CIAO! Women Project / Activities (If you are interested in reading the project's outputs and presentations to local/national meetings you may find them in the national sections of the website - go to the front page and pick a flag) We have identified, as worthy of further analysis, the specific needs of adult women in relation to ICT competencies. In fact, this group faces a specific and unique situation, different from that of younger women, used to ICT since their childhood. This situation needs to be addressed quickly to avoid missing opportunities for this target group. The project is based on the experience done by 3 of the 6 Partners in a Grundtvig 2 learning partnership. On that occasion, about 50 people, mostly women, chosen at random, were briefly interviewed to assess how they see ICT. The interviews showed certain recurring language patterns which tended to propose a stereotyped image of the computer and the Internet, that apparently originated from the popularised information circulated by the media to the non-specialist public. Our proposal goes in the direction suggested by the success of practices developed by women in the field of adult training and education as well as the activation of empowerment processes. A quantum leap is needed in order to achieve the education quality and opportunities that we must provide to adult women. The project has three main goals: 1) developing pathways facilitating the creation of courses which take into account specific gender-related aspects. Specifically,  the project will study and test suitable ways of assistance with respect to: a) the definition of the educational project, b) developing and exploring specific indicators and methodologies to be applied to a broad variety of initiatives linked with LLL and related with (and/or specific for) adult women; 2) changing the image of adult women and their relationship with technology in the eye of the media and communicators, helping them to overcome a view which is obsolete and, judging from the preliminary results obtained in the above mentioned interviews, does not correspond to reality; 3) introducing an advanced approach to LLL which makes learning take a quantum leap. Today, computers in education are too often used in a traditional and, by now obsolete, manner: we’d like to directly project women into advanced scenarios, avoiding knowledge and learning methods which are now outdated, thus contributing to break down gender and cultural barriers to women's access to technology careers.