Knowledge and use of ICT in the agro-food field: the point of view of the formative processes.

The development processes concerning the whole of society question our skills at transferring or receiving information, whether we are individual or a large community. Up to this time the formative processes carried out by public and private institutions show evident limits, anachronisms and paradoxes. The inefficacy of some of these formative paths is often due to the lack of the basic knowledge (and of its checking). Communication, along with its “abstraction”, its high “informality” level and its important role in the development processes, help us to revise its value chain. Through our brief investigation, we pointed out some lacks. Firstly, about the approach to internet; then about surfing tools and, at last, about the “use of keywords”. We gather a sample composed of 100 elements, clustered by gender, in the sphere of post-diploma, degree and post-degree courses during the 2002-2003 academic year, in two southern regions of Italy: Calabria and Sicily. The research field is the one of agro-food economics, both for the question topics and for the author’s direct pertinence. The results pointed out, through a descriptive statistic, inaccurate dynamics concerning the information communication technology (ICT); the gathered data showed a little familiarity both with the topics and with the tools.