Win7 would be a dream. More like a crappy c.2006 Dell running XP. Boss keeps saying “Well, it works!” but me forcing it to function and sitting through downtime while it chokes up on necessary functions isn’t exactly “working”.
Most of the issues I see with computers these days stems from basic ignorance or misunderstanding of how the operating system and hardware works. If the people growing up with computers have not attempted to figure this stuff out while using it every day, I’m not sure that a school class will convince them to start learning. For example, there are people in the world who can navigate a website and put in an order for custom t-shirts to be printed, but also have no knowledge that you can rename files in Windows. Or when installing a program, they don’t realize that their actions are what triggered the UAC prompt and that this was supposed to happen and they’re supposed to agree (they think the computer is warning them of something bad instead). It’s the basic stuff like that which really gets in the way when it comes to using a computer. They can follow rote directions but won’t understand that sometimes there are three different ways to get to the same destination, and that flexibility is what’s needed in computer operation. And if they really only follow directions exactly then it really comes crashing down if they mis-click on the wrong menu option. This is the sort of basic computer knowledge needed to navigate a computer well: critical thinking. And I just don’t believe it can be taught in a single class without the student really desiring to learn it (and if they did desire, they’d probably have taught themselves). By the time computer classes happen it’s too late for this sort of skill teaching.
Anyway, I don’t think anything exceptional is needed to be taught when it comes to the programs themselves. Keyboard skills, word processing, email, and spreadsheets I would consider a mandatory class or two. Teach practical stuff like learning how to research properly and write your resume. Don’t bother with programming and other advanced knowledge unless an interest is shown.
Community College Information Literacy Instructor here.
I hope they:
[ul]
[li]Know where all the keys are on a keyboard and how to use Shift [/li][li]Have decent mouse control[/li][li]Know how to open and close a program[/li][li]Know how to copy and paste text[/li][li]Know how to copy and paste jpegs, and how to open and save them in Paint[/li][li]Know how to use POWERPOINT[/li][li]Understand what a file system is: C:, My Documents, Flash Drives, Cloud[/li][li]Know how to upload and download and save and edit files using Blackboard[/li][li]Know how to upload and download and save and edit files using Email [/li][li]Have a Gmail account[/li][li]Know how to use Internet maps and directories[/li][li]Know how to install and use a non IE web browser[/li][li]Know how to use a Deep Web search engine (Ebsco, etc.). Or at least have heard of one.[/li][li]Have some understanding of Internet privacy issues[/li][li]Have some understanding of Internet credibility issues[/li][/ul]
Do my students know any of these things? No. But they somehow place out of our introductory computer course and are enrolled in online-only classes. :smack:
This is a huge, huge issue. So much “Well email just works on my phone, I don’t need a password or know how to check email on a computer…”
:mad:
[quote=“LibrarySpy, post:23, topic:724563”]
[ul]
[li]Know how to use POWERPOINT[/li][/QUOTE]
[/ul]
Dear Cthulu, why?
Here (and when I was in grad school) there are lots and lots of oral presentations and speeches. PowerPoint presentations are required. They’re usually graded. The lower level classes do PowerPoint in lieu of a written essay. More advanced classes do both.
LibrarySpy has really a much more comprehensive list of the idea I was trying to get across. There are people who use computers regularly without knowing half of this, somehow (the worst offenders are those who do not know you can copy and paste text, or the difference between close and minimize. I just have no idea how they get through using a computer.). What it comes down to in the end is teaching them to help themselves. The web has almost anything you can think of on it. I learn by searching google for answers to my questions. “How do I ______?”, “What is _____?” and it will tell me. But many people still never think to do this. I keep trying to teach some people to use the vast amounts of knowledge at their disposal to help themselves, but it is simply not important to them (especially if someone else picks it up and does it for them).
I think every kid should get exposure at some level to coding, in order to let them experience it and consider whether its something that they could pursue. Every kid doesn’t need to take a full semester’s worth, but enough for them to form an opinion of “hey, this is pretty cool,” or “no, this really isn’t for me.”
Accordingly, kids need exposure to a lot of things that they might never need as adults (like doing math by hand) in order to expose them to the various worlds of possibilities that exist; school doesn’t exist (solely) to prepare kids for a minimum level of adult competency - it should make them aware of all the things they could do with their lives above and beyond that, and let them know how to go about pursuing those things on their own, or after school.
Oh God, yes. The learned helplessness is so strong in some people.
