Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

• Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Ellen DeGeneres all dropped out of college, yet they became leaders in their fields. Their secret? Self-directed learning.
• Self-directed learning can help people expand their knowledge, gain new skills, and improve upon their liberal education.
• Following habits like Benjamin Franklin's five-hour rule, the 80/20 rule, and SMART goals can help self-directed learners succeed in their pursuits.

Gendered life patterns and socialisation may negatively affect women’s confidence in using digital technology – particularly older women with lower socio-economic status. These are some of the findings from two reports carried out by Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, and the Good Things Foundation, into digital inclusion and literacy. In this post Kate Gilchrist asks what this means for how parents and grandparents support their children in a digital age and argues that policy makers must take such factors into account. Kate is the editor of the Parenting for a Digital Future blog and is a PhD researcher in the Media and Communications department at LSE.

For colleges and universities to succeed today, treating nontraditional students as the norm is becoming quite important.

With college enrollment declining over the past five years, looking to engage students who have often struggled in traditional academic settings might be a way for universities to increase their success.

By 2020, around 65 per cent of university graduates will work in jobs that don’t yet exist. Automation, driven by rapid advances in artificial intelligence, is also destroying repetitive, low-skill jobs, and changing the nature of most others.

Yet, as with all “creative destruction”, for every 20 jobs that will be lost from 2018-27, about 13 will be created, according to a 2016 research paper by Wilcocks and Laity. In India, the promised rich economic dividend that the country is demographically poised to reap depends deeply upon the quality of the future workforce. Therefore, the task of future-proofing the skills of our workforce assumes that much more import.

Here at Techboomers, we are always advocating for adult online learning. We believe it is never too late to start learning new skills, especially when it comes to online education. Because of modern technology, it’s entirely possible to learn about almost any topic online. You can work at your own pace, from the comfort of your own home, and keep working on gaining the skills you want to acquire to help you achieve goals in your life.