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What Should One Know to be Truly Computer Literate?
rbannon asks: "Computer literacy is becoming an increasingly used term in education, and more and more schools are being asked to set computer literacy goals for their students. Unfortunately for too many, it means being able to use Microsoft products, and that's all. However, I see it much differently, and I cannot help but think that computer literacy is all about using computers to be able to communicate more effectively. With that in mind does anyone have any recommendations for computer literacy goals, and how to measure them?"
I think everyone should be able to put together a system from hardware and install an operating system. We all know it isn't particularly hard to do (I'm talking about a self installing os like windows or suse, not one of those uber hardcore linux distros), but you gain an entirely different perspective on computing when you understand the basic concepts required to do so. It will at least demystify the basic idea of computing for the vast majority of americans. I am thoughly dissapointed in the concept of computer literacy. Using ms word and pressing the start button does not qualify as being computer literate. You wouldn't exactly call a first grader who reads word by word one word a second literate and ready for the world would you?
With the ever-changing technologies, the key skill no longer becomes knowing how to use any particular tool, piece of hardware or software, but rather becomes the ability to adapt and effectively learn how to use any tool or environment.
Not to sound too cliché, but Google and the Internet are at the center of this. Much like books eliminated the need for memorization and transmission by oral tradition, Google and the Internet revolutionize how one learns and adapts. Teach your students how to learn and adapt. Teach them skills on ways to search for information, ways to evaluate what information is good, and what is trash, and teach them how to contribute back information for others to learn from their experiences, good or bad.
To evaluate them, give them novel, creative problems and the tools to learn how to adapt to the environment, and search for solutions. Evaluate their ability to use the resources at their disposal to come up with their own solutions to the problems. This is infinitely better than training them to rote memorize solutions to static problems.
I'd like to see a day where a skill that is searched for on a resumé is no longer a specific ability with a specific tool, but simply the line "Fast and adaptive learner" or "Excel at creative solution design in novel environments." That's what I'd be looking for in an employee, and for future generations of technology users.
How to install an operating system, so that when they get sick of non-free rubbish they can switch to a free software system.... Or reinstall Windows themselves.
Basic knowledge would probably be the ability to surf the internet w/o difficulty, use a basic editor/wordprocessor, read and send e-mail, and possibly run a few choice applications. Advanced users should have an understanding of how to install/uninstall software and operating systems, navigate a command prompt/shell, and know the basics of how an operating system works. Ideally they should be able to write scripts and probably some code. They should be able to learn new operating systems and applications quickly. The biggest factor in literacy is comfort. If you can read/write/speak a language without difficulty then you're literate. If you can get things done on a computer easily then you're computer literate.
Someone says "our schools should make sure all their graduates are computer literate". People agree. What does this sort of literacy entail?
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
Scarily enough, thats all too true. My mom, who can barely use email, is the hosptial's "computer person". She's the only one willing to pull the plug and reboot it when it freezes up.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The ability to perform the tasks they want or need to do. Although this does not take into account the ability to perform maintenance and/or repairs when the system deviates from ideal function. I can drive a car, change a tyre and check the oil. I don't know how to swap out an engine, but I could take some car maintenance courses and learn. This makes me 'car literate' for 99% of daily tasks, even though I couldn't hold down a career as a garage mechanic based on what I currently know.
First is the Ctrl-X/V/C. Make sure they understand copy/paste/cut. It is terribly useful and something that a surprisingly small number of computer users seem to know how to use.
READ DIALOG BOXES. This goes with the "no one from Nigeria" stuff. I can't tell you how many people I've helped with computers or errors or questions where the process of helping them consisted of "Did you read the dialog box?" "What does the dialog box say?" "So what should you do?" and that helped them.
Last, and most important UNDERSTAND THE FILESYSTEM. I've gotten my parents quite good at day-to-day use of the computer. It has taken YEARS. That said, I wouldn't consider them computer literate. This is one of the reasons.
So you want to find a file my parents saved. Where is it? That's right... My Documents. Not a sub-folder, just My Documents. That's where there are a few thousand files. Why? Because that is the default save location. Unless it's not. Some programs (AOL, etc) like to save somewhere else. So files saved from those programs are in those folders. Good luck finding anything, especially with the cruddy Windows search function. Spotlight would work well, but then again I gave them Google Desktop and they don't use it (it's easier to just scroll through the list of 3,000 files).
Introducing them to a few basic file types (TXT, JPG, HTML, DOC, XLS, ZIP, etc.) would also be a good step. So would the idea that you can delete a zip file after you unzip it. A decent chunk of the stuff in my parents My Documents folder? Zip files and their contents that Windows or AOL unzipped for them. But since that process is hidden, they don't know to delete the ZIP files or what they are.
