Computers and related technology have become an undeniable part of our daily existence. It is almost impossible to live without interacting in some way with computing technology. The purpose of this course is to give you some tools you can use to begin mastering technology. We will not be able to make the impact of technology go away, but if we approach it carefully, we can decide whether our lives are controlled or enhanced by the computers that surround us. As the influx of technology grows at unprecedented rates, we quickly find that our accustomed ways of thinking may need refinement.
The nature of computers makes them much more flexible than the kinds of machines we may be used to learning. Because of this flexibility, we cannot train ourselves to use a computer in the same way we teach ourselves to use a more mechanical machine, such as a car or a sewing machine. When you learn to use one of these traditional machines, you determine what it is supposed to do, how to make it do that job, and what to do if it isn't working. Once you learn one car or sewing machine, the skill of driving or sewing is relatively easy to transfer to new cars or sewing machines. You can expect any car to do the same basic task, although the cockpit layout may be different, the transmission may require more skill, and so on. The same can be said of the sewing machine. You might need to learn a new way to install thread into the machine, but the process of sewing does not substantially change from machine to machine. In these largely mechanical single purpose machines, you have to learn only one skill, although that skill may be very complex in nature. You don't expect cars to start flying, and you don't expect a sewing machine to ever suddenly start acting like a microwave.
As we will see, computers are very different from these machines in at least one critical way. While a car or a sewing machine is designed primarily to do a single type of job, the computer is designed to do many very different kinds of jobs. The same computer could be used as a writing tool, to simulate the effects of a roller coaster, to play parlor games, to do complex mathematical calculations, and to retrieve stock market quotes from Tokyo. These things could conceivably happen at the same time in the same computer. The skills you would need to control a computer when it is helping you edit documents might be very different than the skills you use to get the stock quotes. If we approach learning a computer using the same learning model that has served us well since the beginning of the industrial revolution, we can never stop learning. It seems impossible to learn how to use a computer, because each time we have it do something else, we have to learn how to control it in that particular context. Some of the applications you will want to use a computer for in the next few years have not yet been invented!
How then, can we hope to teach a class to use a computer? Many educators have used the car/sewing machine model, treating each software application package as a new and distinct machine. Using this model, you might learn how to use a specific word processing package, say WordPerfect 6.0 for windows. You can learn how to use this system essentially the same way you learned how to drive or use a sewing machine. We can feed you a list of commands, take you step by step through a number of typical processes, and guide you carefully through your first few projects. This is a comfortable model of learning, and it works very well for teaching specific programs. If you need to learn exactly how to use WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows, and that's all you will ever use your computer for, such an approach would be ideal.
Unfortunately, the learning model outlined above has some serious weaknesses when applied to learning computers and technology. The first problem is the universality of computers. If we teach you word processing, you have learned something useful, but you really haven't learned much about computers. They can do so much more than process words. As an educated person, you will be expected to know many other ways to use computers. We would not be doing our job if we taught only one type of application.
Another problem is the pace of changing technology. It is no exaggeration to say that any software we install in the lab today will probably be out of date by the end of the semester. New releases of major programs come so frequently that memorizing commands and the layout of the program is a futile process. Things will change. You can't rely on the menu structure of a program, the control key combinations, or anything else to stay the same.
Anther weakness in the above model is the variety of programs that are available in any one category. If we decide to teach you WordPerfect in our classes, and you end up working in an office which uses only Word for Windows, you could be lost. The commands you have dutifully memorized when the computer is running one application could do nothing at all in a different application. It is conceivable that a command you use to save documents in one program could be used to delete documents in another. The potential for confusion is obvious.
The prospects for ever learning how to use and control a computer sound quite gloomy, but it is not nearly as bad as it sounds. If you reflect on your classmates, family, and friends, you can undoubtedly think of a person who can sit down at any computer, run a program she has never seen before, and produce amazing results. How do these people do it? Why is it that some people can run a never - before - seen program and make it do things for them? What is their secret?
After studying the way such people work, we have noticed some important themes:
We will not focus on individual software packages, although we will certainly use them for examples and exercises. We will be far less interested in actual commands and methods for doing things, and more interested in the process you will use to learn how to do these things in whatever applications you use in the future. Our goal is to teach you the skills you will need to learn computing applications that have not even been imagined yet!