Start me up, and never stop

The Guardian’s Public magazine published an article in April entitled “Start me up, and never stop” referring to IT literacy and the need to promote it across all sectors and ages.  The article’s based on a roundtable discussion with representives from OCR, CBI, Connecting for Health, LSE, BT, Lifelong Learning UK, BBC, NIACE, Microsoft UK and others …

The title implies that what you need to know to remain digitally literate expands every day because technology moves so fast.  There’s also an acknowledgement of “digital denial” as some people reach a level of knowledge and become no longer interested in exploring it further.

The full article can be read here.  I’ve included a few quotes below:

“If we are not careful, the UK will become a country in digital denial: that’s why it is so important to promote IT literacy across all sectors and ages”

“…as technology advances, those who lack IT skills will be left further and further behind.”

“It was pointed out that 40% of people in the UK don’t feel they have the skills to do the jobs as well as they should … in Poland only 20% feel they lack the necessary skills.”

“The emphasis on targets and measurable outputs doesn’t help when you’re talking about lifelong learning and constant reskilling, which is necessary with IT, participants agreed.”

“Skills learnt doing one thing, such as playing around with photos at home, are easily transferred to the workplace and vice versa.”