(versione italiana qua)
Short answer: both. Question: but aren't they the same thing? No — but many people in schools and in society at large are unaware of this.
In the world of education in particular, there is confusion between the two terms "informatics" and "digital" and the concepts they relate to. But this is by no means the fault of teachers, nor is there any point in looking for someone to blame. At the recent MIUR National Seminar on "Digital Citizenship and Culture", one of the distinguished colleagues at the speakers' table recalled how over the past 30 years schools have spoken of informatics skills and digital skills, using one term or the other interchangeably to mean: the ability to programme in Pascal, to use Word, to write emails, to do coding, to use social media consciously, and so on. It is hardly surprising, then, that many of the debates and communications on these topics end up saying things that contradict one another.
In my presentation, therefore, I began by recalling the etymology of the two words: "digital" refers to the representation of data through numerical symbols, while "informatics" refers to the capacity for automatic data processing made possible by the methods and theories of informatics, which is a scientific discipline. Representing data through numerical symbols is nothing new from recent decades. The Babylonians did it for calculating astronomical orbits, and the ancient Egyptians for calculating land areas, each with their own system of representation. What is new is the ability to process these representations automatically (that is, informatics) — as if an enormously complicated clockwork mechanism were at work.
It is obvious to everyone that a clock is a purely mechanical executor of a calculation conceived and designed by a human being, and that a clock does not "know" what the various gears that make it up are, what they represent, or what they are for. But the realisation of computers, made possible by informatics, allows us to have, for the first time in human history, an automatic system that — by manipulating symbols whose meaning it does not know, following instructions whose meaning it does not know — transforms data that are meaningful to human beings. The result is a "cognitive machine": a system that performs operations of a cognitive nature. This is a genuine revolution — the "informatics revolution" — which I have characterised as the third "revolution in power relations".
Schools are now being asked to adapt to the fact that we live in a digital society, and must therefore produce digital citizens. What should be done? Are "digital skills" or "informatics skills" what is needed? To clarify, it is helpful to return to the etymology mentioned above. Digital skills are all those relating to the use of technologies that manipulate data in numerical form: they are therefore operational skills. Informatics skills, by contrast, are those pertaining to the principles and techniques of informatics: they are therefore scientific skills. Both are needed, but they serve different purposes.
European Union documents on this subject unfortunately create a degree of confusion, mixing operational and scientific aspects. This is not merely my opinion. Reading, for example, the Recommendation of the Council of the European Union of 22 May 2018, one finds that programming is treated as a digital skill, when it is in fact a fundamental part of informatics, and therefore a scientific skill. Treating computer programming as an operational skill rather than as one of the foundational elements of informatics — which is a scientific discipline — is equivalent to reducing arithmetic to an operational skill (that of the times table). In the United States, the UK, and many other advanced countries, the distinction is, by contrast, well understood.
In these countries, today's digital society is correctly viewed as an evolution of industrial society. The latter was the result of the transformation of agricultural society under the impetus of the industrial revolution. Digital society is still a society of machines — but of a digital kind: "cognitive machines". To prepare citizens for industrial society over the past two centuries, students were not given operational skills in the use of industrial machinery; instead, the scientific disciplines explaining the underlying scientific principles were introduced into schools. In the same way, preparing citizens to fully understand digital society requires introducing into schools the scientific discipline that explains it and made it possible: informatics. This does not deny that digital skills — the operational level — are also needed in schools. They are valuable, and they cut across all subjects, because in every discipline a teacher can benefit in both their teaching and administrative work from a good level of digital skills.
In conclusion, schools must certainly develop students' digital skills (operational level), and must ensure that their teachers — in every subject — possess them too. But it is absolutely necessary to provide students with an informatics education (scientific level), in order to equip them to participate actively and in an informed way in digital society.
--The original version (in italian) has been published by "Il Fatto Quotidiano" on 13 March 2019.
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