There are heart-stopping, gratitude-soaked moments we do notice these connections however – in times of crisis.

In the phone line-jammed hours after the Boston Marathon bombings, Google’s People Finder was a lifeline for worried relatives and friends. After China’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan, one of the key services of disaster relief units was mobile phone charging stations. After a natural disaster, Google’s Crisis Response Unit facilitates other response agencies to share alerts on Google’s platforms.

They all prove that technology is a reactionary tool in times of disaster and crisis; we use it to inform, help and understand.

Now a new study released by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) goes much further.

They claim that the latest communication technology could be used to prevent conflict, violence and man-made crisis. Threats of unrest or conflict can actually dissipate when handled with the right technology locally and in real-time.

Consider the tools at hand. There’s the explosion of data available from mobile phones, social media, crowdsourcing, crisis mapping, blogging and big data. Add to that increasing global interconnectivity and the growing penetration rate of mobile phones (particularly in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa), and what you have is quite startling potential.

Harness these technologies in the right way, and you have a method to forestall crises, and address the root causes of violence.

UNDP has the case studies to prove this is already happening.

In Kenya, deadly post-election violence in 2007 led to grave concern around this year’s elections in March. But a toll-free SMS service gave citizens a simple way of reporting perceived threats to a message hub. The local reports were then analysed centrally so police and other responders could make informed decisions on where they were needed. Combined with the Uchaguzi crowdmapping site, the result was a relatively peaceful election day.

As technology advances and mobile penetration continues, similar success stories will multiply.

These systems bridge the gulf between warning and response, and better yet – it’s empowering for individuals to feel they can protect their community.

Three app creators from Nigeria already know this – and have a Mobile World Summit Award to prove it. iPolice is a community policing platform that lets citizens connect with security agencies to report crimes and provide valuable information via their mobile phones. It’s essentially Neighbourhood Watch gone mobile, but it allows police to follow and analyse security and crime trends. They can identify crime black spots to avoid, and warn users of growing crime trends.

Of course technology isn’t always used for good, which the UNDP concedes. It can be harnessed to incite conflict too, as we saw with the London riots.

Now that we know citizens can use technology to work with NGOs, police and responders to protect their community, it makes the case for digital literacy even more urgent.

Just like Twitter evolved into an ecosystem of real time news when needed, we’re excited about a new application for technology: an ecosystem of conflict prevention.

Every year, on the fourth Thursday in April, the offices of companies, departments, and universities involved in Information Communication Technologies open their doors. And they’re only letting girls in.

Their shared mission is to show girls the training, study and career options open to them in ICT, and introduce them to female role models in the field. 

Last year, 1320 events in 82 countries empowered 30,000 girls across the world, from Australia to Malaysia, Oman to Jordan, North America to Latin America. In Kyrgyzstan and Hungary, 2012 marked the first time for events. In Germany, they held over 9,500 events for 115,000 girls to get a taste of technical and natural sciences. Women in Technology Nigeria (WITIN) gave talks to community schools in Nigeria, particularly in rural neighbourhoods.

This year promises to be even bigger. So… why such a fuss about girls?

The ICT sector is one of the fastest-growing industries in the world, and the roles in it are among the highest-paid jobs, but not all the population is benefitting.

Only about 26% of the 2.7 million people in Europe’s ICT sector are female. In the United States by 2020, there will be 1.4 million computing-related job openings, but only 30% will be filled by women.

This has implications for the economy, society and future innovation.

When women are left out of highly-paid jobs, it exacerbates existing social inequalities caused by the gender pay gap. Vice-President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes believes ICT roles can help this:

“Today the gender pay gap is equivalent to women working 59 days a year for free, and ICT is one way to catch up. Women in the ICT sector earn an average of 9% more than women in similar positions in other sectors."

Promoting gender equality and empowering women is one of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals for 2015.

It’s not just girls and women affected. If technology is imagined and designed by a mostly male population, we're missing out on the innovations, solutions, and creations that 50% of the population could bring.

That voice and perspective will be missing in the technology of the future. Research posted by NWCIT also found girls are much more likely than boys to study computing because of their “interest in helping people or society”.

In CEPIS, women in ICT is a core issue. Secretary General Fiona Fanning explains:

“Getting more girls and women into ICT studies and careers is not merely a gender issue, it is essential to sustain the pipeline of ICT graduates and ultimately Europe’s competitiveness." 

