COMPUTER LITERACY REQUIREMENT FOR GRADUATION
Tom McFadden
April, 2000

Typically, when students search for information, they settle on the most easily acquired information, and they cease collecting data when the required number of sources has been located. Most students, due to inadequate guidance, have little concern for how much information really exists on their topic, for how wide the range of perspectives is on the topic, or for what the most reliable, authoritative, and up4o-date information on the topic may be. What's more, online databases, CD-ROMs, and the Internet, all touted as the current end-all of information technology, are not leading to any better research. Most students are content with whatever materializes from their first few keystrokes.

---Patricia Senn Brevik, Student Learning in the Information Age
(Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press, 1998), 35.

A. Much of the current discussion about "information literacy" is really more about "computer literacy". The ability to handle information in an intelligent and critical way is not different from the kind of thing required of any undergraduate as a normal part of general education and of meeting the requirements of the major. We might wonder if, in fact, most undergraduates do actually succeed in acquiring these skills and abilities, but that is another matter. Many colleges and universities have established guidelines for describing this kind of competence, and for evaluating undergraduate achievement, but most of these programs simply reflect traditional concern for library and research skills. What some have called "digital literacy" is something else, although there are overlaps. Note that this is not really about requiring undergraduates to take one or more courses in computer science.

Digital competence, in the sense intended, can be thought of as having two distinct aspects:

1. Desktop competence;
2. Electronic information retrieval competence (which is largely a matter of WWW skill, but not entirely).

The question for Union College is this: Should we build into the general education curriculum, and the requirements for the major, something about these kinds of competence roughly analogous to the WAG requirements for writing skills? If so, then another analogy naturally suggests itself:

1. General education level (of competence);
2. Major level (of competence).

B. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it, but here is how this would probably break out:

I. General education level (of competence)

1. Desktop competence
2. EIR competence

II. Major level (of competence)

1. Desktop competence
2. EIR competence

For all majors, level I would almost certainly be the same, or nearly the same; the important differences (and the specialization) would only emerge at level II. In application, this might work this way:

General desktop competence:

--ability to create, edit, format, and print text documents using either WordPerfect or MS Word;
--ability to manipulate MS Windows to view, create, delete, transfer, etc., individual flies, folders, and directories;
--etc.

General EIR competence:

--ability to open a general WWW browser (e.g., Netscape) and access individual Internet URL addresses;
--ability to use, at a certain level of skill and critical intelligence, one or more WWW search engines to locate information relevant to a topic;
--ability to evaluate individual URL sources of information relevant to a topic for quality (however defined);
--etc.

In both of these examples, much is obviously left unspecified. One could make the required abilities and skills as detailed and microscopic as desired. These guidelines also leave entirely open questions of resources, methods, and evaluation.

The advanced competence level would be specific to the content and methods of the chosen major. Here is how this might work for, say, an economics major:

Major desktop competence:

--ability to use a spreadsheet program (e-g., Excel) to analyze numerical data according to a variety of standards for applied and theoretical economics;
--ability to use common statistical analysis application programs for advanced classroom and research work;
--etc.

Major EIR competence:

--ability to access via CD-ROM or the WWW content databases such as EconLit to identify articles and other resources relevant to a given research problem or topic;
--ability to access the WWW for numerical and statistical data relevant to a given research problem or topic.

This is all suitably vague, but offers at least a model for constructing a set of guidelines and objectives for the undergraduate population in general.

C. And just exactly how is the College supposed to support the acquisitions of these skills and abilities? And how, more importantly perhaps, is anyone supposed to test for these skills and abilities?

One answer is this: We don't do anything special (aside from the Writing Center) to ensure that undergraduates satisfy the WAC requirements; they just do so as part of classroom work more generally. So, we could also designate individual courses, or sequences of courses, as requiring simply as part of the normal work load the exercise of the general and special computer skills indicated above. How the students get help, outside the classroom and apart from the instructor, in acquiring these skills might be as haphazard as it is for writing; somehow, it all seems to work (we optimistically believe).

We might also support mini-courses, seminars, and workshops on particular aspects of the general and specialized skills, both in the departments, as well as in the Library and OCS. And so on.

No particular attempt would be made to test for the presence of these skills in individual instances, but course grades could reflect the extent to which the skills were demonstrated in class work and research projects. Provision could be made for remediation.