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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?"
You can't measure computer literacy without a context because "computer" is such a vague term these days and "computers" are used by many people for many different things.
FOr the average office worker it's knowing how to use MS Office. For the Hardware Engineer it means something completely different and for the software developer it's different again.
You can only be "truly computer literate" in the context of a particular field.
It's like asking for a "skilled driver" - skilled to what level? Skilled enough to navigate through suburban traffic or to compete in a Gran Prix?
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
Assembly.
Know more than the other people you work with.
Just stay one step ahead.
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?
The basic rule of thumb I would use is that if you've taught them with one operating system, and they don't have any difficulty accomplishing the same tasks with another operating system of the same basic design, then they've learnt the basic concepts well enough as opposed to learning by rote what to click.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It shouldn't be about being able to use certain products or being able to do a specific task, the real goal should be teaching the kids to find out how to do things for themselves.
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to learn things for himself, and he'll be a hell of a lot more than a fisherman.
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.
A literate person is one who can learn anything given time and opportunity, not someone who's read everything.
A computer literate person should be one who grasps a foundation of knowledge that prevents dead ends and allows learning whatever the current task requires.
The key concept would have to be that a computer is a playback device for software, that whoever controls the software owns the computer (yes, owns. Which gives you more control, being handed car keys, or being handed a root password?), and that some software is much better than other software. Teach that and you've cured all the people who think Internet Explorer is "the internet".
If you want to teach people to use a computer to commmunicate better, then teach them to communicate better. Outlining is a skill that is even more useful for web pages than it was for text. Good composition skills are indispensable. Old-fashioned "rhetoric" classes have a lot to offer about conveying and supporting ideas. Where text is considered obsolete, teach the "grammar" and "vocabulary" that filmmakers have worked out for multimedia works.
No one agrees with me on this, but I think that you have to know a computer language to understand computers. It can even be something like LOGO, for kids. I'm not suggesting that someone has to know a set of GUI widgets for a modern desktop or anything.
If you know a language, you know what an algorithm is, even if you don't know the word. And if you know what an algorithm is, you pretty much know what a computer is.
I'm a giant fan of that MIT vision -- LOGO for kids, extensible and scriptable apps for adults, cheap laptops for people in parts of the world where money is scarce, open information on the web, etc.
I don't have kids, though, and I've never convinced anyone that their kids would be better of learning LOGO than powerpoint. Everyone says the same thing -- you don't have to be an engineer to drive a car.
I was lucky -- I got to learn about computers with a KIM-1 single board machine, and timesharing on a PDP-10, reading books about games written by hippies. If I wanted to play a game, I'd usually have to port it from one dialect of BASIC to another. It wasn't really hard, and it's not really fair to call them ports. But you had to understand the code at least a little bit.
I think it would be a lot harder to learn from iTunes.
I started on your tutorial, but two steps in Emacs closed on me.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
The biggest problem with learning how to use computers I've seen from neophytes is the fear of trying stuff. Everything I know about computers comes from wanting to find out how stuff works. I tinker and mess around and do stupid things and eventually figure out what things are and how they work.
Too many people are afraid they'll break the computer and resort to memorizing what they are shown. Since they only do the one thing they are trained to they are unable to grasp the underlying components and what it all means.
To be literate you have to tinker. Try stuff. Break things, get someone to fix them. Then try some different stuff.
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.
Whenever I have a question like this, I try to devise a similar question from a non-computer perspective (a different context) to help me wrap my brain around the idea. This also happens to work especially well when trying to explain computer issues to those who are not computer literate.
For example, "What does vehicle literate mean?" A car, like a computer, is a single complex machine that the average person above a certain age is expected to know how to operate. So how does one become "car literate"? Because you know how to drive one vehicle does not mean you can operate a boat or airplane or the space shuttle. So "computer literate" probably does not mean that you can operate any computer, just the most common variety (e.g. Windows and Office). Even then, you might know how to drive an automatic and not a standard (Windows vs Linux).
Analogy is a great tool to not only improve others understanding of a given concept but also your own.
Just for fun consider this: Computer support technicians and doctors are similar in many ways. They are both supposed to be highly paid, highly trained, highly skilled, and highly knowledgeable about an extremely complex machine that they did not design or create and of which cannot possibly know everything about. Often, they rely on their limited experience to make a best guess about the root cause of the machine's particular problem and then follow up with lots of testing to see if they are correct or not. As you probably know, some computer support people, trained and certified or not, seem to have an innate gift for solving computer problems while others should never be allowed to touch a computer. Makes you think about your doctor, eh?
Ouch! The truth hurts!
