One reason is they don’t know they can adjust the time between clicks to suit their fingers, or even that they can make all selections into single-clicks instead. Good knowledge to have, and should be in Computer 101.
I work with twentysomethings, some of whom are going on to medical school, who don’t know that Ctrl+C is Copy and Ctrl+V is paste. Or that you can drag an attachment into an email in Eudora. They go through the menus every time. Stuff like this should be taught to anyone who sits at a computer for a large portion of every day.
Excel needs to be taught. The same people I’m talking about also make all of their data tables in Word (NOT LYING) because they’re afraid of Excel. 30 minutes of training could fix that for good. Also, there are a few fields where PowerPoint is useful–in medical research, all presentations and posters are made in PP. I once encountered a very detailed bar graph in a presentation I’d been given to touch up. It looked normal, but something about it was weird. I messed around with it for a few minutes, only to discover that IT WAS MADE ENTIRELY FROM AUTOSHAPES. I shit you not. It must have taken about twenty times longer than just making a regular chart in PP. Every detail of a regular PP chart was mimicked–down to the weight of the hash marks and lines. This was done by someone with at least a basic college education.
I so want to say teach them how to program. But we’re way past that. sob
More than just terminology, I’d say teach them the structure of computers and the philosophy of applications. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are all very similar. Teach the common stuff - open, save, copy, paste, font sizes, colors, first, and then the details for each program. Given that, they’ll be able to pick up Open Office in no time also. Similarly, teach at a high level what happens when you turn your computer on, when you open a program or a file, when you print, when you access the Internet, and they’ll have a far better chance of figuring out what an error message really means.
Teaching Office 2003 commands by rote will not help at all with Office 2007.
Some great suggestions here.
I would also recommend a day introducing GoogleDocs, which are invaluable for team projects. If your college uses Turnitin, they should get training in using that, and I daresay Google Earth is going to become more useful, and a desirable skill to have. Makes for killer presentation material. It can be downloaded for free and installed without an Admin account.
I find my high school students, even the accelerated ones, really have difficulty with the concept of a domain and a file path.
Most people who don’t ‘grow up’ with computers seem to be taught to use them in a very rote fashion. They’re taught a list of tasks, and how to carry them out. However, this does not tell them how to use a computer, merely how to carry out those tasks. If the interface changes, or if something goes wrong, or if they step even a little bit beyond what they were taught, they’re helpless.
The most important goal of computer education, I think, should be to give the user an intuition about computers. They should learn a general overview of what the hardware is, and why it does what it does. They should learn what the operating system is, what sort of abstractions it presents, and what sort of metaphors it provides for manipulating them. They should learn the overall feel of applications under the dominant operating system (Windows), the commonalities between these applications, and a general set of expectations for their interfaces. They should learn the general structure of networking technology and the Internet, how a machine connects to it, how a web browser works and how it presents information to you, how email works, and general safety and security precautions to use on the Internet and with networks in general.
None of this needs to be ultra-rigorous, but it needs to be sufficiently logically complete that the user can begin to reason about what he sees the computer do, draw conclusions, and have them be right most of the time. For 95% of the stuff they will encounter, it should not be that difficult to build up this intuition, and I believe a single semester-long course should cover it. Once they feel comfortable with this material, they will be able to continue learning on their own. I’ve taught a number of people based on this set of principles (one-on-one), and it usually takes 6-8 hours of instruction for this to sink in for someone who is used to thinking rigorously and analytically, but has no previous experience with computers. Several days of instruction should build up sufficient intuition to continue learning independently. That would be, what, a third of a semester’s worth of instructional hours?
Once the user has learned the basics (what a computer is, how it works, what it can be used for, and how to do it safely), they can then start learning about specific tasks that may be helpful to them. Things like online research tools, crafting search engine queries, fact-checking, etc. I think that would cover another third of the semester.
Teaching applications is missing the point. If someone is comfortable with a Windows machine, they can start using Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in minutes. If they don’t know their keyboard from their mouse, on the other hand, teaching them particular applications is practically useless - that knowledge will become obsolete in two years at most. It also teaches them dependence on an instructor for new rote protocols, should they want to do anything new.
Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are specialized tools that most people don’t need. Skills learned in them aren’t easily transferable to other applications (Layer blending? Clone brush? And how does this help Johnny recover his homework that he accidentally ‘deleted’?). If someone needs them, they can learn them, but they’re about as far from basic computer skills as I can think of. There are professionals who specialize in these applications, and mastering them takes years, not a semester.
Oh, and programming is probably completely irrelevant to this. If someone has a basic intuition about computers, they can then decide if they need to learn how to code, and take a real programming course. Honestly, if they’re starting from scratch, it’d take, what, two years of CS education for them to become half-decent coders on the Windows platform? I mean, I’m sure they can be taught general code-monkeying in a fraction of that time, but learning how to figure out what you want to do, coming up with a design, implementing it, testing it, and then maintaining it…that’s not something that can be taught in a few days.
On the other hand, if you can teach that in a few days, I want to take your class. 
[QUOTE=Millit the Frail]
I work with twentysomethings, some of whom are going on to medical school, who don’t know that Ctrl+C is Copy and Ctrl+V is paste. Or that you can drag an attachment into an email in Eudora. They go through the menus every time. Stuff like this should be taught to anyone who sits at a computer for a large portion of every day.
QUOTE]
I get scolded for this all the time when using the computer. It is something that drives me crazy - yes I do know, and can use the shortcuts when I feel like it, but I simply don’t - if I want to take 1.5 seconds longer to do a task, then you can just suck it up.
What I would love to be taught would be logical thinking skills and how to experiment. I am fully self taught in excel, word and powerpoint, as well as a littel bit of knowledge in Photoshop and databases.
All of the knowledge I have gained has been through experimenting. This should be taught. Also file basics - such as 1 meg is REALLY big for a word file. What to do to reduce the size should be experimentation…
Like the time I ended up with a 90 meg ppt file - hmmm I wonder if all those hi res pix could be the problem? Perhaps I take them out and see…ahh they are the problem, well ok then how do I make them smaller? and so on (BTW i just found out last week, after 8 years plus of doing ppt presentations that there is a function that will automatically resize your pix to screen resolution 
)
In a previous life, I had to explain some very simple things about Microsoft Word, specifically how to double space a document, how to save a document to a disk, and how to print.
I was explaining this to children (well, okay, 18-24ish year olds).
This was only say 5 years ago. One would expect them to understand the concepts; this is the digital generation.
No. They do not understand. They do not WANT to understand.
How hard is it to understand File Save.
“Well at XYZ High we just had a BUTTON to save it.”
/me shows them the exact same button in Word they’re talking about and explains that’s the same as File/Save, and refrains from saying “But we use big kid words for it now”.
“Well, that’s HARD and I DON’T WANT TO DO IT.”
Well fine, use the button, but remember to save to your disk and not to the hard drive, because we remove everything at the end of the week.
“Okay.”
At he end of the week, yeah, you know what happens.
“ZOMG WEREZ MY PAPEEEERRRRRZZZZ”
I’m glad I work as a cashier in the bookstore now. Same pay, easier job.
I would imagine by college, most students have the basics down. But it would be good to do a quick review so all students are up to a minimal level.
Just like the first hour of college analytic geometry & calculus is a review of 4 years of high school algebra, geometry, and trig. And that’s for a class where students could be expected to be prepared just by being admitted. In your case, you have no previous requirements that can be assumed.
So I think that the basic basics should be covered, quickly before continuing, and I would include such things as [ul][li]how to turn on and off a computer[]Booting process and options[]Window basics, regardless of OS: opening a window, what a browser does, how to size a window, how to run a program, minimize a program, close a program, how to multitask[]Standard tools used by most programs and their standard shortcuts: cut/copy/paste, clipboard concepts, open file, save file, search for file, etc.[]the tree structure concept including path syntax as a substitute for clicking multiple folders & files[]Basic system tweaks and how to set personal options[]I’m sure there’s more…[/ul]Once everyone has those under their belts, THEN you can consider showing how specific applications work. If you don’t cover these first, you will find some students are mystified about how you can have two documents open at once and why the file they worked on yesterday has disappeared.[/li]
Shouldn’t they know this already? Sure, and many do. But you have to have a foundation for more complex issues, which is why college classes have prerequisites.
Not on a library computer they can’t! We show them by knocking on the desk. “Knock knock, just like that.” <click…click> "It doesn’t understand if you don’t do it fast enough. <knock knock!> <click…click>