My entire list is really, “Read the screen.”
Read the screen! Read the screen!
• They should understand the concept of a hierarchical file system composed of volumes, folders, subfolders, and files
• The should understand the distinction between an application and a document and understand that the former in the environment in which you view, create, and/or edit the latter.
• They should understand the concept of things stored on the computer as distinguished from things stored online or on the network, and should be able to distinguish between the software environment in which it was created and the location to which it was saved. I don’t want to ever again ask anyone where they think they saved their document and have them reply “in Word”, yeesh! Or, god help me, “in Microsoft”.
• They should understand the concept of different applications (programs) and should be clear on the difference between a different application and a different web site.
•They should understand what RAM is, what a hard disk is, what a CPU is, and what a network connection is, and distinguish between the concepts of “not enough RAM” and “not enough hard disk space”, and between the concepts of “a slow computer” versus “a slow network connection”.
I’m not sure that answers “why,” at least not in a meaningful sense, but I guess it does in a functional sense.
Horrid, horrid tool used almost entirely for horrid, horrid purposes.
I think Microsoft has horribly damaged this by changing all their support over to the “libraries & search” methodology. People already had trouble realizing where they were saving things. Now with libraries and search many users think they don’t have to know hardly anything about saving or file systems, and save their files willy-nilly everywhere. Asking them to navigate to the folder where they save everything is a mystery.
And, it plain annoys me when I want to know exactly where some file or function is so I can just go there directly in the future but Microsoft’s help page simply says, “search for _______” as the first step. Of course this method hides the file tree to the searched destination by changing the breadcrumb path at the top to something useless instead. Thus the only workaround I’ve found is to show search results in detail view with folder info as a display option so I can manually see where something is stored.
Almost as much as they damaged things by trying to insist on their “document based” model of computer use a few years back. You didn’t have Word, Excel, etc. - you had text documents, and spreadsheets, and so forth, and those “program” things were supposed to live invisibly behind the curtain.
Good concept, in some ways, but utterly contrary to both the way the system worked and the vast majority of users perceived the tasks.
It mostly turns notes for articles or speeches into something resembling your local diner’s placemats. I agree, pretty much worthless.
True. To be perfectly fair about it, speaking as a long-term Macintosh fan… Apple had that clumsy idea first. Didn’t work for them either. OpenDoc.
You do (or have done) PC support for a living, don’t you?
It’s not that, so much - any tool can be used to worthless ends. I clearly remember the days when every Mac owner had a copy of PageMaker and o deer ghod. Word users can construct blindingly-ugly, screwed up documents that crash even a robust system the second time they are loaded. Excel users can do correspondence by the square.
My visceral loathing of PowerPunt is threefold:
[ul]
[li]Communicating using displayed pages is something of an art and requires some acquired skill in information management. A vast number of users have no idea what that sentence means.[/li][li]As with all such tools, using every single fancy-up available (including animations, sound effects and lotsa fonts) is not a benefit.[/li][li]PP completely lacks any skilled-user or ‘professional’ options and operates entirely at the finger-painting level, meaning that even an extremely experienced user can’t do things like ensure even font sizes across a range of slides. Corollary: both MS and most users think this is a feature.[/li][/ul]
Sort of. I was an an in-house FileMaker Pro database developer from 1998 to 2006 (I do similar work now but as a consultant). I wasn’t hired to do generic workstation tech support but I was often the one they’d turn to to go help Joe or Sue, the admin assistant or the senior sales rep, etc.
This is a pretty good list. Protect me from people who say “the internet is down” when their router is unplugged.
I’m against teaching programming, unless you are serious about it. Too many people I know think they are programmers when they can cobble together twenty lines of awful code, and are innocent of any concepts of program or data structures.
As for PowerPoint, it is a necessary skill, so teach them to do a decent job with it, not a crap job. Teach them that copying a paragraph of a a paper onto a slide (I’ve seen this) is not a good idea.
That’s exactly what they’re supposed to be learning. Information literacy.
Welcome to community college.
This is my experience. I teach high school, and I would say that my students from 10-15 years ago were much more skilled with how to use PCs and “office” programs than my students of the last few years. Really basic things like copy/paste, re-sizing cells, adjusting margins, and navigating within program menus are foreign to many of them these days. I used to be able to count on them knowing at least the very basics of spreadsheets, but no longer. 
The only reason PowerPoint exists is because some people never got to use flashcards enough when they were in grade school.