That's like saying you should be able to assemble a car before you can drive. Or put a stove together before you can cook. The fact that you even think this is another indication that many of the people who work in IT (or have serious interest in it) don't understand what the end user really needs. A normal, everyday user should be able to get real work done easily without having to understand all of the jargon that you and I understand. It's absurd to expect him to do so.
David
How do you go to a website? Do you know what the #1 search on Yahoo is? It's "Google". My parent's computers are set up with Google as the home page. Do you know how they get just about anywhere? Searching google. Want to go to "favoritestore.com"? Well you type "favoritestore.com" in the Google search field and hit Search then click on the right one that comes up. They also use bookmarks. That one took a LONG TIME to break. I can not tell you how many people I've seen with that one.
Also, what is a home page in your web browser? That's the company that sells you your internet service! We subscribe to Google. We never get a bill from them. We do get bills from Comcast for Internet. But that little logical inconsistency doesn't seem to occur to them. I think I've got this one through to my parents too, but I'm not sure. I know it is (at least in part) related to AOL. The fact that you can change this to whatever you want is important and should be mentioned.
The last one for now is a personal pet-peeve of mine. I run into this in the otherwise very smart and computer savvy people in my high level CS classes.
This - / - is a FOREWORD-slash
This - \ - is a BACK-slash
One leans forward, the other leans backward. The terms are NOT INTERCHANGEABLE. The mean DIFFERENT things.
Of course this wouldn't be a problem is MS stuck with / as a path separator for DOS just like UNIX used, but that's another argument.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
>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.
The fact that noones parents understand the filesystem is an indicator of exactly one thing
THE FILE/FOLDER METAPHOR IS BROKEN
Yes, the whole idea of 'files' is only a metaphor. Even in Unix. A very useful metaphor, sure. But it's not necessary or helpful anymore for the average user.
It's great that files exist, and in *nix-likes are the basis for everything, sure. But the user doesn't need to see these pesky files anymore, they are just confusing him. He should know be one level of abstraction up - working with something we could call a 'document', for want of a better term. He doesn't need to know if his webpage consists of multiple files. It's just a document. If he has the same piece of content in multiple formats, he doesn't need to know that either. It's just a document. He should be able to preserve multiple versions restore points of his document, w/o worrying about having different files with different names. It's just a document.
Fact: most techies understand treelike structures well, and did even before hierarchical filesystems became common currency. For obvious reasons.
Fact: most people's mom encountered her first treelike structure the first day she typed a document in Word, and wanted to save it.
MS realized as far back as W95 that the filesystem hierarchy wasn't particularly intuitive to the average member of the W95 target market. Rather than do something revolutionary and innovative which would have made everyone's lives easier the last 10 years, they mucked around with it a little bit, made some cosmetic changes, tried to please both the new people and the experienced people, and ended up fixing not much, and breaking things which were at least consistent in DOS.
My dad figured out that since he had 2 versions of the folder 'My Documents', one contained in My Computer, and one not (on the desktop), one was storing his files locally, and the other was storing them somewhere else, not on his computer. He even renamed the folder in the C: drive "My documents here" so he could tell them apart. (on winME btw)
This isn't an obligatory MS-bash. IMHO, it's a lot more shocking that no linux distro/desktop manager, has tried to sort this out. They are the ones that have the opportunity to make fairly sweeping changes. Linux users would catch on fast, appreciate an elegant solution, and still be competent to see 'behind the scenes' to the actual filesystem if desired. The same goes for Apple to some extent, and for some slightly different reasons. MS themselves have their hands much more tied as to what they could change, now that everyone has 10 yrs experience of Windows doing it the dumb way.
In a previous slashdot story about similar stuff, someone said that their mom used a single word document to type everything, and printed out the relevant pages each time.
Older people are not stupid, but they are being made to feel stupid by stupid designers, programmers and documenters, and as technology becomes more important this is more and more damaging to their lives.
* to all the older slashdot users, computer able seniors, and slashdotters with techie parents, sorry to make generalizations but they are broadly true..
my password really is 'stinkypants'
The fact that noones parents understand the filesystem is an indicator of exactly one thing
THE FILE/FOLDER METAPHOR IS BROKEN
Yes, the whole idea of 'files' is only a metaphor. Even in Unix. A very useful metaphor, sure. But it's not necessary or helpful anymore for the average user.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this one. People have been using hierarchical paper files for hundreds if not thousands of years. It's a basic organizational system, and is a minimum for working sanely with large numbers of files. The confusing thing is that the user's files are saved in the same filesystem as all the system and application stuff, so the hierarchy itself is overwhelming. I can understand the need to separate those.
Older people are not stupid, but they are being made to feel stupid by stupid designers, programmers and documenters, and as technology becomes more important this is more and more damaging to their lives.
