Interesting Snippets

“Virtually all young people are familiar with electronic games and social networking and might be considered as ‘digital natives’, but they are not “digitally competent” in the sense that they do not know sufficiently how to use the digital world in a business context,” said the EC.

The European e-Skills Week will comprise a number of activities and events designed to inform young people on how to acquire such skills from between the 19 and 30 March. The EC says that the driving force behind the initiative was the importance of ICT skills to the future of the European economy and an increase in jobs which require a high level of education.

Schmidt promoted the idea of a stepping stone as the world figures out how to connect the very poor to the Internet. He said that “mesh networks” — small groups of devices connected to one another but not the Internet — are a way to at least get remote communities together. Mesh networks can serve as a kind of “digital watering hole,” where small communities can work out important issues.
“No one is saying technology will suddenly change the world’s social structure, but connectivity changes lives

saying kids are digital natives because they can text, send email, and use facebook… is like claiming that kids these days are all automotive engineers because they have driver’s licenses.

I teach freshmen. Most of them have the barest idea of how to use the Internet except for simple, pre-packaged tasks

It’s daunting, actually, to think about how hard I would have to work, and how much I would have to learn, and how many silently-and-inexplicably-failing scripts I would have to write, before I could produce code that would rival what the professionals write and put on the internet gratis.

I just can’t resist all the free goodies. If knowing how to program is tomorrow’s “basic literacy,” I afraid I’m just going to have to die as an illiterate code plagiarist.

every year about 200 million people are going online for the very first time.

However, traditional internet access via a copper wire and a desktop PC will fade into the background.

The rapid fall in the cost of smartphones - with cheap versions now costing about $100 - means that by 2016 about 80% of all internet users will access the web using a mobile phone.

The majority of Facebook and Twitter audiences are over 40-years-old,” says Gerzema. “You’re dealing with people who have worked in and around computing for 30 years – 15 of them online – and who are completely at ease with technological innovation. It’s no longer safe to try and demark the early adopter demographic by age alone.

Almost a quarter of the European Union’s 500 million people have never used the Internet and there is a widening division between the web-savvy north of Europe and the poorer south and east, figures released on Wednesday showed.

More than half the population of Romania and just under half of those in Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus and Portugal do not have Internet access at home, according to the figures from Eurostat

Europe and North America are home to 84% of all (Wikipedia) articles. Anguilla has the fewest number of geotagged articles (four), and indeed most small island nations and city states have less than 100 articles. However, it is not just microstates that are characterised by extremely low levels of wiki representation. Almost all of Africa is poorly represented in the encyclopaedia. There are remarkably more Wikipedia articles (7,800) written about Antarctica than any country in Africa or South America. Even China, which is home to the world’s biggest population of Internet users and is the fourth largest country on Earth contains fewer than 1% of all geotagged articles.

There are a staggering number of articles in the United States (over 180,000 of them) and tens of thousands in many European countries, Japan, Australia and India. As we saw in our last post, there are also far fewer in much of the rest of the world. In fact, there are only a few countries in Africa that contain more than 1000 articles. …