| What should every citizen know about computers and computer technology? For better or worse, answers typically depend upon who is asked.
• Students commonly have a practical bent: How can one get the computer to perform specific tasks, why does a machine act the way it does, what is involved in getting computers to interact, and so on.
• Computing faculty typically emphasize the need to understand concepts and problem solving.
• The National Research Council (NRC) identifies appropriate general knowledge and skill as computer fluency, and summarizes its perspective in a 1999 report, Being Fluent with Information Technology.
On the surface, such perspectives may seem unrelated or contradictory. The practical details of interest to students may seem quite different from the high-level concepts and abstractions highlighted by faculty. Some textbooks written by faculty may do a fine job in covering foundational material, but often omit the practical issues that motivate students. Other books may describe pragmatic elements about how to run specific software (e.g., how one can utilize a bold type font in a word processing document), thus satisfying some students, but such books rarely provide adequate coverage of more general and lasting concepts. |
