Netherlands' young phone coaches

It's kind of empowering to know that a lot of adults around the world need help learning about how to operate their cellphones. In New Zealand there's Mobile Mentors, springwise.com reports. But what makes even more sense is an initiative in the Netherlands that's "taking advantage of kids’ innate cell phone proficiency by training them as ‘phone coaches’ and getting them to transfer their skills to older users," springwise also reports. That's kids 12-16, and "the program’s goal is to improve their social skills and self-esteem, and give them access to corporate environments they might otherwise not be exposed to" (parents can do this at home by exchanging their street smarts (or life literacy) for their kids' tech literacy and have an ongoing mutually beneficial education program in place. Thanks to Susan in California for sending me a heads-up about this. About it she wrote: "My son, almost 11, thought this was a super idea. He thinks by the time he is 12 he can have a thriving business. I already use him to program my phone and everything else!"

11-year-old school network admin

A small private school in Arkansas was struggling to keep its network of 60 aging donated computers going on a shoestring budget, so one of its students helped out. "The first thing Jon found as he leapt into the role of network was that he had to map out the network to find out what was on it," NetworkWorld reports. So he simply bought some software that could do that at his local electronics store, and that helped him uncover "an ungodly amount of computer viruses and spam." Then he evaluated some more software and got things into shape. He was also being his mom's knight in shining armor - she was the school librarian and had just had "computer support" added to her duties. Thanks to a poster in Slashdot.org for pointing out this story (the post was in turn pointed out by a researcher colleague in Portugal, Daniel Cardoso - don't you love how information flows online?).