Sunday, February 15, 2009

Re: 21st Century Computer Skills

On Mon, Feb 16, 2009 at 12:24 AM, Ernest Koe <ernestkoe@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am saying that the business of teaching software fluency shouldn't be the
> goal. Fluency is the means, not the end; such instruction be proportionally
> small compared to higher-order activities because they can figure stuff out
> pretty quickly once they have the basics.


Yes, *once they have the basics*. Which is exactly what I teach. The
question, though, seems to be "what are those basics?" And I can tell you
that in my opinion, the student who indents a paragraph by pressing return
at the end of every line and then leaning on the space bar until it gets to
the right place, and then has to redo the whole thing when she adds some
text to that paragraph hasn't learned the basics. I can tell you that the
student who forces a page break by leaning on the Return key until he's at
the top of the next page, and then has to readjust that when he changes what
was on one or more of the previous pages hasn't learned the basics. I can
tell you that the student who has to create two documents for her paper, one
for the un-numbered cover page and one for the numbered body hasn't learned
the basics. Nor will most of them [take the time to] figure this out left to
their own devices.

But once you give them the basics in one program to do job X, they'll know
to look for those features when they're introduced to program Y. But they
have to be given the basics in one program first.

I would not assume that. It is probably true that some employers today are
> actually looking for employees who can work PowerPoint 2007. And, it is
> true
> that my particular needs today may not be representative of the market
> place
> in general. However, I will happily challenge anyone to anticipate what
> specific application skills an 8th grader will need in ten years.


But I can tell you with great accuracy what specific application skills an
8th grader will need in one year. And next year I'll be able to tell you
what skills that 9th grader will need the next. Following that, I'll be able
to tell you what skills that 10th grader will need. As I've said before,
it's all incremental.

Let's face it, PowerPoint is nothing more than a computerized slide show or
flip chart, something that dates back to when *I* was a kid. But apparently,
knowing how to create a good slide show is still a useful skill. It doesn't
matter whether you do it in PowerPoint 2007, Keynote, OpenOffice, or
whatever, but having that skill is still useful. But again, learning the
basics in one makes you much better able to navigate any of the others (even
though it may frustrate you that a particular feature is not in the "right
place" or not available at all).


> The thing is that we are talking about students in school (>K-12), not
> about
> what professional career paths that may require specific
> software/technology
> expertise. In the context of elementary/secondary education, I am
> explicitly
> saying that becoming an expert user should not be the aim. If they become
> one along the way, even better. If they decide they want to grow up and
> become an expert of Maya because they want to get into 3D animation, they
> will find a way to do that by getting the instruction that works for them.


Then apparently we are talking about two entirely different things, and may
almost agree.

For years I have written my own classroom materials for things like word
processing and spreadsheets because just about all of the materials I've
found for classroom use assumed that we were preparing students to use these
tools in a business setting. Not one of them was geared to the student
writing a paper or doing a lab report. And as you and others have said many
times in this venue, "who knows what they'll be using by then?"

But I had a pretty good idea of what there needs were in our school, and
what they would likely be when they started college. As a result I wrote my
materials to make them 95/95 users of those programs: able to do 95% of what
they needed to do 95% of the time.

My goal was to make them fluent in the use of these tools in an academic
setting. Who knows what other software they'll pick up over time because of
a career goal or avocation? I still need to train them in the best and
easiest use of the tools they're going to need in the classroom, and very
likely beyond.

It is not a choice between either/or, it is more likely a case of both/and.
I believe that Daniel Pink said in "A whole New Mind" that you'll still need
the old stuff, it just won't be enough. That seems to indicate to me that
you can't get rid of the old stuff, and that the stuff I teach will be
important for a long time - as the basis, perhaps, for some of the new
stuff.

And as I've also said before, if it appears 10 or 20 years from now that we
finally did get rid of that old stuff that I used to teach, it will only be
because it morphed slowly over that time into something else. The typewriter
made it easier to do the formatting that many of tried to do by hand. The
computer made that same formatting even easier and gave us less of a
headache when we had to insert new text. When you look at 1978 compared to
2008, it seems like two radically different methods, but if you look at it
on a year-by-year basis, you'll see incremental changes leading to where we
are now, with the old forms being produced in new ways.


> My point was clumsily made. Let me be more precise. There are and will be
> many ways to author content. People will ask for work-products to meet
> certain professional and technical standards. e.g., "pdf, less than ten
> pages, Standard English, CMOS" or "QuickTime, 720p HD, no more than 10
> minutes long, lossless, CreativeCommons (Attribution)". But, we won't care
> how these products are produced.


And how do you create that pdf of less than 10 pages. How do you make it
readable and without glaring formatting errors? One tends to think that you
need to word process it. And that QuickTime movie, won't it need a script -
one that's clearly understood by everyone working on the project?

Maybe we don't disagree as much as it appears we do. It would be nice if
that were the case.
--

keg

========================================
Keith E Gatling
mailto:keith@gatling.us
http://www.gatling.us/keith
The fact that I'm open-minded doesn't mean that I have to agree with you.
========================================

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