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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?"
Assembly.
Know more than the other people you work with.
Just stay one step ahead.
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!
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.
Certainly, there are quirky programs and systems that require more investigation than the others (blender, I'm looking at you), but if you really and truly grok these points, you are computer-literate.
Your car analogy works against you here. When I climb into the van we have at work, I drive more slowly and cautiously because it doesn't work quite like I'm used to. The fact that I know how to look for the controls to start, steer, and stop means I am 'driving-literate' even if I have to hunt for the seat-adjustment lever every time I drive that monster. Just because I know nothing about lisp, and am thus unable to use emacs to it's full potential, does not mean I am computer illiterate; it means I am unfamiliar with this particular windshield-wiper control. I'll figure out how to use emacs eventually though, because I am literate enough to do so.
>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'
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.
While I agree the skills you list are really good ones to have and that everyone should possess them, I think it is far beyond what should be required of literacy. As defined, literacy is simply the ability to read and write. This implies at the most basic level. It doesn't include understanding metaphors and hyperboles, it doesn't include many things that we seem to think the average person in this world should understand in order to be able to survive, it is the bare minimum they need to know to get by. If you were to come upon someone who was considered only literate in the English language, they would probably be able to read and write at the level of a fifth grader. Clearly not the most ideal for the world, but they would likely be able to read a shopping list or basic forms required for living. Likewise, computer literacy should simply include the basics. While I applaud your desire for everyone to know scripting, the fact of the matter is that very few computer users percentage wise know/understand how to do it and I think it is above and beyond what should be required to consider someone computer literate. My mother for example. She is able to send/receive email, type at a reasonable pace, browse the web and purchase things online, etc. and I would consider her computer literate--she is able to get by in her daily routine with the use of the computer and not call me every 2 seconds confused about everything. She could never in a million years start to get her head around writing a script in Perl. For God's sake it's kind of a bitch for me to get something like REGEXs right the first time and I'm a pretty seasoned programmer. I can't even imagine trying to explain those bad boys to my Mom or any "average" computer user for that matter.
I think computer literacy is much simpler and basic than you are making it out to be.