All digital skills are not all created equal, and teaching technical skills alone is problematic

Around the world governments encourage teaching in digital skills and literacies in the school curriculum and promote digital learning at home. The hope is that gaining digital skills will help implement e-government initiatives, foster civic participation, prepare young people for the ‘jobs of the future’, promote domestic adoption of digital consumer goods and services and enable citizens to locate and evaluate trustworthy information. These efforts vary hugely in their nature and goals, and it’s not clear if they actually work. In this blog, Sonia Livingstone, Giovanna Mascheroni and Mariya Stoilova discuss their new article arguing that what really matters to outcomes is the specific types of digital skills being gained.