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There are programs and services you can use to make sure that you make the most out of your computer. Having a computer desktop that you can navigate quickly and efficiently is fast becoming more important than having a tidy desk.

digital literacy as ‘the ability to find, evaluate, utilize, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet’6. By this definition, digital skills are any skills related to being digitally literate. Anything from the ability to find out your high-score on Minesweeper to coding a website counts as a digital skill.

What Digital Skills do I Need for the Modern Workplace?

"There's a difference," she says, "between wanting to celebrate your femininity and shrinking and pinking something."

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

It's ironic, really. Computer networks bring people together who'd otherwise never meet. But the impersonality of the medium changes that meeting to something less -- well, less personal. Humans exchanging email often behave the way some people behind the wheel of a car do: They curse at other drivers, make obscene gestures, and generally behave like savages. Most of them would never act that way at work or at home. But the interposition of the machine seems to make it acceptable.

Algorithms have become one of the most powerful arbiters in our lives. They make decisions about the news we read, the jobs we get, the people we meet, the schools we attend and the ads we see. Yet there is growing evidence that algorithms and other types of software can discriminate.

The people who write them incorporate their biases, and algorithms often learn from human behavior, so they reflect the biases we hold.

Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning workshop, which considers the role that machines play in consequential decisions in areas like employment, health care and policing.

We can’t just buy iPads (or any device), add water, and hope that strategy will usher schools to the leading edge of 21st century education. Technology, by itself, isn’t curative. Human agency shapes the path.

The social and economic world of today and tomorrow require people who can critically and creatively work in teams to solve problems.

All computing devices — from laptops to tablets to smartphones — are dismantling knowledge silos

There are more platforms, more websites, more pat solutions to serious problems — here’s an app that can fix drug addiction! promote fiscal responsibility! advance childhood literacy!

The doors to start-up-dom have been thrown wide open. At Harvard, enrollment in the introductory computer-science course, CS50, has soared. Last semester, 39 percent of the students in the class were women, and 73 percent had never coded before.

I protested: “What about Facebook?” He looked at me, and I thought about it. No doubt, Facebook has changed the world. Facebook has made it easier to communicate, participate, pontificate, track down new contacts and vet romantic prospects. But in other moments, it has also made me nauseatingly jealous of my friends, even as I’m aware of its unreality. Everything on Facebook, like an Instagram photo, is experienced through a soft-glow filter. And for all the noise, the pinging notifications and flashing lights, you never really feel productive on Facebook.

That, ultimately, is the challenge: to identify digitally driven, innovative practices that work and scale them up. Schools can look to a growing number of models to meet that challenge, as well as the lessons that can be learned from others' mistakes.

many schools are turning to open educational resources. They're convinced that the free, malleable, and shareable academic content offers advantages that traditional commercial materials cannot match.

administrators and teachers are learning to embrace the eclectic jumble of student-owned devices, in the belief that taking a flexible approach will benefit instruction.

Computer Grading The approach led him to his biggest triumph to date. The challenge was to write a program that could automatically and reliably evaluate student essays -- essentially a grading machine.

Two professors, computer scientist George Mohler and anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham, who specializes in crime scenarios, were instrumental in developing the predictive method of fighting crime. Their program is based on models for predicting the aftershocks of earthquakes.

The two data experts, Mohler and Brantingham, have since started a company and are marketing their product, Predictive Policing, worldwide

"Security is one of the biggest growth areas for Big Data applications," says Schröder. In addition to crime and terrorism, Splunk focuses on the growing number of attacks in, and by means of, the Internet and its software can detect hacker attacks or other cyber attacks. "We are positioning ourselves for an expanding cyber war," Schröder says. But the data hunters' new war also has many civilian aspects.

but we do know that third-party data brokers sell all manner of information to businesses, including “police officers’ home addresses, rape sufferers, and genetic disease sufferers” as well as suspected alcoholics and cancer and HIV/AIDS patients.

The first is that almost everything is personal. In the words of computer scientists Arvind Narayanan (Princeton

this model simply doesn’t reflect the reality of the deeply unequal situation we now face. Those who wield the tools of data tracking and analytics have far more power than those who don’t.