It’s well-documented that women’s basic capabilities in engineering and technology are equal to men’s. In countries where gender discrimination is relatively low, girls have the same performance level in mathematics as boys. It’s the cultural, sociological, economic and other factors that are having a negative impact on women’s involvement in ICT.

This is why the key word today is girls. We’re addressing young girls still in education, catching them before they form inaccurate stereotypes about ICT jobs only being for ‘geeks’ and ‘brogrammers’.

They're being shown that this career path is just as open to them as any man, that there are successful women already in this field, and they have the power to choose their future.

So today, we’re soaking up quotes from the Women in ICT role models complied by CEPIS, and all the great stories and events popping up on Twitter under #GirlsinICT Day.

As Neelie Kroes puts it:

“We need to fill one million ICT jobs in Europe – and half of them belong to women”

We say: you go girls.

ENISA is the EU’s response to the cyber security issues of the European Union.

And there are a few!

Remember the large-scale cyber-attack in March against Spamhaus? If you live in Western Europe you probably heard about it, as it slowed internet connections in the region for almost a week. The attack was the biggest Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in internet history.

According to ENISA, the technique used for the DDoS attack is not new and is actually avoidable if IPs implement certain best practice. Spamhaus' service provider CloudFlare wrote about the attack on their blog, saying:

"One of our goals is to make DDoS something you only read about in the history books."

At a security conference in Amsterdam recently, another worrying security hole was exposed, this time in aviation and aircraft systems.

Security consultant Hugo Teso claimed he has created an Android app that would allow him to remotely attack and hijack commercial aircraft. Unencrypted and unauthenticated broadcast systems leaves it open to eavesdropping or message jamming. He used virtual planes in a lab to demonstrate his ability to hijack a plane, gaining access to the plane’s onboard computer system and uploading new data.

With all the benefits of technology and greater connection, comes the drawbacks of cyber threats, and their growing power and sophistication.

As ENISA's video tells us, being aware of them and knowing how be protected against them is a concern for us all, whether you're a government, small business, or just a home PC user. 

If you'd like to learn more about how you can protect yourself or your business from cyber threats, have a look at our IT Security module.

The battle has narrowed to between the iGeneration, Gen Wii, Net Gen, and Digital Natives.

No prizes for guessing where the ‘i’ came from. Though we do express some alarm over the apparent distaste for multiple syllables in those born after 2000, we’re most fascinated by the phrase ‘digital natives’.

It’s an evocative term: picture the teenager dangling with iPods and smartphones, swiping between school tablet and home PC seamlessly, or indeed simultaneously. It seems like common sense: newborns plastered on Facebook before even leaving the hospital, with iPads in their pram and digital radio in their crèche. These kids don’t need manuals; they just plug into the latest smartphone or software and take off like they’re riding a bike.

Or do they? 

The term ‘digital native’ was coined back in 2001 by Marc Prensky.  In one swoop, he divided the population between those who are bought up with digital technologies (our infamous natives), and those born before 1980 who weren’t; the ‘immigrants’. He announced that “today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach”, and their exposure to these technologies meant they have new learning styles and cognitive capacities.

He had supporters, including Diana and James Oblinger, who gushed in the introduction to their study:

“Even our least technologically inclined son could tell us things about graphics and images that we didn’t know. He has a digital literacy that eludes us.”

Prensky further expanded our dictionaries in 2008 by claiming that a permanent state of technological immersion will be typical of our upcoming generation of “i-kids”. We all saw that one coming.

Finally, the universities stepped in.

Neil Selwyn, after reviewing the literature on the subject for his paper The digital native – myth and reality, bluntly put it:

“The findings show that young people's engagements with digital technologies are varied and often unspectacular.”

Next up was Glasgow Caledonian University., who pointed out that there was no empirical basis to the claims of Prensky and Co., and likened their debate to “an academic form of a ‘moral panic’”. They found no evidence that young people are adopting radically different learning styles.

The wittiest argument we have come across on far is by Ryan Henson Creighton on his blog:

“It doesn’t matter what sort of technology you’re surrounded by: no one comes out of the womb knowing how to type a search engine query, pilot a spaceship, or even use a fork.”

Which brings us to our position in the debate, which as you might imagine, is firmly in the ‘everyone has to be taught to use a fork’ camp.

We’d even go as far as saying that assuming these ‘digital natives’ will naturally soak in essential digital skills is dangerous.

There’s no denying we have a generation who can swipe their thumb across a tablet, operate a smartphone with one button, and navigate the bright, simple UIs of mobile apps.

