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?"

Comments

The Key Skill Is Ability to Learn

[celest]

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.

Re:The following....

[MBCook]

An excellent list. I can only add a few small things to it.

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.

Re:context: education

[mysticgoat]

I work for the department of a community college that teaches computer skills to adults who are seeking entry level jobs. Our clientelle are generally funded by one of half a dozen different State grants. We've got a proven track record of taking persons off State assistance programs and turning them into taxpayers.

In this milieu, I think "computer literacy" can be regarded as a continuum with definite upper and lower boundaries:

• The low boundary is being able to perform common office tasks like email, word processing, and internet searches, and being able to understand and follow general instructions with regard to executing these tasks, and being able to describe specific tasks in these categories in an understandable way. A person who can do these things is going to be an asset to any company who hires them and we teach to this level of performance.
• The lower middle part concerns being able to do all of the common office tasks with one brand of software, and being able to confidently learn how to do these tasks on unfamiliar software, and demonstrating a history of on-going acquisition of computer skills. I try to influence our courses so they foster the attitudes, curiosity, and ambition that would cause our students to seek this level of proficiency after they are employed.
• The upper middle part concerns being able to contribute meaningfully to risk/benefit discussions about changing office software, policies, or procedures. This kind of work is to common office work as writing novels or poetry is to writing one's diary: it involves much more than technical proficiency with the software tools; it requires a degree of insight into the social and political aspects of software usage.
• And the high boundary of computer literacy in this milieu is being able to develop and implement office policies and procedures that effectively exploit available software and computer resources. Certainly there are many technical skills like programming or database construction that might feed into this, but those skills are also clearly separate from shaping software tasks and job descriptions in useful ways. (This may sound like systems analyst work-- but in practice it is more like a merger of choreography and marriage counseling).

Note that it is entirely possible for someone with extensive programming or sysadmin skills to score pretty low on this continuum. I have met such people. It almost seems as though some people can learn to shoe a horse without ever learning the basics about how to ride one.

Re:context: education

[cp.tar]

One of my... well, in the USA I guess would be called majors in college... is Information Science, which we students describe as a kind of Computer Science Lite. Nothing like the hard work people in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science put in, anyway. However, people here are being taught about several kinds of computer literacy:

• Using Windows XP and MS Office, i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint. And Internet Explorer, gods help us, although our college oficially endorses Firefox.
• Basic programming. In Pascal.
• Basic HTML. Only HTML. Done in Notepad. including the <FONT> tag and all its options.
  At least there's Notepad++ for us who know that it's there.
• Basic active webpage design. In ASP.NET. In that crappy MS Visual Web Developer Thingy 2005, using VB.NET, if I understood correctly. Anyway, crappy program, crappy language, crappily taught.
• Some advanced text processing, which is, as far as I can tell, some advanced functions of MS Word (I'm a freshman, and this is a sophomore course, so I only know what they tell me).
• Some database work in junior and senior years.
• I haven't heard mention of any kind of specialised library, museum or any related software, although there should be.

Anyway, that's why we're starting a club which may well, depending on the interest, develop into an informal parallel study. There are enough of us who know enough about many different areas and who are willing to learn more. So we plan to:

• give courses on several programming languages:
  • Scheme or Lisp and Prolog (very handy for NLP)
  • PHP and Python
  • supplemental courses in Pascal and Basic.
• organise a Build Your Own Computer workshop, for we find the fact that some of our fellow students have to pay someone to upgrade their RAM scandalous.
• teach proper (LaTeX) typesetting (that's if I find enough time to learn it myself - any good on-line manuals you can reccomend?)
• get people to know different operating systems - at least Windows and Linux, Mac OS X if we can get our hands on it, Solaris if we have time; make them aware of multiplatform software and open formats.
• teach proper webpage design - (X)HTML + CSS and then move up.

We're sure we'll get more ideas in time... but I meant this to show at least some of the differences in our views on computer literacy as compared to most of our teachers'. On the other hand, we can expect some of the other kind of teachers to join our courses, so not everything is lost in advance.