The idea of computer technical proficiency has come up many times over the years on Dusty World.  Whether you want to call it digital literacy, digital fluency,  or twenty-first Century skills, there is obviously a big gap in the computer user skills we’re graduating people with.  This isn’t a new thing, I’ve been benefiting from this lack of fluency in the general public since the 1980s.

After dropping out of high school in the late ’80s I started apprenticing as a millwright.  At our warehouse the new building control systems were becoming computerized and all of the very skilled welders and mechanics in our department were leery of them, so guess who got to take that on?  The new guy who had been working with computers since he was ten.

A summer job I got while going to university in the early 1990s involved converting an engineering shop over to computerized ordering (they’d hand written all parts orders and completed shipments prior to that, ironically while producing telephony computer electronics).  I got Lotus1-2-3 (which I’d never used before) working with the formatting so we could print out orders using our existing forms.  This took a bit of trial and error, but I wouldn’t have described it as particularly difficult, it just took a willingness to make effective use of digital technology in problem solving.

After graduating from uni I continually found myself moved into technology implementation  simply because of this fluency I seemed to have that many people didn’t.  This eventually led to me getting IT qualifications as a technician.  It even followed me into teacher’s college where I found myself teaching other students software and has been a mainstay of my teaching career.

This week I came across a recent study that sheds light on all of this anecdotal experience.  The Distribution of Computer User Skills research across wealthy OECD countries all point to some rather astonishing facts: 

“Overall, people with strong technology skills make up a 5–8% sliver of their country’s population, and this is true across all wealthy OECD countries.

What’s important to remember is that 95% of the general population in North America cannot make effective use of computers in resolving even simple problems or overcoming unexpected outcomes.”

Computer use isn’t just poor, it’s abysmal.  Over a third of Canadians aged 16-65 can’t do anything other than simple, rote, habitual work in a digital environment.  If asked to do tasks that I would consider straightforward and with no particular digital expertise, they are unable.  Keep in mind, this is only looking at the skills of work-aged people.  It’s not even considering seniors who generally have much weaker computer skills – so the actual computer skill level in the whole population is even lower than this implies.

You’re probably doubting your ability to be considered an advanced user in this study, but you shouldn’t.  None of these tests involved programming or having to do anything engineering wise with a computer, it’s all user focused work using simple software.  To be considered a strong (level 3) computer user you had to be able to “schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages.”  If you’ve ever had a group of people email and work out a date for a meeting and then you’ve put that meeting in Google Calendar, you’re considered a high end user.  If you’re reading this online blog, you’re probably considered a proficient, level 3, high-skills user.

The article that started this leads on to another on the digital divide, but rather than hang it all on economic factors it also considers psychological and skills based limitations.  A few years ago I attempted to provide local households that said they couldn’t afford one with a computer.  It was a complete failure – like giving books to illiterate people then wondering why they weren’t illiterate any more; there is a lot more to the digital divide than economic barriers, though they no doubt play a part in it.  The fast evolving nature of technology means relatively recent computers are available often for free to people who otherwise can’t afford them, but the problem isn’t just access to technology, it’s the inability of our education system to build sufficient digital fluency in our population to make use of them.  There is no point in handing out technology to people who can’t make use of it.

With all of this in mind, who are we aiming at when we introduce digital technology into the classroom?  What are we doing when we pitch elearning at a general public who have this distressingly low level of digital fluency?  The vast majority of our students (fictitious digital native prejudices aside) are functionally illiterate when using digital technologies in even simple, user focused ways.  We seem to think we are graduating students who are able to make effective use of computers – except we aren’t.  Many educators dwell in that level 0 to 1 poor user category themselves.

I’ve been advocating for it for over five years – nothing changes.

If our digital fluency were seen in terms of literacy, we’re handing out the complete works of Shakespeare to illiterates and then wondering why it isn’t working and why it’s being vandalized.  At some point we’ll stop dumping the latest multi-national prompted tech fad (ipads, chromebooks, whatever) into classrooms and start teaching a K to 12 digital skills continuum so people can actually make use of the technology we provide.

