increasingly becoming an integral part of Serbian education institutions’ curricula. The paper aims at providing an overview of the official documents adopted in Serbia that are advocating for a greater level of implementation of ICT in teaching and consequently digital literacy courses within the Serbian education system. Furthermore, we intend to present the current situation in terms of teaching digital literacy in Serbia as well as the initiatives and projects that have already been realized in the field. The later include The Digital school project and KODigranje campaign of the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, which was developed under the Battle for Knowledge initiative in order to increase the digital literacy of primary students, but also the Digital Youthquake project, which aimed at improving digital literacy skills of youth workers. In addition, we will reflect upon the place of Serbian Cyrillic alphabet on the Internet and discuss the opportunity of raising the level of its visibility online by means of fostering digital literacy within the Serbian education system.

Keywords:

Digital, literacy, knowledge, workers, Serbia, education, system, laws, initiatives, projects.