Grid-Tools

Why a computer isn’t a fridge

Posted on 13. Jan, 2012 by Vanessa Howard in Test data

For public policy, it’s all happening at breakneck speed. Only last April, Intellect, the UK tech trade association, suggested that ICT taught in schools was inadequate. This week, the education secretary Michael Gove announced that the current programme will be scrapped in England from September.

Parents of children in secondary schools will be aware that a slow walk through the basics of PowerPoint doesn’t exactly set the world alight for many teens but Gove went further by saying that current content isn’t just dull, it’s harmful.

Not injurious for our young citizens, of course, but a threat to our economic and entrepreneurial prospects. The mistake that has been made is teaching children how to use applications, not how to develop them.

Here’s a view worth listening to: “Programming a computer is really, really creative. And what’s disappointing now is that for lot of kids in school, the way they meet the computer is like the way they meet a fridge, it’s white goods.

“They don’t know that if they can imagine the computer doing something differently, they could program it.” So said Tim Berners-Lee.

Clearly, we don’t need to foster passive office skills but need to fire up the imagination of the able. Our global, inter-connected, furiously paced world demands that we continue to develop what Berners-Lee describes as ‘a human system mediated by technology’.

Shaping the future is the work of today and innovation only happens through a fierce engagement of the creative and the analytical. We need more of it. It’s out there; we just have to nurture it.