OR: Memories of being a Computer Numbskull

The title of this post was chosen as a reminder to myself of the impact of information technology on my own reality in perhaps much the same way as it may have just had upon you, dear reader. It was this: “What on earth is going on?”

Having been in this game for over 3 decades, now seems like a good time to dust off those memories and see how thay might apply to today’s educators who feel less than comfortable with today’s available (information) technologies.

Da Capo

As an undergraduate, I felt swamped by the amount of information that I came across. Even a decade later, I came across DOS file extensions (.doc, .ppt, .exe for example) and wondered what thay all meant. (Fast forward to the present day: I now take all these things as “small change, or common currency”, and I keep having to remind myself that this familiarity is perhaps nothing like as common as I might like to believe. But more of this later.)

An Analysis

Refecting on my own journey of learning, one of the things that strikes me is how I have been able to reduce the cacophony of information into a small, and hence intellectually manageable, number of concepts. But even learning about those concepts in the absence of a suitable guide was quite a struggle. The aim of this post is to suggest to fellow trainers those ideas and concepts which they may think it is most beneficial for their students to use as stepping stones their own IT Nirvana.

Assumptions About Context

In the remainder of this post, I assume that people are comfortable with using “hardware”: screen, keyboard, mouse, CD/DVD, and possibly a USB storage device, and that your target audience is fellow educators. As such, I do not go any further into this area.

Basic Concepts

For me, (and excluding hardware) there are four basic concepts that underlie everything:

1. People
2. Data (e.g. MS-Word documents)
3. Applications (a.k.a. “software”)
4. Communications (e.g. connection to an ISP)

Everything else amounts to detail: the four concepts above provide some sort of context, and hence opportunity to understand, what is going on. To give an example by using an analogy, the difference between Windows and Linux could be likened to the difference between a petrol engine and a diesel engine in a car: they both move the car, they just use different fuel. (The technological differences on both sides of the analogy also hold true when you go into the details of these four technologies.)

Motivation

My own motivation for what I learned was a drive to understand the technology so that I could use it in the workplace. Leaving aside teachers who simply refuse to learn about Web 2.0 technologies, the question is how to present the concepts of Web 2.0 in the most digestible fashion.

What and How to Teach?

I can only offer what I would teach and how I would teach it in this context. I offer this “solution” as a starting point for formulating your own ideas.

To start with, I describe the basic concepts listed above in terms that the learners can understand – I contextualise those concepts into the students’ own lives. For example, people still write letters (“data”, stored in “files”) using pen and ink (“hardware”). Corrections to electronic letters are much easier: “software” deletion is easier mechanically than using a physical eraser. Sending the letter can be physical (ask your local post office) or electronic (“communications” using e.g. wires).

Eating an elephant is best done one mouthful at a time. Introducing little bits of technology that are relevant to the learner’s needs at the time is a successful approach. Being wholly selfish, if I was now to learn what I now know, I would want to know how each of those mouthfuls fitted into the four basic concepts above.

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Tom Whitby (Twitter: @tomwhitby) and Shelly Terrell (http://teacherbootcamp.edublogs.org/ , Twitter: @ShellTerrell) for prompting me to write this post, and to Di Bédard (http://learning-commons.blogspot.com/ , Twitter: @windsordi) for providing the French translation.