Implementing Fluency with Information Technology

The charge of the NRC committee was to specify only the content that ‘‘everyone should know about Information Technology.’’ The implementation of FITness — the term used by the committee to identify those who are fluent with information technology—education would be left until later. But the committee was composed of academics, so, inevitably, teaching fluency at the college level was addressed.

The committee began by noting the desirability of FITness as a post condition of college, that is, knowledge with which students leave college. Eventually, the report stated, FITness should be a pre condition of college, like basic knowledge of science, math, and foreign languages. Although appropriate for pre-college, the challenges are so great for implementing fluency instruction in K-12 that it will be years before FITness can be an entrance requirement.

Therefore, teaching fluency in college is essential in the short run. Also, compared with K-12 public instruction, post secondary institutions are far more flexible in terms of their ability to develop curricula and infrastructure for new pedagogical endeavors.

The NRC committee did not define a curriculum, only the content. Curriculum development began in the spring term of 1999 with the offering of the first FITness class, CSE100 Fluency with Information Technology at the University of Washington. The goal of this class is to teach the recommended skills, concepts and capabilities to freshmen in one 10-week quarter. The class has three lectures and two labs per week, each of 50 minutes.

Skills are taught primarily in the labs, capabilities are presented primarily as lecture demonstrations, and concepts are learned primarily through reading. [Course notes from early offerings of this program became the textbook, Fluency with Information Technology,published by Addison Wesley.] Three projects integrate the material. Other universities, colleges, and community colleges have developed FITness curricula since then.

Because the skills, concepts, and capabilities are such different kinds of knowledge, teaching fluency requires a varied strategy.

Skills material—word processing, browsing, processing e-mail, and so on—is best taught in a lab with a video projector connected to the computer of the instructor. In the lab, students ‘‘learn through doing,’’ and, because an important part of learning an application is familiarity with the GUI, the video display facilitates demonstrations. Furthermore, the detailed ‘‘click here, click there’’ instruction should give way quickly to more generic instruction that describes general properties of PC applications. This process allows students to learn how to learn an application, which makes them more independent.

Concepts material—computer operation, database principles, network protocols, and so forth—is effectively science and can be learned most efficiently through a combination of textbook reading and lectures that amplify and illustrate the ideas. Because computers are so fast and the common applications are built with millions of lines of software, students will not be able to recognize the instruction interpretation cycle of a computer or TCP/IP in their direct experience. So, the goal is simply to explain, as is done in physics or biology, how basic processes work.

Capabilities material—logical reasoning, complexity management, debugging, and so forth—is higher- level thinking that often is learned through life experience. Because capabilities generally are non algorithmic, they are somewhat more challenging to teach. Lecture demonstrations are effective because the class can, say, debug a problem together, which illustrates the process and provides a context for commentary on alternative techniques. The capabilities, being instances of thinking, are not learned entirely in a FITness course; students will continue to hone their knowledge throughout life.

As noted, projects provide the opportunity to apply and integrate these three kinds of knowledge.

The committee recommended that the ideal case would be for fluency instruction to be incorporated into discipline-specific IT instruction when possible. That is, as architecture students, business majors, and pharmacists learn the technology that supports their specialties, they also learn the recommended skills, concepts, and capabilities. Projects could be specialized to their area of study, and problem solving could incorporate discipline-specific methodologies. Although it has advantages, the recommendation implies that students learn FITness relatively late in their college career, that is, after choosing a major.

Because the material applies across the curriculum, it is advantageous to learn it much earlier, for example, freshman year or before college, so that it can support the whole academic program. A compromise would be to offer generic FITness, as described above, as early as possible, and then to give further instruction on the capabilities in a research methods or career tools class once students have specialized in a major.