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Video: Digital Literacy, Part 16
Rachel Chong
Special Counsel
Office of the State CIO
MS. CHONG: Digital literacy is extremely important for California. And the reason I say that is I think that Californians have fallen behind a little bit in terms of our digital literacy skills. I see other advanced nations in IT computing like Japan, South Korea becoming better than the US in terms of training their students and their workers to be ready for an information age workplace. So I think digital literacy must be emphasized in our education and our workforce to catch up.
So as an example, I know there's a new program in California to address the STEM skills of our students. That means science, technology, engineering and math. And digital literacy plays a big role as part of the “T,” the technology part.
Next, digital literacy is very important to Californians because the applications that are enabled by broadband -- so for example, when we have good broadband we're able to bring to our people things like tele-education, the ability of remote learning from a teacher who isn't in the same room as you. Or we can have tele-health, having a doctor who's in an urban hospital treat a person who's out in a rural area.
I also think that increasingly, frankly because of budget shortfalls, we have a lot of government benefits being delivered online. A lot of job seeking is being done online. You have to type your resume and email it in or post it to a job site. So that's why it's very important that we train low income, senior citizens, non-English speaking people, folks like that, in digital literacy skills, because a lot of the business of the state is now being done on computers and on the internet.