8 digital skills we must teach our children
Yuhyun Park, a researcher on digital education and policy at Nanyang Technological University shared 8 skills to teach our children by when it comes to the digital world and these are:
Digital intelligence or “DQ” is the set of social, emotional and cognitive abilities that enable individuals to face the challenges and adapt to the demands of digital life. These abilities can broadly be broken down into eight interconnected areas:
- Digital identity: The ability to create and manage one’s online identity and reputation. This includes an awareness of one’s online persona and management of the short-term and long-term impact of one’s online presence.
- Digital use: The ability to use digital devices and media, including the mastery of control in order to achieve a healthy balance between life online and offline.
- Digital safety: The ability to manage risks online (e.g. cyberbullying, grooming, radicalization) as well as problematic content (e.g. violence and obscenity), and to avoid and limit these risks.
- Digital security: The ability to detect cyber threats (e.g. hacking, scams, malware), to understand best practices and to use suitable security tools for data protection.
- Digital emotional intelligence: The ability to be empathetic and build good relationships with others online.
- Digital communication: The ability to communicate and collaborate with others using digital technologies and media.
- Digital literacy: The ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share and create content as well as competency in computational thinking.
- Digital rights: The ability to understand and uphold personal and legal rights, including the rights to privacy, intellectual property, freedom of speech and protection from hate speech. (Source: WEF)
This is a response to the large numbers of children who now have access to devices and the internet the world over. We need to play a role as adults living around them to exercise some of these skills ourselves so that they can follow suit.
Park stated that these values will ‘facilitate the wise and responsible use of technology – an attribute which will mark the future leaders of tomorrow.’
I agree with her. The more the next generation starts to see the internet as more than just a place to share memes or download torrents, the more we will have an informed generation after us that strives more for innovation with their newly acquired set of digital skills from the tech space than simply entertainment, a generation that doesn’t wait for others to create solutions but create them themselves.
Nice article