Dominic

I think you need to find new ways to encourage the transfer of IT skills. From an early age, schools need to be teaching kids much, much more IT. Starting out with safety and how to use the *current trends* such as Facebook, MySpace; as well as general web browsing and communication tools. Relevant, *recent* information is the key because these things change so rapidly. This means having teachers in place who really know their IT (and keep on top of it). Both a *new* breed of IT/teacher hybrid needs to be trained for the future, as well as enticing existing individuals in the IT industry to consider a teaching career (to cope with the now). Currently there's little incentive though, certainly not financial. I just had a thought though... if you can encourage (or train) more IT-savvy individuals to teach, perhaps they can double up as personal online nannies / monitors of their class pupils? They could build it into their lessons when introducing websites like Facebook and MySpace, automatically friending-up with pupils to oversee their future interactions with others (until a certain age). It might be nice if some of these social sites featured authorised accounts to monitor other users like this. Perhaps it wouldn't be such a good idea for other reasons (discussion required). Either way, the government is going to have to work *with* the IT industry, gain its support. I'm not going to mention what's damaging that right now because I think it's obvious. Another point on early online safety... there has to be a well delivered balance between promoting the online dangers and sandboxing/scaring children. We need them to be eager and interested. They need to be willing to explore and experiment with technology and the Internet so they develope those *unteachable* skills and a passion. Then as children get older I think they *all* need to start thinking / get taught about what goes on behind the button clicks, *how* Google performs its searches, *where* their username and passwords are stored, even what the limitations of filtering software are ;) - otherwise, they might grow up to be politicians! Hehe. There seems to be a new generation emerging that is very savvy at using popular social networks but uninterested in how they work behind the scenes. Teaching that might get a few thinking "How can I *create* a social network?" instead of "How do I *use* a social network?". Hopefully by higher education you have more teens interested in persuing an IT career. Then you need your "elite" to teach them. First those from academic backgrounds (professors of science) to teach the low-level principles, best practises and theories that apply across the whole subject matter. It's not just whether a pupil can develope an iPhone app *now*. It's about if they can self-transfer their skills over to other platforms in the future, such as Google's Android. You also need those from the (commercial) industry sector who can cover *current*, real-world scenarios. Ask one of them just 5 years ago (a little longer than a degree course) and they'd have been talking about data centralisation and tight control over communication protocols. Today, they're excited about cloud computing, APIs and embracing the social web. That's how much it can change in such a short time. Again, incentives are required to keep these kinds of people in the country and inside the colleges and universities.