Once again I left a symposium dazed about life and study as I pondered the questions and ideas surrounding future predictions about network literacy…

The idea of success standards adjusting towards the network literate are very easy to fathom considering people like Mark Zuckenberg who launched Facebook when he was literally the same age as me.

The other idea from the symposium was network literacy being more prominent in education, perhaps via the introduction of programming etc in early schooling. This reminded me of something on a much more basic, simple scale but it was the compulsory Microsoft Powerpoint tutorials I’d had to undertake in primary school. They were held by secondary school students- which I realised, years later, was most likely because the teachers themselves had no clue how, why or what Powerpoint was. Even though these tutorials took up my lunch time, didn’t affect my grades or even my quality of work as we were never expected or asked to use it ever again afterwards.. I was so excited by it and picked it up very quickly. Now it’s a very prominent factor in my education from both ends, i.e entire lectures are based on them as well as many of my own assignments… Who knows what could be briefly introduced in a Grade 4 class one day that will change the way people work. Ten years after those lunchtime Powerpoint classes, Microsoft Office was a major component of a course I did in business administration. Most of my class were ladies twice my age either changing their career paths or getting back into work after long hiatus periods, who struggled to get their head around the same program that I had to thank for my really early assignment submissions which lead to my really short class days.

Confronting is the truth that because children today are picking up on technological skills from a much earlier age and because network literacy is usually self-taught:

how young will the minds determining major networking/technological/general advances in the future be? 

Most kids I knew enjoyed playing around with Powerpoint and we’d use it for fun when we were young even though it didn’t mean much to us. What would’ve happened had we*  all been completely disengaged with it? Would we have still ended up using it so much in our tertiary education/work? Would one of the more advanced students somehow improved the program or discover or even create a better alternative à la Mark Zuckenberg? I guess the limitation with this example is in the early 2000s how many school-friendly alternatives did we have? I didn’t even have a computer and I wasn’t part of a minority. The program came about at a good time but ten years from now in an increasingly network-literate youth population, how would introduction of such skills benefit the same people who could operate iPads for their own personal use when they were toddlers. Obviously there’d be a very different skill-set involved in the future but would it even be necessary given what these people would already be capable of? If so, I feel it’d be the 9 year old teaching pre-schoolers… and I’d be the teacher not understanding the how, why or what.

*(I mean this on a much larger scale than my class, ‘we’ = all students with computer access in primary school)