Strolling through informatics #0 – Introduction

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by Enrico Nardelli

(versione italiana qua)

With this post we begin a "journey" that aims to stimulate the reader's interest in Informatics, that scientific discipline which underlies today's digital society. All too often, communication in this field is driven by technological trends or commercial pressures. Through a series of educational pieces, we intend instead to explore both the main concepts of the discipline and some of the consequences arising from the ever-increasing use of informatics-based technologies. The posts in this series are based on the Author's book The Computer Revolution: Knowledge, Awareness and Power in Digital Society, to which we refer for further insights.

The society we live in is now permeated by an enormous quantity and variety of digital devices: one need only think of the sphere of media and communication, where letters, articles and books have now been completely dematerialized in the form of tweets, email messages, posts on blogs (with their related management systems, also digital) or the sphere of social relations, where digital communication and interaction systems increasingly replace what were once face-to-face meetings and direct encounters. An even greater impact is expected with the spread of so-called artificial intelligence techniques (artificial intelligence), among which those of machine learning (machine learning) have particular relevance and importance, promising to provide digital assistants capable of making work more effective and efficient.

All these digital systems are governed by scientific laws, analogously to what happens with physical systems, those of Informatics. It is a scientific discipline with its own corpus of concepts, theories, principles, methods, knowledge and open problems [The Royal Society 2012; Académie des Sciences 2013]. Its effects can be seen both in the creation of this digital world, only apparently virtual, since it constitutes an increasingly relevant reality, and in the acceleration it is giving to the development of science and technology, in all fields, also creating new areas of study and research. The transformations that information technology has brought to all sectors mean that every profession and every discipline is somehow influenced by it and constitute one of the fundamental factors of economic development over the last 50 years.

The social impact of informatics is evident both in the ubiquity of the World Wide Web and its ongoing extension to the Internet of Things (Internet of Things) and in the attention that legislators around the world have placed and are placing on regulating the management of digital data and the use of artificial intelligence techniques. The scientific importance is testified by the publication, in its almost 70 years of life as an autonomous science, of about 2 million scientific articles, compared to an estimated total of 70 million for all disciplines [Informatics for All 2020].

On the educational front, there is the recent approval by the Council of the European Union of the European Commission's proposed Recommendation on teaching informatics in schools (Council of the European Union, 2023). The approved Recommendation addresses the need to ensure that education supports the digital transformation by providing the necessary skills for this purpose. Therefore, all Member States are recommended to develop quality informatics education in both primary and secondary education.

More specifically, it is recommended to:

• introduce high-quality informatics teaching from the beginning of compulsory education, having clearly established learning objectives, dedicated time and assessment methods, in order to offer all students the opportunity to develop their digital skills in a scientifically well-founded way,
• ensure that informatics teaching is delivered by qualified teachers, who have quality teaching resources, well-founded teaching approaches, and appropriate methods for assessing learning objectives at their disposal.

The need for informatics as a fundamental scientific discipline for the education of all citizens in the 21st century is therefore clearly manifested to all Member States. This is a most timely indication. We should remember that, with the transition from an agricultural society to an industrial society, the educational process of people changed, introducing into compulsory education elements of those sciences (physics, biology, chemistry, ...) that are the basis of every industrial machine. Similarly, in the transition from industrial society to digital society, it is necessary to add the study of informatics to compulsory education, which is indispensable for understanding digital machines.

Understanding the fundamental principles of this science is indeed essential to enable every person to have that basic knowledge necessary to understand and influence the development of the digital world, and contribute to the harmonious growth of a just, equitable and secure digital society.

We will therefore try to provide some useful educational nuggets to those who follow us with attention and faithfulness, and we hope to induce them to seek to know more about informatics, so as to be able to navigate and participate responsibly and critically in a communicative sphere of information – sometimes incorrect or incomplete – that risks being increasingly controlled by algorithms that could be biased.

With the next post we will begin this "stroll" by discussing how informatics can be defined.

Bibliographical References

Académie des Sciences (2013). L'enseignement de l'Informatique en France: Il est urgent de ne plus attendre, May 2013. http://www.academie-sciences.fr/pdf/rapport/rads_0513.pdf

Council of the European Union (2023), Recommendation on improving the provision of digital skills and competences in education and training, November 2023, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/IT/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ:C_202401030

Informatics for All (2020). Position paper for the public consultation on the renovation of the EU Digital Education Action Plan. https://www.informaticsforall.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Informatics-for-All-position-paper.pdf

The Royal Society (2012). Shut down or restart? The way forward for computing in UK schools, January 2012. https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/computing-in-schools/report/

[[The posts in this series are based on the Author's book (in Italian) La rivoluzione informatica: conoscenza, consapevolezza e potere nella società digitale, (= The Informatics Revolution: Knowledge, Awareness and Power in the Digital Society) to which readers are referred for further reading]].

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The original version (in italian) has been published by "Osservatorio sullo Stato digitale" (= Observatory on Digital State) of IRPA - Istituto di Ricerche sulla Pubblica Amministrazione (= Research Institute on Public Administration) on 18 September 2024.