21 century skillsets: the new literacy

Almost no one in the traditional education world, in both K-12 schools and higher educational institutions, has noticed the new literacy.

Not only is there a necessity to be more generally technically literate, but

the educated person of today must be able to read, write and express thoughts in a variety of technology-based media

MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld notices “From a combination of passion and inventiveness I sense that students are reinventing literacy. Literacy has been boiled down to reading and writing, but the means have changed since the Renaissance. In a very real sense post-digital literacy now includes 3D machining and microcontroller programming.” (Source: a paraphrase of Gershenfeld's Edge interview)

This should really be extended to say that the new literacy includes expression in traditional writing and in computer software, 3d printing, virtual worlds, video games, synthetic biology and visual storytelling.

Does everyone have to excel at expressing themselves in each of these media? No, but the most effective people are able to communicate through multiple forms of media.

An interesting analysis would be in evaluating the types of expression that are possible in each of the media. How is the same idea different in writing, in software, in 3d animation? Which media are better in which cases? Imagine the assignment to create a representation of yourself through biology, by assembling DNA sequences for different actions from the Registry of Standard Biological Parts database.

There has never been such an explosion of venues for creativity and self-expression. The result is very exciting – a richer interconnectedness of humanity and a new level of collaboration opportunities as more people can now connect through their user-generated content.

To Web 2.0 or not to Web 2.0

Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and others are making their APIs open and increasingly easy to use. Often with only a few lines of copied and modified code, a Google map swatch or search bar or Flickr photo cloud providing visual accompaniment or now Yahoo mail information can be added to any website. Google's code is primarily client-side so can run more easily, Yahoo's mainly runs server-side and requires ISPs to have Apache 2.0 and PHP 5 installed.

Those sneaky software companies! At a basic level, open APIs expand the outsourcing trend from user-generated content to user-generated applications too. This actually benefits both the software companies and users.

At the more important conceptual level, open APIs are extending the componentization of software, which has been progressing in fits of cohesion and rollbacks of proprietary standards. As Jaron Lanier and others have long pointed out, the software industry lacks an effective standardized component library and rebuilds the wheel each time. The same point is made in global productivity speak by former McKinsey consultant William Lewis in "the Power of Productivity;" industries that standardized components early became leaders, homebuilding is a notable example.

Users featuring more prominently in the development process as well as other current factors such as Web 2.0 applications being organized in chunkable components may provide a stronger more fungible foundation for software development from which we can all benefit.