But that doesn’t equate to the skills needed to put together a CV, avoid IT risks, or effectively use the internet to find work. In fact, one in 10 unemployed young people in the UK cannot send their CV online.

What we’ve found, is that we have people who assume they are more skilled than they are, and a workforce who takes on computer tasks they are not fully equipped for.

In a Dutch study organised by our partners, they found workers in the Netherlands were spending almost 8% of their day resolving technology issues. The big surprise was that workers and managers were unaware there was a problem. They genuinely thought their skill levels were up to the job, even though most of them had never undergone any formal ICT training.

A study from Greece found that workers, and their supervisors, were overestimating their computer abilities. As a result, companies were assigning employees to tasks that they didn’t have the skills for.

It’s even a problem at the top. A report by CA technologies last year claimed a lack of full digital literacy in the C-suite is hampering business growth and competitiveness.

So we’re saying that you’re probably not as competent as you think you are, and you’re almost definitely not as competent as you could be.

And we think that’s true no matter what letter your generation ends with.

We’ll leave you with the words of James Perry, from Kent, who started using the internet at the age of 89: 

"Being online has opened up avenues of communication that I thought were closed forever, such as being able to speak with friends in Australia. I'm convinced if I can learn, then anyone can, and I can't wait to start spreading the word."

Neither can we.

Von Ahn was explaining reCAPTCHA; a service that uses the human responses to CAPTCHAs to digitize books – one word at a time. If you have ever typed a CAPTCHA into Google, Ticketmaster or Facebook, you have been part of this effort – and you are among 750 million others to do so.

Projects such as reCAPTCHA harness what’s called online collaboration for potentially world-changing results.

Online collaboration is essentially knowledge and resource-sharing in real time over the internet. Imagine users in different parts of the world working on the same documents at the same time while instant messaging – all through the web.

‘Citizen science’ is one impressive result of this. It involves ordinary internet users assisting in mammoth scientific tasks that computer power alone cannot accomplish. Results have included finding new planets (by processing NASA data), deciphering fragments of ancient texts, and – with online game FoldIt – a breakthrough in an AIDS-like virus that had baffled scientists for years.

However, most ordinary ‘citizens’ partake in online collaboration for slightly less laudable aims than solving scientific conundrums. It is a useful tool for every company, community and project.

It enables remote employees to work together on the same documents. They can communicate instantly, brainstorm and share calendars. Resources can be cloud-hosted, making them accessible anywhere – even on mobile devices.

These tools are a great improvement to error-prone methods passing files around, manually tracking changes and manually merging document versions.

It happens to the best of us – remember when 80,000 copies of Jonathan Franzen's fourth book Freedom had to be pulped? A proof-reader mistakenly sent an unfinished and unchecked version of the novel to the publisher, which was discovered only when it reached the book shops.

As Guardian columnist Charlie Brooker admitted at the time;

“Like anyone who's ever suffered the traumatic loss of the only copy of a crucial file, whenever I'm writing scripts I tend to end up saving about 1,500 different versions along the way, leading to a directory full of bewildering titles such as FINALSCRIPT2a.DOC and FINALSCRIPT1b-IGNORE-ALL-OTHERS-AND-USE-THIS.DOC.”

So online collaboration offers great benefits for efficient filing and time-saving. Knowing the best practices and risks is vital before bringing it into your workplace, however.

The New York Times recently reported how employees opening documents on their personal devices and on the cloud are scattering confidential data all over the web.

Naturally, ECDL has a solution though.

Our online collaboration module is an upcoming addition to our arsenal. The module will cover the tools, theories and technologies behind online collaboration, along with the risks.

It’s the perfect first step for anyone wanting to explore the possibilities online collaborations gives – and then make it their own.

We like to think that we’re unleashing a few more von Ahns into the world along the way too.

As the man himself mused:

“The question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000 [people], what can we do with 100 million?”

100 million? We’ll just have to wait and see.

You may have spotted Rwanda in the news recently. These days, it’s in the business pages.

Articles describe its “stunning turnaround” (Forbes), “startling improvement in business climate” (The Economist), and ambition to become “a regional services center and IT hub, something like the Singapore of Africa” (TheWorld.org).

It’s an ambition led by government since the early 2000s. The results, as media have claimed, are about as swift as the fibre-optic cables being laid.

