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

Both the Knowledge Society and the technological revolution we are nowadays' living are carrying out the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to be vital for all the citizens. This arising new model also coincides on one side with the implementation of The European Higher Education Area (EHEA), and on the other side, 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. Thus, digital competencies are not only taking their maximum importance in the society but also 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 though a gap is found in the definition of the digital skills in Higher Education we have decided to focus on the technological instrumental skills. This decision had been taken due to the floods of documents in the scope of the secondary Education that claim, and as Area (2008) states, that at first the instrumental dimension should be acquired in order to develop 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 know about how they use them. We have translated into Euskera 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). Preliminary data about the technological access' differences between the male and female students and the changes have been made from their first year studies to their second year studies, first conclusions and future research-lines will be described in this paper