In fact, they don't understand files and e-mail either. When you get an attachment in e-mail (say a picture) and you choose to view it and it gets saved to the hard drive... what do you do the next time you want to view that picture? That's right, you go to the e-mail and RE-SAVE the file with the default filename (helpfully with a "(1)" or some such at the end to ensure you have tons of spare copies) and let the right program open up automatically again. E-mail is a foreign land from the file system for all they know. AOL and it's tendencies to keep it's own weird folders and such have NOT helped at all in this regard.
In fact, warn them against AOL in the first place. I can not tell you how many things I've given up teaching because of AOL.
I'll post more if I can think of it. But basic use of the filesystem (especially creating folder and how you can nest folders and use that for organization) is critical.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Kinda have to disagree, computer literacy is the same as regular literacy. The more literate you are the easier it is to switch context and still gain useful knowledge.
The average office worker is not as computer literate as a software developer because generally, all they can do, is use their word processor, email and spreadsheets. While a software developer would be able use an IDE,compilers, debuggers and also be able to use a word processor to write a report and figure out their budgets on a spreadsheet.
Likewise a person who has worked in different enviroments (MS, Mac,*nix) using different tools, (text editors, spread sheets, media players,compilers) is more computer literate than a person who has only ever used their win-box to email. They may know every hot-key short cut and trick that Outlook can handle but they're not really computer literate if they can't send an email on a mac or linux box if they have to.
The more contexts/environments a person can work in, and the shorter time it takes to gain fluency in a new context, the more computer literate that person is.
Then again, I could be wrong.
... it's about how to think.
One of the reasons my employer is moving from Tcl to another development platform for Web infrastructure, probably Java, is because they claim they can get more Java programmers than Tcl programmers. While this might be true, I would argue that they will get exactly as many competent, effective Java programmers as they get Tcl programmers, in other words, very few. Any programmer worth the appellation can do his job regardless of the tool.
Equating "literacy" with the ability to use Microsoft Office (or something similar) is like equating mathematics knowledge by memorizing the times tables up to 100. Useful for a very specific, narrow range of tasks, but completely worthless when presented with a new type of problem.
Unfortunately, it is far easier to test for memorization than for actual thinking, and this is the route of least resistance our education system likes to take.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I define "computer literacy" as I would any other use of the word "literacy". A person who can listen or read a language but can't express an original thought in it isn't considered 'literate'. Yes, I mean programming is required to be considered computer literate. Computers are nothing more than a decoder for instructions, if all you can do is cause it to play back someone else's stored commands you are a passive user in exactly the same way as a child sticking Barney videos into the VCR in their bedroom.
Yes, many people (especially in the uneducated nations of today's modern Western world) might be able to live a productive life only knowing how to operate a web browser but 'computer literate' they ain't. You can make exactly the same observation about someone who can't write a coherent paragraph, they too can often live a productive life in the lower classes of society, but illiteracy kills off most chances to better oneself.
And I can already hear some witless wonder getting ready to analogize about people not needing to be mechanics to use a car, blah blah. No everyone doesn't need to be able to strip an engine down but they should know where all the major parts are, the basic theory of operation, common failure modes, make a few emergency fixes, etc. You might not be able to write an office suite from scratch but you should be able to write a spreadsheet macro, a simple shell script or be able to at least have a shot at fixing a bug in a larger program that is really annoying you.
Democrat delenda est
Computer literate person:
* does not fear or mystify the computer or computer specialists.
* knows the basic operation of a personal computer, starting from how turn computer on and off and ending around knowing when and which expert to call about problems.
* knows, in practice, the paradigms of human-computer interaction, most often meaning a functional ability to use most modern GUIs.
* knows the rules of thumb of computer security and privacy.
* can search for and understand manuals and other information sources about new areas of computer use.
* can make educated guesses about relevant search terms.
* has a firm grip of the theoretical limits of what can be done with a computer.
* can issue commands to a computer in a way that makes sense in the relevant problem domain.
Being able to program is obviously one generic ability that would fulfill the last criteria. However, programming is too often understood to mean an ability to design and implement systems or applications. That is not required for computer literacy. Programming-related things that computer literacy would include are: expressing information in a computer understandable way, information manipulation, information querying and some ability to use interfaces like APIs.
I feel strongly about the basic ability to command a computer. In the digital age everyone should have that ability. I may be, however, defining the substance of commanding too close to programming. It may be that less is needed or that more emphasis should be in understanding processes or epistemology or something.