The World Bank’s Doing Business 2013 report ranks Rwanda as the second most improved nation globally and the most improved in sub-Saharan Africa since 2005. The report even includes a case study titled ‘Rwanda: fostering prosperity by promoting entrepreneurship.’

"We have made significant progress, but there is always a room for improvement," says Jean Philbert Nsengimana, the Youth and ICT Minister.

The government knows that greater ICT skills are vital to the country’s success. This won’t be easy, when 2% of households had a computer in 2011. However, the number of people with mobile phones was 40.6% in the same year, jumping to 53% in 2012.

Rapid adoption of mobile technology is behind the success of the ‘eSoko’ system, which sends a text messages to farmers with the latest crop market prices.

The digital literacy rate is low at community level. Those in rural areas have a limited ownership of ICT devices, and a limited awareness of how ICT can improve their productivity and socio-economic welfare.

“ICT skills, both at the level of professional ICT, as well as IT literacy, for people to be able to take advantage of the technology is very key,” Patrick Nyirishema, Head of ICT on Rwanda Development Board, told TheWorld.org.

When General Manager of ICDL Africa, Daniel Palmer, met with Minister Nsengimana last week, part of their discussion centred on ICDL Asia’s partnership with the Workforce Development Agency (WDA) in Singapore.

When Singapore’s WDA implemented a skills programme across the working population, they chose ICDL to be the computer skills certification for its international standard and recognition. In the first eight months of the scheme, 9,400 tests were conducted.

With Rwanda now eyeing a national implementation of computer skills certification, spanning public and private sectors, the term ‘Singapore of Africa’ seems more apt than ever.

Minister Nsengimana explained that the target is to increase mobile phone ownership to more than 80%, and computer users to 50% within five years. Ambitious, yes – but so was doubling the average national income and attracting foreign investors such as Visa.

As Patrick Nyirishema put it; “If you want to reach the moon, you aim for the sun”.

Wherever they aim for, the rest of the world will be watching.

Technology integration is happening in classrooms around the world, from Sydney to Nairobi. The benefits are still revealing themselves, with one study finding technology in the classroom could reverse child illiteracy rates as it “benefits the slow learner and reduces restraints on bright students.”

Integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) into learning can also enhance students’ employability. Education.com recently asked a group of professionals from top Silicon Valley companies what skills every teenager should have before leaving school. The answers were almost unanimously ICT skills; including typing, word processing, spreadsheets, email etiquette and database use.

There is one link in the education chain that must be secure to enable all these developments though: teachers must be sufficiently confident and trained to combine ICT with learning.

It is an issue that has not escaped the attention of the European Commission. Their ‘Rethinking Education’ policy is a response to the EU’s youth unemployment levels and the need to strengthen the link between education and the labour market.

It is also a key concern for the Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs, a multi-stakeholder partnership set to tackle the projected shortfall of 700,000 ICT professionals in Europe by 2015.

When it launches on 4 March 2013, it will announce pledges it has collected from companies, industry associations and Member States to support the aims of the coalition with new jobs, training places, start-up funding and more.  

One of the strands of the ECDL Foundation’s own pledge leads right back to the classroom. Our new module ICT for Educators, which will be piloted in 2013, will give teachers the competence to use ICT as a tool for learning in all subjects. This will allow the benefits of an ICT classroom reveal itself, as well as producing the digitally literate students needed for the Europe of tomorrow.

“Technology is not separate to teaching”, the headteacher of Essa Academy told the BBC. “In fact, the greatest teachers would use technology to make their lessons even better”.

It’s a lesson that ECDL Foundation and the Grand Coalition hope to teach the rest of Europe as well.

An online consultation on ICT-enabled innovation for learning in Europe is being run by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. They are asking for education stakeholders, including teachers, policy makers and education officers, to share their views on this online survey before 15 April 2013.

Given that grandparents are an important support to childcare, they have a role to play in ensuring that children use the Internet safely. Whether they are in charge for a couple of hours or a weekend here and there, it is crucial that grandparents understand the technology young people use every day in order to support children and help them stay safe online.

As we celebrate the Safer Internet Day on 5th February, it is important to remember that children’s online safety can only be significantly improved if adults in children's life are made aware of the risks and dangers associated with using the Internet. Grandparents, as an extra pair of eyes and ears, can provide support to both parents and teachers in guiding children on the Internet.

With smartphones being more and more used by children, it’s even more important to keep an eye on children’s online activities. Therefore, ensuring that children have safe access to the Internet is a shared responsibility; however grandparents often lack the digital skills and knowledge needed to keep up with the technology used by children. So, what steps can we take to improve the digital literacy of the elderly?

