Digital Literacy in Adults: An Overview of the Problems, Challenges and Solutions in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Day by day educational and government institutions choose to generate Virtual Learning Environments, being the use of technology a part of the chosen competence to develop; using digital platforms implies resource handling to facilitate educational projects managament, cloud documents, colaborative tools, publish and spread digital products. The advantage of using digital tools is that allows the quality assesment of the retrieved information. Then the appropiation of technological tools is considered an emerging social need. Kids, youngs and adults require abilities to use them, according to their grade of complexity it will be necessary to practice or going to an institution to get training. While the adult already use the technology to browse the internet, chat, multimedia use, make online procedures, watch news, consult books, among other activities; it is necessary to offer spaces for office software, social networks and applied multimedia training; in Mexico there are options like the Technological Literacy Training for Adults that takes place on the Instituto Tecnológico de Sonora (Sonoran Institute of Technology). Once the need of training is covered it is essential that the adult continues practicing and getting training with the objective of generating an update culture. An adequate and continual process for technological literacy will avoid adults being excluded of knowledge and information society. Also, it is important to consider training on using mobile devices with Mobile Learning wich allows the user to gradually be fluent on this technology, from locate online documents, sharing them, group collaboration to even learning from every place on any moment.