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Programming Literacy for 21st Century
by Andrew McCaskey
Marc Prensky at Edutopia says that Programming is an essential part of 21st Century Literacy. More than ability to carefully read and write a contemporary spoken language, more than combination of visual, audible and multimedia elements, an ability to make digital technology do whatever, within the possible, you want it to do — to bend digital technology to one’s needs, purposes, and will, just as in the present we bend words and images.
“Will every educated person really have to program? Can’t the people who need programming just buy it?” – preferably offshore. Possibly. With that model, we have in a sense returned to the Middle Ages or ancient Egypt, or even before. Then, if you needed to communicate your thoughts on paper, you couldn’t do it yourself. You had to hire a better-educated person — a scribe — who knew the writing code. Then, at the other end, you needed someone to read or decode it — unless, of course, you were “well educated,” that is, you had been taught to read and write and thus had become literate.
He goes on to make the point that things like programming a remote, downloading a ringtone, doing a web search, tweaking a MySpace page are elementrary forms of exactly that skill – bending a digital device to do something the the user wants or imagines. Just about every young person programs (controls his or her own digital technology) to some extent.
His question is “Will the need for a separate scribe tribe of programmers continue through the twenty-first century, or will the skill set of an educated person soon include programming fluency?”
The more educated and literate we are (in the tired twentieth-century sense), the more ideas that can be or could be implemented with digital technology we have. Yet most of us “digital immigrants” — those who came to computers and digital technology later in our lives — never even know it. And we are slipping back to the Middle ages once again.
Nokia Augmented Reality Point & Find
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