YOUTH 2020 - The position of young people in Slovenia

330 look for information and what is available, understand the information, know whether it is relevant to them and whether it is correct, and make a decision on further action based on the data (Heeks, 2018: 60-61). The EU Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning (EU Council, 2018) include digital competence among the key eight com- petencies. According to this, digital competencies “includes information and data literacy, communication and collaboration, media literacy, dig- ital content creation […], safety […], intellectual property related ques- tions, problem solving and critical thinking” (ibid.). In the case of the Mladina 2020 survey, we asked young people how inde- pendently they performvarious ICT-related tasks that indicate their level of digital competencies. As regards the perception of the ability to assess whether online content is credible and trustworthy, we find that just over 40% of young people assess themselves as independent, i.e. able to assess the authenticity of online content (see Figure 10.2). Furthermore, a slightly higher proportion of respondents (42.8%) easily or fairly well filter a large number of hits very quickly. In addition to this ability, in a flood of informa- tion, the ability to manage a manageable amount of information is equally as important. Approximately the same share of young people can easily or fairly well co-create a product with others at the same time on the same document or file, whichproves their ability to co-createwith the help of ICT tools. A similar proportion of young people (38.9%) also very well or quite well understand the challenges associated with uploading information about themselves online. On the other hand, we cannot overlook the fact that, for around three-fifths of young people, the basic processes of autono- mous and secure use of the internet pose a particular challenge that they do notmeet well or easily. This is especially true for tasks that hide several pro- duction dimensions, such as creating websites or blogs using dedicated on- line tools. Less than a fifth of respondents are such users (18.1%), which means that the vast majority of young people onlinemainly consume avail- able content. Examples of use and creation online, as indicated by the inter- viewee’s statement below, are more the exception than the rule. “I got my website half a year ago, so I also use WordPress.” (Tjaša, 26 years old, young professional athlete)