1. Should network literacy be focused on in earlier education?

In the talk about how coding is very important in our day and age. I briefly mentioned this in the my previous blog post about the organisation code.org which primarily focused in the US but their aim is to have “Every student in every school have the opportunity to learn computer science”. I tested out the ‘write your own computer program’ lesson and I learnt about repeat-loops, conditionals (ifs and else) and basic algorithms. It uses the characters from popular games like Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies to illustrate their lessons. You have to move the character to the end goal telling it instruments like ‘move forward’, ‘turn left’. It was only the first lesson so it was relatively straight forward but definitely introduced me to some of the basics. After you complete a level it show you the codes in JavaScript, which was helpful but I don’t think i remember any of them. It felt more like I was playing a game rather than learning basic coding techniques. I found out that coding relies a lot on problem solving big or small.

In this article, Joe O’Brien a CEO of EdgeCase, a company that specialises in software development.

“Even if a CEO never codes for her company, just understanding what is happening is going to be huge for her from a risk standpoint, from an understanding standpoint”

For students studying media, this would be even more crucial for us to learn how it works even if we don’t end up actually coding the next Facebook or Twitter. Last year in September, England was the first country to make computer programming a compulsory subject for all year levels. Furthermore, the US is expanding their reach but what about Australia?

Computer programming is overall increasing your network literacy. Even being able to understand it, you are giving yourself extra knowledge to equip yourself for the future.