Abstract:

According to Eurostat, in 2013 Portugal was the fifth country with the highest percentage of people that never used the Internet (33% of the population), preceded by Romania (42%), Bulgaria (41%), Greece (36%) and Italy (35%). On the other hand Denmark and Sweden have the lowest, both with 4%. Germany and United Kingdom have also low percentage 13% and 8% respectively. The average in the 28 EU member countries is 21%.
Information and communications technology (ICT) are becoming more prevalent in all areas and fields of society. The digital inclusion has been seen as very beneficial to the individual, economy and society. So for the digital excluded, namely with disadvantaged background, like social exclusion, geographical exclusion or age exclusion (elderly), the ICT can take an even more important role to help them integrate in society.
Despite a growth in the number of Internet users in the last decades, there are still a lot of people that don't use, or even never used this tool.
This project aims to address this problem by engaging synergies of nine partners in four countries (Portugal, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany) whose good practices will be shared and validated by the Science and Technology Foundation in Portugal. This network will work both at local, regional, national and international levels in transversal and trans-sectorial areas, both in terms of the partners involved (academic and enterprise), and in terms of the focus group (VET; adult education with disadvantaged background; HEI with special focus on this group) literacy inclusion, re-qualification and employability.
As a strategic partnership project this proposal intends to promote actions, to build contents, digital instruments and to analyse the impact of ICT in a glocal (global&local) world, rooted in a process of civilisational change (social, political, economic and cultural). Always taking leverage of the individual skills and competences of each partner, anchored by the best research and state of the art practices.
The main focus, as said before is to attend the info-excluded citizen, mainly the ones with disadvantaged backgrounds, both in social and geographical terms by integrating the ICTs in their lives and to share and spread those good practices either among partners and with the community.
The adopted methodology will be, in a first moment:
1) identify the most preeminent needs and ways of integrating ICT in daily life;
2) share current good practices (in the areas of new competences- digital literacy, inclusion and employability);
3) enrich each other’s knowledge in complementary fields;
4) analyse the impact of ICT in a global world in a process of civilisational change (social, political, economic, and cultural).
In a second moment the results achieved will contribute to shape the local implementation of good practices.
We've already developed educational technology content in 3 levels of difficulty, basic, intermediate and advanced, based on the identified needs of the population. These content are the basic usage of computers, using a search engine, communicate via e-mail, via social networks, and audio/video chat, in a more intermediate level to create an online presentation, a video animation and to manage a chat or video-conference participating in a forum, in the advanced level are the development of a mobile app or a website using web applications. We'll now develop pedagogical guidelines to train these population in the mentioned content.

Keywords:

Inclusion, digital literacy, disadvantaged background citizen, elderly, Erasmus+.