At the beginning of the reading I was a big foggy as to what the major point they were trying to instill was. There were definitions being tossed around and some interesting points about computer literacy, such as the fact that every public library in the united states provides internet access to its patrons, and also shows them how to use the web. Also, according to Williams, "six of ten American homes" have internet but then again this was back in 2003. At this point in time, internet has reached almost every home. One of the big questions William's asks is, "As a nation, what are we teaching when we teach computers? Should we teach? What is computer literacy?"
The authors from the report, Being Fluent with Information Technology discuss computer literacy and explain how literacy is a broad term and too "modest" of a goal. To be able to adapt to the frequent changes individuals need to learn the basic skills. From here, with every new change the ability to adapt is a lot easier then starting fresh.
One of the points she made that I really connected to was how some technical computer skills and software types are not always interchangeable. She showcased engineers & lawyers. A lawyer isn't going to find use in a CAD design program, same as an engineer would find no benefit in having a legal database. I see this clearly in the internship I had the past two summers. There were about 15 college level interns throughout the company, and we each used very different computer programs. Every day I would fire up my Photoshop and Adobe Fireworks photo editing programs while Erik, a ME intern two doors down was building a different type of image on his CAD program, and Gavin, who was part of IT, a few desks down from Erik was tinkering away at his "Vipre" computer security program. If we switched computers none of us would know where to begin on each job-specific software program, but we could easily navigate the programs like Microsoft Word, Excel, and itunes that we have been using for years.
No comments:
Post a Comment