The EqualSkills Programme is a first step that older people can take to acquire ICT skills. Developed by ECDL Foundation, EqualSkills is an introductory ICT skills development programme based on a simple, non-threatening approach to provide basic skills for using a computer, email, and the Internet. Grandparents wishing to develop their digital skills further out can also take ECDL’s Foundation’s IT Security module, which is intended to influence a user’s attitude, awareness and behaviour so that they become more security conscious.

Developing older Europeans’ ICT skills is not only crucial to ensure their continued participation in their grandchildren’s online activities, but also in order to foster active ageing. An increased level of digital literacy indeed will allow older people to live more independently and benefit from a better quality of life as they can fully benefit of digital devices and services. ICT can also open up training and employment opportunities for older people, including those with disabilities.

There is – unsurprisingly - a lack of consensus, but Gartner, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal all pinpoint ‘Big Data’ as a trend, amongst others, to watch for 2013. ‘Big Data’ and how it is handled is a step on from traditional approaches to data storage and data mining. Huge amounts of data are potentially now coming in from a range of different sources in real time and analysis and judgement on this data needs to happen instantaneously. This seems like an infrastructure challenge for the IT industry – maybe IT users need not be concerned?

They should be - because the data is frequently directly associated with increased activity on faster networks, through an ever-increasing number of devices. The creators of the data in many instances may be users. The target of the dynamically managed and analysed responses to this data will also be users – as, for example, a potential purchaser of a good or service. That is to say, if you inputted a search term such as ‘fishing trips’, you would receive targeted advertising for fishing goods and services in your location. This is nothing new – but ‘Big Data’ will make this more focused. And, as we incorporate a greater number of devices into our lives that are increasingly integrated in terms of our data, it will also become more pervasive.

As ICT users, we need not just to be able to carry out functional skills, for example effectively using a browser: we need also to be able to be able to control the technology environment in which we operate. This requires an understanding and awareness of the how our own behaviour can be used by technology services to tailor the information or options with which you are presented. This can be a good or bad thing – but we need to be equipped with sufficient understanding and awareness of the use of ‘Big Data’ so that we can decide which it is.

Despite all the positive things about families spending more time participating in activities together, perhaps direct instruction ‘across the generations’ should be viewed with caution. This is especially true if the instruction is in a field of knowledge that is familiar to one of the generations but they are not proficient in it: nearly all teenagers will have watched their parents work the gears and clutch in a car when sitting in the passenger seat but this does not qualify them to drive a car. A large percentage of parents of teenagers are perfectly comfortable using a computer – and use one for work and/or leisure on a daily basis. However, many parents (and indeed grandparents) are not. In many cases this is because they have not ‘grown up’ with computers and have not, until quite recently, felt that being able to use one would add any real value to their lives.

This situation has changed. More and more activities are becoming increasingly reliant on technology – including general communication and accessing essential goods and services – with the result that not being able perform basic functions on a computer is no longer really an option. And increasingly, this group is turning to younger family members for instruction, which poses certain problems.

Not all children receive structured ICT learning in schools, and acquire their skills informally through their daily activities, such as social media engagement. As such, they possess and incomplete set of digital skills, and if a parent is to learn from them, they too will acquire incomplete skills – much like a teenager picking up a parent’s bad driving habits. Additionally, teenagers (and perhaps parents, too) are not renowned for their patience. This can lead to quite a fractious learning environment where one party assumes that the other has knowledge that they don’t, and the other feels somewhat frustrated or embarrassed because they don’t possess this knowledge.

A structured, peer-led, non-threatening environment is a much better way for these ‘non-digital natives’ to learn the basics. Through introductory ICT programmes, such as ECDL Foundation’s EqualSkills and e-Citizen programmes, they acquire these essential skills in a complete manner from a qualified trainer, and often in a class of their peers. This more structured group learning allows them to become comfortable with the basics of technology, and through the well-grounded basics, go on to develop their skills to the level of their choosing.

This explosion of mobile content has resulted in all service and knowledge providers having to re-examine how they deliver their content, and the provision of formal skills development programmes is no exception. The received wisdom in how we acquire ‘serious’ knowledge would have dictated a well-lit, quiet room, with a book of learning materials, and more often than not a pen. The emergence of e-Learning content has challenged this traditional view, and mobile platforms have challenged it further.