--Flam
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
Teach a man to be curious, and you'll be learning from him one day.
It's sad that we're often satisfied with step #2 and steps 3 and 4 are viewed in disdain.
Whoa... scripting? We are talking about literacy, IE something kids and grandmothers should be able to acheive. Scripting requires a great deal of knowledge about how to use a computer before you can start taking those pieces together to create greater functionality. Its going to be tough to teach someone who is struggling to remember the ls command how to grep that output and pipe it to wc -l to see how many recipes she has with "pie" or whatever in the title.
I think the general definition of literacy is simple. They should know how to operate the computer on a day to day basis well enough that they can learn or get help on their own. For any OS, this means starting/stopping the computer, running programs, installing programs, understanding what the file system is, how it is set up and how to navigate it. How to change basic usability settings like mouse sensitivity, UI colors, wallpaper, etc. How and where to acquire new software. How to get on and navigate the internet, how to spot spam/phishing sites. These are the basics, and the details of how to do these tasks are OS specific.
On top of this though, to be "literate" you really have to know how to use the basic functionality of common software packages such as email programs, web browsers, word processors, etc.
NO ONE is literate though until they can take the knowledge they have and learn new things though. Case in point- my mother. I told her how to install aim, she sat there with a notepad and wrote down every single step down to what button to select. I told her that she just needed to understand the general process, and that most likely the exact site name and buttons would change. She just gave me a blank stare. I used to encourage her to write down how to do stuff for simple tasks so she could eventually memorize them and start connecting the dots that this stuff is pretty much the same throughout most programs. Instead, she used her cheat sheets as a crutch, and never deviated from them one iota, never connected the dots, she just blindly followed instructions without thinking about what she was doing. This is a woman who has been using computers for over 20 years. Its kind of astounding.
A person cannot be considered "computer literate" unless they can sit down in front of just about anything they might reasonably encounter and be able to get at least rudimentary stuff done. Learning just how to drill down a specific system's menus (or across "ribbons" if they ever appear) to the exclusion of alternate methods is almost worse than no education at all.
Hear hear!
I recently had to reinstall my in-law's PC due to it being crufted to the eyeballs and basically running like a dog. I took the opportunity to upgrade to WinXP and all was well. I then discovered that they didn't have an Office disk and my M-I-L uses Word a lot. Apparently a 'man just installed it for us'. Hmm.
Anyway, with no Office disk handy Installed OpenOffice.org2. The menus are largely similar, the font, size, alignment and formatting buttons are in the same place. The print button is in the the same place too. All is well.
The M-I-L comes along, clicks her Word document and starts editing. She has already mentally equated minor visual differences with the switch to WinXP, so ignores the slight layout shift and gets down to work. A little while later she notices some oddities. For example, OOo autocomplete was turned on, and it kept guessing what she was trying to type (correctly, I might add). Only then did she cotton on that it didn't say 'Microsoft Word' at the top of the window.
"I can't use this! I don't know how to work it! I only know Word!" came the cry. I try to counter with "You've just spent 2 productive hours getting a document together, including making the page 2-column and printing 2 sample copies. How can you say you don't know how to use it?"
Unfortunately ALL I got from there on in was "I only know Word! I only know Word! I don't know what this is, I only know Word!"
She now has Word 97 (legally). It's crap. She still has OOo if she wants it, but she still maintains she doesn't know how to use it. You seriously CANNOT help some people improve because they simply do not want to. There is a mental block that says "I don't know about computers" and that's as far as they will ever get.
Sadly this means that we long-suffering computer literate relatives have a lifetime of sorting out viruses, scams, trojans and spyware ahead of us because people, quite literally, will never learn.
When I did my Computer Studies A level ( around 14 years ago ) there was very little which was specific to Microsoft or any other IT company, instead we learnt about the way databases, networks, spreadsheets were supposed to work and what you should be using them for in generalities rather than bothering too much with actually using any specific database or wordprocessor.
;-)
In a way I think this is much better since you can find yourself having to work with any aspect of computer technology and knowing what it should be capable of doing it is usually pretty easy to work out how it is actually doing it in the case you are dealing with. You usually also end up learning how many Microsoft products don't quite do what you would expect them to do and do other, unexpected things, when you get them to do the things they can do
A few years later when I was unemployed and forced to do an NVQ in various computer technologies it was indeed Microsoft all the way and simply parroting a set of steps necessary to whack some numbers in a spreadsheet/write some letter etc etc. This was laughably easy but I suspect the people on the course coming up against computers for the first time learnt very little that they directly use 8 years later unless they actually managed to work out for themselves why they were doing the steps they were making.