The Informatics for All coalition participated to the consultation phase on the renovation of the Digital Education Action Plan which ran until September 4th, 2020, by submitting a position paper.
At the end of the consultation phase a high-level online event has been held, with the participation of Margrethe Vestager, European Executive Vice President for a Europe fit for the Digital Age.
Enrico Nardelli (President of Informatics Europe), on behalf of the coalition attended the event, which was preceded by a set of parallel thematic group meetings. One of these, featuring about ten european experts in digital education, was focusing on “Advocates of Digital Education” and was attended also by Austeja Trinkunaite (Secretary General of CEPIS) who reported in the public event outcomes and findings of the group. The need of having Informatics Education in school was reported as one of the challenges we face in Digital Education and the comment of Ms. Vestager on this point reinforced this view. She said: «It is really a million euro question: how to make sure that we have sufficient skills not only to ourselves use digital tools but also to construct them, to create software, to be the masters of the technology, creating the technology. Here we are still enormously lacking behind, both we need digital engineers, but basically everything digital, because one most foresee that every sector, every trade digitalizes, one way or another, in the coming years.»
You can see in the clip below Ms. Trinkunaite’s report and Ms. Vestager’s comment.
In the final part of the public event with Ms. Vestager, the need of mastering Informatics to be able of mastering digital technology was again underlined, and this position was reinforced by Ms. Vestager who said: «I just want to underline what Enrico Nardelli just said, because this is not just about having a technical skill, it’s about – what it is that they say in German? – “bildung”, that you are also able to control technology yourself, that you fully understand or you can grasp what it is that it’s ongoing. So I think it ought to be sort of a much more obvious also part of cultural education that you understand technology. If it’s just a black-box and you’re just a consumer, one way or another, I think we fail young people if we do not give them the skills and the insights to build the culture around technology that allows for the humans to prevail and to set the direction.»
The full video of the public event can be seen here:
https://webcast.ec.europa.eu/new-digital-education-action-plan