Gov considers website to teach tech skills
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A review of England's computer skills has found over 11m people who lack even basic IT abilities.
The report by Baroness Estelle Morris recommends free IT training for all adults in England. The report found 11.6m English people lack basic tech skills.
Morris reckons a marketing campaign to show people the benefits of going online would help, along with a website to train people and various skill providers to help with basic stuff like mouse and keyboard skills.
A website to help people get online? Really?
Since 2004/2005 there has been a 54 per cent fall in numbers enrolling on ICT courses - some of this accounted for by people signing up for longer courses.
The government is currently involved in over 70 different projects to improve skills, Morris recommends simplifying this and making one department responsible for digital literacy. Anyone wanting to improve their skills must first choose between a confusing number of providers - including online centres, public libraries, voluntary organisations, adult or further education centres and other private sector training providers.
The report also notes that the government signed up to the Riga Ministerial Declaration in 2006, which pledged to halve the gap in internet usage for groups at risk of exclusion by 2010 - the government was unable to provide any information on this target.
There's more info here, but amusingly you'll have to cut and paste to see the whole report because someone has buggered up the HTML on the link. ®
COMMENTS
@zerofool2005
Interesting - I failed GCSE IT back in the early 90's - very much to do with regretting taking an option that, rather than teach IT, just taught basic word processing, databases and spreadsheets on Wordperfect for 2 blasted years!! To put this into context, I now do very well thankyou in a tech consultancy role. However, I thought education had moved on, and that people wouldn't be falling into that trap anymore?
21st century illiteracy
Perhaps they can offer some help to the thick wankers who seem to populate the majority of offices across the country who can't perform the most elementary "tech" tasks without cacking it up, usually toasting someone elses labour in the process. We're at least 10 years from it being forgiveable not to know the difference between 'save' and 'save as' and what copy and paste is, but some extremely well paid types seem to revel in finding this all a bit complex.
The sooner schools/employers require a demonstrable basic understanding of the computers you will be using, the better.
Paris, cos there really are people thicker than her
First ......
.... teach them to think for themselves. As a former, yet unrepentant, school teacher the problem for most of these people may well be lack of basic reading and comprehension skills. Not to mention math skills.
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