A very good case in point is that of the ICDL National Operator in South Korea partnering with a leading national telecoms company to make many of the ICDL modules available for mobile platforms, so that they can be accessed ‘on the go’. This does not dilute the standards of the learning, and candidates will still have to undergo testing in strictly regulated test conditions, but it allows the learning materials to be accessed from pretty much any location. Increasing numbers of people are demanding this level of flexibility, and organisations such as ICDL Korea are embracing these demands. 

It is certainly true that, in many economies across the globe, people continue to be laid off, and that reduced revenues for organisations have led to a de facto freeze on hiring. Despite these doldrums, or perhaps because of them, now is an even more crucial time for people – particularly younger people and job seekers – to develop their essential ICT skills. In addition to these skills being considered an essential life skill in a modern knowledge economy, they also may present opportunities that the user had not anticipated, or actively sought.

With a base level of essential skills and an ability to collaborate online, connections can be made that can lead to real job opportunities. The way in which we work is changing, with less focus being placed on the traditional need for a ‘9 to 5’ job in a fixed location. A wealth of opportunity presents itself as mobile devices become more sophisticated and decent internet coverage becomes more widely available, and short-term or project-based collaboration is becoming more the norm than the exception. This collaboration often occurs remotely and is mostly online/cloud-based, but in addition to requiring online skills, these projects also require an ability to use more traditional applications, such as spreadsheets, or word processing applications.

Even if it appears that, on the surface of things, that there is no work out there, it is still of vital importance to keep developing one’s skill set. This can be done inexpensively and conveniently through online courses/e-learning resources, such as ECDL / ICDL[1], and you never know what it might lead to.

[1] To find out more about the modules offered through the ECDL / ICDL programme, visit www.ecdl.org

This ‘Scoreboard’ charts the progress of the various aims of the European Commission’s Digital Agenda for Europe (DAE), a flagship initiative launched in 2010 as part of the EU’s strategy ‘Europe 2020’[1] to turn Europe into a smart economy with sustainable and inclusive growth by 2020. One of the central components within the DAE is the action area to address the digital skills deficit in Europe, which has the potential to jeopardise Europe’s competiveness and levels of employment and innovation.

Other findings of the ‘Scoreboard’ show that marginal progress has been made in relation to access to, and use of, computers and the internet by European citizens. Despite this, a lack of skills is still cited as one of the main reasons why Europeans do not use the internet, and nearly 30% of Europeans feel that they possess low-level internet skills.

In addition to these skill levels being detrimental to Europe’s current progression toward becoming a smart and sustainable digital economy, the ‘Scoreboard’ also returns findings that this situation is likely to persist in the future, as currently only 1 out of 3 students in Europe is taught by teachers for whom participation in ICT training is compulsory.

If Europe’s teachers do not possess the ICT skills to effectively use technology, not only are the multiple benefits offered to education by technology going to waste, European school-goers will be at a significant disadvantage to their contemporaries worldwide, and Europe’s long-term competitiveness will be likely to suffer.

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eu2020/index_en.htm

We now use technology to perform an increasingly varied number of tasks, and we are storing an ever-growing amount of data electronically. Not all of this data is of a sensitive or private nature, but in the interest of preventing, for example, identity theft, it is very important that we keep this range of data secure. What is often overlooked is how we, as individual users, go about this. Two specific actions – or perhaps more accurately, inactions – are worth highlighting: carelessness in keeping our hardware safe, and topically, the high-risk behaviour of using the same email address and password combinations across multiple sites.

In relation to the first, often individuals do not pay enough attention to the whereabouts of devices, such as USB flash drives, or even laptops. There have been a variety of well-publicised incidents of national tax or health workers misplacing unencrypted hardware in public places. Apart from the obvious embarrassment for the organisations involved, the issue of vast amounts of very sensitive data being potentially subject to exploitation is of real concern.

The issue of password security was recently highlighted when the server of a high-profile technology company was recently hacked, exposing nearly 6.5 million clients’ passwords. The organisation has been widely criticised for not possessing sufficiently secure server encryption software, but some responsibility must also be assumed by the clients’ themselves. IT security is, to a large extent, predicated on the behaviour of the individual: if someone uses their personal email address and ‘12345’ password across multiple sites, it is similar to going away for a three-month holiday and leaving both the front and back doors unlocked.

But, what is an Internet Protocol (IP), and why is a new one required?

