The evolution of digital competence models in a 4.0 era

This paper focuses on the evolution of digital competence in the last 15 years, and its development in order to face the challenges of the spread of social media and, on the other hand, to better deal with the Industry 4.0 trends. We will contextualize the issue within the debate on the importance of soft skills for today workers (which was stressed by several associations), in a framework obeying to logic of competence. In the early 2000’s, indeed, digital competence was seen as a point of interaction between IT literacy, information literacy, media literacy and visual literacy; in this decade, however, while young people become “authors” very early, it should be integrated as well with some elements coming from social literacy and, also, from the communication in the mother tongue, as it has been defined by EU. We will then describe the Digital Competence models that inspired the Italian Digital School Action Plan, linked to the 2015 school reform, analyzing the way those models address the evolution of the media scenario from an ecological, social and authorial viewpoint.