Digital Making & Le Canard Digérateur [Video]

You don’t have to look far these days for proclamations of the power of opportunity that digital technology provides for young people to make and shape the world. There are specific examples aplenty, but it’s hard to understand the scale to which opportunities are being taken up.

Young people could be changing their world through digital making, but how many of them are even trying to?

With great power also, often, comes great challenges. There is a danger of both overstating the access young people have to opportunities and ignoring the challenges they create.

In this keynote from the University of West England ICT conference I look at both the opportunities and the challenges that digital making technologies provide for young people, informed by the ‘Young Digital Makers’ report I did at Nesta. The talk covers how digital gives power to a much older activity of ‘making’, and why this is important not just for technology, jobs and the economy, but for our culture and societies.

All through the vehicle of a rather strange 18th century machine…

Digital Making & Le Canard Digerateur from Oliver Quinlan on Vimeo.

Originally published at Oliver Quinlan.