The European Commission considers the development of digital competences a strategic action to spread and to develop a more active digital participation of citizens. The objective is to increase the level of digital competence in the European citizens up to 2015 and to reduce the number of those who don't use new technologies and don't surf the net. At the base of an active citizenship there are creativity skills, the ability to support one's own point of view, the ability to quest, to have a critical reflection, communicative, collaborative, problem solving and listening abilities. This paper offers a theoretical definition of the critical competencies starting from the European framework and providing an operational definition from semiotic and linguistic patterns in the scholarly literature, concluding with the compilation of an evaluation rubric. By focusing on the critical dimension of digital competence, it may be possible to create evaluation tools applicable to different contexts and target audiences.