Essentially, an IP is something similar to a street/postal address but for devices that use the Internet: each device, be it a computer, a tablet or an ebook reader, has a unique numerical label that identifies it, and without it that device cannot access any web content, download any web-based video, or communicate with any other device via the Internet. To reuse the postal address analogy, you would not receive any letters to your house if it were not correctly numbered or named – no one would know where to send them.

Why is a new version required?

With the exponential growth of Internet users, and the explosive proliferation of internet-ready devices – particularly tablets and smartphones – the current internet version is close to running out of unique numerical labels, in the same way that a telephone network can run out of unique phone numbers if there are not enough digits assigned.

It is highly unlikely that IPv6 will run out of unique numerical combinations in the near future: the Internet we've relied on to date - we are currently on IPv4 - has space for about 4.3bn IPs. The new, larger IPv6 expands the limit to more than 340 trillion, trillion, trillion.

Despite the fact that most of the larger internet providers – Google, Facebook, Yahoo etc.- have been IPv6-enabled for some time, it is expected that users’ full migration to the new version will be gradual. It is not a straightforward switch: businesses would have to take a full inventory of their current IT systems, there will be cost involved, and from a different point of view, there are bandwith issues involved, so political/regulatory factors will also come in to play.

For those who might be curious as to the fate of IPv5 – it was the name given to a rudimentary Internet version in the 1970s that was created for the experimental transmission of voice, video, and distributed simulation.

It is anticipated that, on a global scale, as the ICT sector continues to grow, there will not be nearly enough skilled professionals to meet the number of jobs that will be created. The European Union calculates that by 2022 there will be 700,000 more ICT jobs than there are professionals to fill them; globally, that shortfall is estimated to be closer to two million. Despite this predicted shortfall, the potential of more than half the world’s population – i.e. that of women’s contribution – is not being utilised, as the sector continues to struggle in attracting younger female talent to ICT jobs.

Despite the fact that the ICT sector has, in the main, managed to escape many elements of the recent global economic downturn, and that its growth contributes significantly to global and national economies and to employment, this growth has not yet led to a parallel increase in jobs for women in the ICT labour market. This female to male ratio is particularly pronounced at senior levels. A recent ITU report suggests that the issue is not just an entry-level problem but may also be one of demotivation, of retention and/or lack of promotion of women within the sector at many levels[1]. This report also reveals that the number of women earning computer science degrees in the US has fallen from 37% in the 1980s to below 20 per cent this year; while teenage girls now use computers and the Internet at rates similar to boys, they are five times less likely to consider a technology-related career.

To improve this situation, there are reportedly very real problems to be overcome, such as the lack of promotion opportunities for women within the sector, and more generally, the underrepresentation of women at board level. These inequalities will only disappear over time if certain measures are introduced, such as the equal promotion of skills development to girls in schools, and the equal promotion of ICT careers to girls in schools, rather than the traditional practice of promoting careers that they would be ‘better suited to’.

Increasing the representation of women in the ICT sector is not only important from a gender equality perspective: it also makes sound economic sense, too.

[1] ‘A Bright Future in ICTs Opportunities for a New Generation of Women’ – International Telecommunications Union (2012)

To combat these low national digital literacy levels, the government launched the ‘e-Sri Lanka’ project, an overarching national development initiative, with the objective of using ICT to foster social integration, peace, economic growth, and poverty reduction. Within this project, the government launched two sub-initiatives to build capacity. Both projects, ‘ICT Skills Training for Government’ and ‘ICT Literacy for Citizens’, fell under the ‘General Skills’ category of the overall e-Sri Lanka framework, which covers ICT awareness and literacy. The overall objective of the two projects is to raise the ICT literacy level in the public sector and in society at large.

Two ECDL Foundation programmes were seen as the right solution for implementing elements of ‘e-Sri Lanka’. The two certification programmes, e-Citizen and ICDL (Start), fitted with the framework very well at the ICT foundational level and ICT certification level respectively. At a later date, the Ministry of Education of Sri Lanka formally adopted ICDL as the required standard for ICT skills training for its principals and teachers, and for other state sector employees. By creating an ICT-skilled teaching body and public service, the benefits of a modernised education system and more productive public service are then experienced by all citizens across the country.

ECDL Foundation has created a case study detailing the e-Sri Lanka initiative. Read the  case study.

The importance of e-Skills within Europe, and the need to attract as many people – particularly young people – to technology and to ICT-related professions, is crucial to economic recovery and growth; it is estimated that by 2020, 8.5 million new European jobs will be knowledge- and skill-intensive, such as high-level managerial and technical jobs[2].

