A proposed change to the U.K. primary school curriculum would have children mastering Wikipedia and Twitter in classrooms.
While I embrace the idea that children should be more technologically saavy from an early age - I would go so far as to argue it is a critical skill - are Twitter and Wikipedia really the channels by which that experience can best be shaped? One is (very loosely termed) a communications tool and the other is a research tool. Neither can be used as a means to further one's interaction with technology - except to the extent one can ask his Twitter followers for help or look it up on Wikipedia, I guess. And how long can it take to master Twitter? You can only type 140 characters at a time! And Wikipedia, while certainly an invaluable resource, seems like a bit narrow for an entire curriculum bullet point.
When I was in elementary school, there was an effort to teach basic programming via LOGO, using turtle graphics. Unfortunately, it was never clear what the purpose of learning to draw stars and hexagons was, and never a clear endgame - the program died after a year or two. But the idea was correct - it represented a useful skill which could (with the right coaching) be redeployed elsewhere. I think we are still on the cusp of people realizing how important it can be to communicate with computers outside the traditional GUI - VBA has been catching on more and more in Excel, for example - and these are the skills children need to develop. Shortly, anyone without basic programming knowledge will be an unskilled outlier.
One of the key hurdles seems to be the prejudice that programming is an isolated skillset. In fact, it is simply a series of logical commands, a string of imperatives with an abbreviated syntax. "Computer science" is the effort to streamline the logic to take fewer steps to complete any given task, but an [inefficient] program can be written simply by writing clear sequential instructions for the computer to follow.
Maybe one day these U.K. kids can Tweet about how Wikipedia's articles on programming have become too complicated for them to understand.