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I'd prefer young people to have the skills that keep them sceptical, critical and independent.

but share, discuss, communicate, even hang out in coffee shops.

where all of this is banned

Not one single teacher in the schools my sons attended has an email address available for parents. I’ve attended innumerable educational conferences where only a handful of the participants used Twitter.

Across the world young people have collaborated on Blogs, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to bring down entire regimes and force political change. Not one of them has been on a digital literacy course. And, in any case, who are these older teachers who know enough about digital literacy to teach these young people? And how do they teach it – through collaborative, communication on media using social media – NO. By and large, in educational institutions, this stuff is shunned, restricted, even banned. We learn digital literacy by doing, largely outside of academe.

Was there a sudden break between these skills in the last century compared to this century? No. What’s changed is the need to understand the wider range of possible communication channels. This comes through mass adoption and practice, not formal education.

I’ve seen no evidence that teachers have the disposition, or training, to teach these skills.