As Europe tentatively exits what has been the deepest recession in decades, the need to provide e-skilled workers to fill these technology-dependent roles becomes more urgent. This is not something that can be done overnight; large sectors of the current workforce need to be upskilled with essential ICT skills to prevent a damaging skills gap, and essential ICT skills development measures, such as the ECDL / ICDL programme, need to be embedded in second- and third- level education curricula so that the students of today can ‘hit the ground running’ as the skilled workers of tomorrow.

In relation to the ICT skill levels of the current workforce, recent European research finds that national economies are losing billions of Euro each year due to workers’ inability to effectively operate the technology required to perform their job role. In addition to the high figures returned by the research in relation to the loss of productivity, what is equally surprising is that workers and managers seem to be unaware of the problem, and believe their ICT skill levels to be of a sufficiently high standard to perform their job functions effectively – despite the fact that the majority of them reported never having undergone any formal ICT skills development training.

There will never be a scenario where the skills of the workforce exactly match the requirement of the economy, but the greater the skills mismatch – especially the essential e-skills mismatch – the longer the loss of productivity will negatively impact on European prosperity.

[1] ECDL Foundation representatives will be presenting on ‘Digital Education of the Future’ at the e-Skills Week closing event, 30 March, in Copenhagen.

[2] CEDEFOP (European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training) Briefing Note (2010)

This prediction is based on several factors, some of which are more persuasive than others. One of the more misleading reasons is that of sales figures/market share gain; in terms of percentage growth, because they have only been available to consumers since 2010, tablet sales are understandably exploding. Also, despite their undeniable work and leisure usefulness, they have also become a ‘must have’ accessory for those with sufficient disposable income. In most cases, the use of tablets is supplementary: at home they seem to be replacing the home computer for browsing, and are far more practical for leisure travel and short business trips, but for tasks that require a substantial data inputting, the tablet cannot compete with the traditional personal computer set-up – and the physical keyboard that goes with it.

Without knowing what the eventual dominance of the tablet over the personal computer will be, it is already quite clear that, in terms of software provision, the marketplace has changed significantly. No longer do two or three providers possess an almost complete monopoly – there are already hundreds and thousands of apps available from a huge variety of sources. This evolution will have an impact on ICT skills development programmes. They will need to move with the times and embrace the fact that the growth in mobile application technology is likely to increase, so it is important to identify the set of stable skills that are required to operate all commonly used applications (mobile or more ‘traditional’) and to incorporate them into future versions of skills development programmes.

Additionally, the issue of vendor independence for skills development programmes will become even more important than it is now: if these programmes are to remain relevant to the needs of the user, they will need to be flexible enough to be delivered through a variety of platforms and to accommodate an ever-increasing number of software providers. ECDL Foundation appreciates the need to keep its programmes relevant to the needs of the user, and as such, continually reviews its range of programmes in keeping with market-led needs and technological advancements.

e-Inclusion is a significant social issue in Europe, and throughout the world. Despite continually improving broadband penetration, currently more than a quarter of Europeans over the age of 16 have never used the Internet. As more and more essential goods and services – such as e-Commerce and  e-Government – and, indeed, much communication moves online, those without the skills to access technology are at risk of increased levels of isolation and marginalisation within society. Those at the older end of the age spectrum, and from more disadvantaged groups, such as the unemployed or those with disabilities, are particularly at risk. Essential ICT skills can therefore now be considered as essential life skills – not everybody needs to develop their computer skills to ‘expert’ level, but those who do not possess some level of digital proficiency will not be able to participate fully in modern society[1].

Initiatives such as the EC’s e-Inclusion Awards draw attention to this important issue, in a positive and participatory manner. This year, awards will be given in two categories: the ‘I am part of IT Award’ is aimed at individuals that have benefitted from becoming e-included, and the ‘Be Part of IT – Digital Inclusion Champions Award’ is for organisations who champion e-inclusion through participation in, and support of, relevant projects. If you feel that your or your organisation’s ‘story’ successfully illustrates e-Inclusion in either category, complete the Registration Form and submit your entry before 4 May 2012.

The winners will be announced at Digital Agenda Assembly (Brussels) in June 2012.

[1] For a detailed explanation of the range of ECDL Foundation programmes that support the development of an individual’s digital proficiency, visit www.ecdl.org/programmes.