Biographical Space, Digital Death and Information Literacy Skills: Current Issues

Burnett, Merchant and Parry [7] consider that the vision based on age criteria can result in a linear reading of literacy work, so we were cautious in our preliminary results.

Posthumous messaging services, Digital estate planning services, and Online memorials and obituaries. These services reintroduced mourning into social life and transformed the traditional specificity of death status and location [8] with impact on the memorializing process [9, 10] (e.g. ‘presencing’, the ‘visual turns’ of selfies at funerals, photo-sharing, re-presencing the funeral via Instagram or the discursive field of multiple hashtags and images highlighting the “death” of inanimate objects, such as mobile phones and laptops, web communities of grief and remembrance, identity work in profiles on social networking sites) and on the new forms of adaptation to digital immortality [11] and in the possibility of an ‘infinite’ communication with the dead (techno-spiritual relationships). According to Bourdeloie and Julier-Costes [12], the logic of connecting/disconnecting with eternity is now taken to the extreme, exploring the metaphysics and the ethical and philosophical problems associated with death and post-mortem survival, complementing with new terms: digital religion, posthumous social presence, telecopresence, social necrophilia, necromedia, permadeath, and thanosensitive design [13]. This can also support questions concerning what future publics will consume the dead and how they will do so [14].

Skills in information literacy education have been systematised by Bawden and Robinson [28]: Understand the information environment; Use digital tools effectively; Recognise information needs; Know relevant information resources; Find and access information; Critically evaluate information and information sources; Critically evaluate online interactions and online tools manage information; Share digital content ethically; Become an independent and a lifelong learner; Learn to learn; Develop metacognition; Understand ethical issues of information; Present and communicate information; Create information products; Synthesize information and create new knowledge.

Several frameworks have been developed in Europe under the initiative of international organizations: 21^st Century Skills and Competences for New Millennium Learners (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) with the goal of providing policy-makers, researchers, and educators with orientations for the design of educational policies and practices that address the requirements of learners in the knowledge society; Key Competences for Lifelong Learning, a European reference framework (Council and European Parliament, 2006), aimed at identifying and defining the key competences that are necessary in the knowledge society; ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (UNESCO, 2008), which intends to identify a common set of qualifications needed for the integration of ICT in teaching and learning.