3. Defining ICT literacy

The International ICT Literacy Panel was comprised of educators, technology experts, scholars and industry and labor representatives from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, and the United States. Our deliberations resulted in the following definition:

ICT literacy is using digital technology, communications tools, and/or networks to access, manage, integrate, evaluate and create information in order to function in a knowledge society.

This definition carries several assumptions made by the panel and therefore it is important to consider each part of the definition in turn.

"ICT..."

Information Technology (IT) has been used for many years, particularly in the United States, and refers to the electronic display, processing, and storage of information, but not necessarily the transmission of the information. The term carries strong historical associations with enterprise data processing and centralized computer services.

However, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) represents the set of activities and technologies that fall into the union of IT and communication technologies. Global industry, international media, and academics increasingly now use ICT to describe this union. The real benefit of adding "communication" doesn't derive from including specific technologies, such as routers or servers, but from the dynamism implicit in interconnected social, economic, and information networks. ICT is characterized by unprecedented global flows in information, products, people, capital, and ideas. These flows are enabled by ICT: their sheer scale and pace would not be possible without the ability to connect vast networks of individuals across geographic boundaries at negligible marginal cost.