Analysis: educating the 'digital citizens' of tomorrow

Computing invited a panel of education experts to give their views on how best to equip young people for tomorrow's digital economy. Peter Gothard listened in

"Under the old ICT curriculum, I think there was a lot of rhetoric like ‘digital citizenship' and ‘21st century skills' that was rather vaguely defined and I don't think that was very helpful," Crispin Weston, chairman of the British Standard Institution's committee for learning, education and training, told Computing. "In part of Michael Gove's speech in January last year he called for an intelligent, serious conversation about how technology could be applied to education to improve teaching and learning, and I think that's still a question that hasn't really been answered properly."

But Weston believes that attempts to "disentangle" so-called citizenry from the raw coding process of computing have revealed a selection of key skills - identity protection on the web, social participation in an online environment - that should not be "terribly difficult" for students to pick up.

Weston said government skills champion Ian Livingstone was right to highlight the importance of core academic disciplines in his 2011 NESTA Next Gen report.

"In the report, Ian came back again and again to maths and physics - a lot of these core academic skills that are actually very important, and I think there's a slight myth that we need to go more quickly to more vocational things," said Weston. "I think productivity is very important, but there's a very important relationship between creativity and skills and knowledge - I don't think you can have one without the others."

But Weston went on to state that the sort of computerised environments that facilitate creative, "games-based" learning across subject areas "do not exist yet".

Livingstone, however, argued that such rigid frameworks are not necessary: "I think computing exemplifies the way learning should be more in-context, relevant and fun," said Livingstone. "Games-based learning where you can learn mathematics playing a game, setting people problems that are mathematical problems, but it's not just the pure maths bit, it's the applied maths, giving a problem, finding out how they're going to solve it, for me is more exciting for children."

While Livingstone argued that a videogame such as Angry Birds could fulfil these criteria quite easily, he explained it's also not so important to get hung up on the technology, but rather consider the teaching theory itself. Telling children to use whatever resources they can to work out how to move Mount Fuji from one place to the other in dump trucks, for example, would naturally lead them to using computers to find an answer.

"What's wrong with them learning through YouTube, or peer to peer learning, or downloading the best resources in the world from MIT?" asked Livingstone. "The children and the teachers learning together? Collaboration is what they're going to be doing in their real lives, so let them collaborate.

"We've all got different skills, but we always tend to set children learning the same information by rote and regurgitation in order to pass an examination, but often that examination has no use."

While Phill Bryant, qualifications group manager for OCR Examinations, didn't agree that exams have "no use", he argued that exam boards need to be following more encompassing ICT education plans with "qualification beyond just the assessment, and looking at the learning it encapsulates as well".

"The GCSE will need to evolve," said Bryant. "It's a fantastic step that computer science has been recognised as part of the key curriculum, but we do need to keep making sure assessment is keeping up."

Joanna Poplawska, co-founder of the Corporate IT Forum Education and Skills Commission, added that "it's important to remember that over 50 per cent of IT professionals are going to work for [large organisations such as McDonald's] that are represented by the forum, as opposed to the vendor community."

Poplawska voiced concerns that, with 900,000 ICT jobs forecast to be available in Europe by 2015, the 2014 target for UK education reform seems a one-shot opportunity: the UK needs to shape up quickly.

"I don't think we have a choice," said Poplawska. "You can see it across Europe; there's widespread agreement that ICT education is a massive driver behind the economy. At the same time, it's agreed education is not doing enough. There are gaps there that need to be filled."