This is a common argument, but I think you underestimate how hard it is to make things usable. The trick is to make things as simple as you can but still have the necessary features. I think Apple has been hitting a sweet spot here for a while with iLife.
The problem is essentially that many many people do not have the patience to figure out a complex system. They approach a program with the desire to do one thing, and the only way they could be satisfied is if there is a big button on the screen that says "Do the Thing". However, that same user may potentially want to do 100 different things at different times, and they certainly won't be satisfied by a screen filled with one hundred buttons. Hence the purpose of menus, wizards, hierarchies, preferences and all the other complications us geeks know and love.
There are a large number of people who do not want to think about how to do something or where one might logically find some aspect of a computer program. These people get anxious just looking at a dialog box. They do not enjoy figuring things out.
I'm sorry, but you are not going to design an interface that meets the lowest common denominator and is still useful. It just ain't gonna happen. To get to that point what we need is full-blown artificial intelligence. In other words, a replacement for the techie that they call on the phone to tell them how to do something. It's so easy to blame the designer, and I agree a lot of interfaces are horrendous, but the reality is that there is a certain amount of irreducible complexity inherent any moderately useful general purpose computer system. People who want to do one thing and have no patience for learning any context should be given appliances that do the one thing they want. That's the only way to make things usable for them.
To be computer literate, one must know how to read computers.
http://outcampaign.org/
I'd add in a few basic skills to consider someone computer literate.
Program agnosticism: They should know roughly how chat programs work. This doesn't mean AIM, this means that they know enough that they can walk up to any chat system and make it do useful things. Same thing for e-mail clients. Same thing for Browsers. You should be able to give them a laptop loaded up with Windows or Knoppix or SkyOS, and they should be able to quickly muddle their way over to myspace.com.
Hardware knowledge: This is your power supply. When it breaks, things tend to smoke. This is a hard drive. When it breaks, it makes a "click click click Screeeeech!" noise. This is your graphics card. Also known as the hole you'll be pouring your money into for the rest of your life. I'm not saying everyone should have memorised the jumper settings on their motherboard. But they shouldn't be afraid to open the thing up and look or make changes.
Some Scripting: I don't care what scripting language. I don't care if you're talking Perl, Word macros, applescript, AutoHotKey, a command line script, an e-mail filter, or Java. If they can write things in a scripting language, even a completely visual handholding one, they're good. You don't need to fully program or compile. You don't even need to be that great at it. You just need to be able to think about the problem in terms of "how do I tell this computer how to do something."
The ______ Agenda
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:
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.
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:
At least there's Notepad++ for us who know that it's there.
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:
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.
Ignore this signature. By order.
What is magic? Words and symbols of power that shape the world according to the will of the magician. The magician speaks the right magic words, and draws the right sigils, and obtains the desired effect.
Meanwhile, the INT 8 half-orc barbarian doesn't have the faintest idea what all the runes carved on his battleaxe actually do. He doesn't care. He knows the end result is a +1 to hit and that suits him just fine. Neither is the ranger concerned about exactly how these enchanted bracers improve his aim with a longbow; they just do. Only the wizard needs to worry about the details.
And what is programming? Words and symbols of power that shape the computer according to the will of the programmer. Type the right instructions, give the right command arguments, and obtain the desired effect.
Ever created an infinite loop? Had a recursive process go berserk on you? Made a small mistake while invoking rm -rf? Yeah. Pure 'Sorcerer's Apprentice'.
We are the nearest thing to magicians that has ever existed in reality. Our spells work and are truly powerful, our mistakes cause incomprehensible chaos, and when one of us turns bad then sometimes the whole world can suffer the consequences. No wonder the muggles treat our creations like they're the mysterious products of a magical power beyond their understanding: that's what they are.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The basic computer skills include:
Basic computer hardware knowledge
Knowing how to fix basic problems with a computer. In some computer labs, the students would "reserve" desktop systems for themselves by turning the brightness all the way down or by loosening the video cable. Other students would just assume the machine was broken and send a fault notice to the helpdesk.
Basic filesystem knowledge - how to create/delete directories, move and copy files. Being able to use CD-ROM/DVD burners, USB keys
Basic keyboarding skills - being able to write punctuated text in a notepad style
text editor.
Basic computer communication skills - knowing how to receive, send, forward and edit E-mail. Understanding of mailing list etiquette. For large corporations, people would blindly use reply-to-all when they have received an E-mail from a mailing list that they were added to by default and tried to unsubscribe.
Basic workdprocessing/spreadsheet skills - being able to load, edit, print and save files, and export these in a variety of file formats.
Basic webpage authoring - how to create webpages with images, hyperlinks and text.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic