— Posted by Prabhat Agarwal, DG INFSO, Project Officer 

“Students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.”

So begins Marc Presky’s famous essay in which he coined the term “Digital Natives” — those born typically after 1980, and raised in the connected digital world. Presky’s main focus was on the revolution of the teaching world. But when we designed the Digital Agenda for Europe, we knew that we had to reach out to our own Digital Natives in Europe. Right from the beginning, and across a much wider set of policies.

And so we did.

In our house, it started with Neelie Kroes’ visit to the Campus Party Europe last year, followed by a special event at last year’s ICT conference, and then continued in the recruitment of a Young Advisors Group for the Digital Agenda, and in the launch of a special grant for young researchers under the Future and Emerging Technologies scheme. In parallel, our colleagues from DG Education and Culture launched a whole series of initiatives on education and employment for young people in Europe. This series of initiatives is called “Youth on the Move“, another key flagship of the Europe 2020 strategy for growth and jobs.

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— Posted by Ken Ducatel, DG INFSO, Head of Unit - Digital Agenda: Policy coordination

Last week, we had the pleasure to spend a morning with Vice-President Neelie Kroes and a set of energetic and inspiring young people who have contributed to the digital society so far through their business, research, or engagement in civic society.

We asked them advice about how to make sure our policies take into better account youth’ needs and how we can work better together in order to help each other. Indeed, what can they do to help us work better and reach young people through our actions? How can we help them overcome barriers and obstacles they have encountered in their professional life? Read the full entry

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