Last week one of my essential students intentionally punched and broke a Chromebook in my classroom.  This made me quite angry because I saw a useful and expensive digital tool being broken.  After reading this report I can’t help but wonder if he was just breaking a thing that he can’t do anything useful with that frustrates him.

“Educational technology has failed to move the needle on either cost effectiveness or student success in the past ten years…” – Brandon Busteed, Gallup Education
(they were talking about this in Phoenix in 2014)




OECD (2016), Skills Matter: Further Results from the Survey of Adult Skills, OECD Skills Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris, France.

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Bridging the digital skills divide

Once again I seem to have found my way into an upper management summit.  I imagine I’ll be the only classroom teacher in there, but that’s no bad thing.  If more front line people were directly connected to decision makers, our policy decisions wouldn’t seem as fictional as they sometimes do.  The other nice thing about a summit like this is that I get to dust off and exercise the philosophy degree, which in a computer technology classroom sometimes lays dormant for too long.


The keynote for this summit is Cheryl Cran, an author and speaker on the future of work.  Her approach seems to be very human resources based, which is appealing to a teacher who works with those humans every day.  Digital transformation tends to diminish a company’s need for human resources since it’s really just another form of automation/mechanization.  Can digital disruption actually lead to better relationships with the humans in your organization?  Perhaps for the few that are left.  If digital disruption is going to lead to mass unemployment, then how effective our companies run is going to be the least of our problems.  Making too much of the human population redundant never ends well for the society that does it.  This is a very difficult path to tread, so I’m very curious to hear how Cheryl presents it.

Cheryl sent out a pre-summit Q&A on where attendees think the future of work lies.  Here are the questions and my responses:



1. In your opinion what does the future of work look like? 


The social contract between employers and employees will continue to deteriorate.  Private employment will be limited to short term as needed contract work for the vast majority.  This is dressed up in “always be retraining/adapting” corporate speak, but the end result is usually downward pressure on everyone’s work/life balance.  The ‘try harder’ language of private business can get hard to believe when you’ve retrained (paying for your own training) multiple times only to be be made redundant again.  Meanwhile wealth is being concentrated into an ever decreasing class of ultra-wealthy entities.


Only the management class will still consider themselves employees of a single company. A universal wage may be instituted to stabilize and pacify a large under-employed working class. Even specialized skills will increasingly become redundant under more advanced automation.  This is less about profit than it is about control.  Machines are much less demanding than people.


2. What do you think are the current challenge for employers right now in regards to attracting youth to work for their companies?


Companies tend to approach employee relations in a conservative fashion with little change in approach from previous years.  GenZ expectations around work have been formed by evolving educational experiences.  With the school system no longer holding students to deadlines and graduation standards much more flexible than they used to be, employers find dealing with young employees who have never had to work to a deadlines challenging.  Attracting youth to a company successfully would have a lot to do with clarifying expectations in the workplace and training to cover that gap between an employer’s expectations and the young employee’s experience.


3. What do you think needs to happen to prepare today’s youth for the future of work? 


Our education system (in Ontario at least) has already started moving towards a universal pay standard by moving from graduation by proven skill to graduation as a general expectation.  This was largely motivated by Ontario’s learning to 18 legislation.  As education has reorientated on a graduation for all approach, there has been increasing friction between graduates and workplace expectations.  If k-12 is an experience everyone is expected to graduate from, then it will fall to post-secondary education to provide support for students as they transition into the workplace.  That support is vital as students are not being taught that deadlines nor even attendance are mandatory.  If we can’t train to bridge that gap, then the workplace itself will have to evolve to expect employees who may or may not be there and may or may not meet deadlines.  From a social efficiency point of view, that obviously isn’t the way forward.


4. What inspires you about today’s youth? Why? 


They are as bright and capable as any other generation.  Only lowered expectations create a social perception of laziness and lack of focus.  One need only attend Skills Canada Nationals or CyberTitan to see just how capable this generation can be of mastery learning.  Whenever I hear someone slagging young people I remind myself of all the great students I’ve seen graduate who have produced world-class results in spite of a system that did not encourage it.

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