The little personal experiences that drive me towards demanding a fundamental change in computer literacy education are quite too numerous to mention. No one event can really stand out as the major event in my life that causes me to carry out this quest. Perhaps a brief history is best.

Even before I decided to become a computer science major at the end of my sophomore year, I was bothered by the frustration and confusion about computers by the people around me. It was the realization that I was particularly more advanced in computers than the rest of my classmates that encouraged me to make the switch.

It may have begun freshman year, when I congregated with other computer enthusiasts in my hall's computer lab. As a result of being one of the computer people, I was commonly called upon to answer random computer questions. In trying to answer these questions I realized that many of the basic concepts of computers, which I took for granted, was hardly common knowledge. I began my first co-op job working at a software company, but I was not even a science major.

Skipping ahead, I became a computer science major and started taking the introductory courses. Even within this field, where I felt I would excel, I found that many of those computer basics I knew before coming to college were not evident in much of my classmates, still! I wondered often how someone without these concepts would consider entering computer science, or expect to do well. I still believe that the curriculum expects (or did then) students to have certain fundamental, general computer knowledge, and they did not. Many had to learn them the hard way, while they were struggling with more difficult concepts, and instead of drawing important connections, they learned them in separate ways. By the middle of my junior year, I was taking some of the more advanced (middler-level) courses - and found that the wide majority were still lacking in many of those essential skills.

In the past year, I worked in the computer department of a prestigious college. Near the end of my employment, I shared an office area with a young guy who was in charge of their faculty computer training. He drew up what seemed to be a well-balanced assortment of classes covering certain common software and other topics. Unfortunately, it did not work to plan. Instead, as he often lamented, he had to spend the course time explaining far more basic topics than he had intended. His assumptions of the knowledge that the faculty would have before entering his class were to him, astoundingly overestimated. I think it's possible that he had to explain these things impromptu, and was not prepared to give these topics an organized focus that was necessary. As a result, his students were unable to make important connections between what they were doing and what he was trying to teach.

Plus, I see contributions to the problem in informal arenas. Reaching back to the time as a freshman in my hall's computer lab, up to the current day, I see advanced computer users trying to give bits of education to more novice users, and causing difficulty in the process. I once saw someone, earnestly trying to be helpful, bark computer slang (not even jargon) at a computer novice having a problem. "Three-finger shuffle," he instructed. The other person made a strange face. "Three-finger shuffle," he repeated. He repeated this phrase, which obviously had no meaning to the other, and he got more frustrated each time as if he expected the person would figure out what he meant. It was like talking louder to a person who doesn't speak your language in the belief that it will help them understand you. He finally brushed the person aside and did what he had intended her to do. Afterwards, I criticized him, and pointed out the problem - he was using words that the other person had never heard before, and furthermore assumed that she would know that what he wanted her to do would do.

I've seen something like this happen as recent as this week. Each time it happens it astounds me. I feel sorry for the person being barked at in a foreign tongue, and in a way I feel sorry for the person trying to be helpful. Many computer experts get bored with details that they take for granted, and many computer novices don't have the time to have those basics explained to them anyway.

Occasionally I try to train my mother to do certain advanced computer tasks. She has had a fair amount of outside computer training and is not really a novice anymore. But because she was taught in the rote, specific cause-and-effect way, it is still difficult to teach her new things, because she lacks the fundamentals of computers. I try to encourage her to be more adventurous with things, which helps. But she is learning the basics after learning the applications of those basics, which is detrimental in any field. I have to try and "erase" the flawed conclusions she has made, because of the order in which she learned computers, in order to teach her to use something more advanced. Luckily I am seeing improvement in this student of mine.

Which helps convince me of my thesis concepts - both that traditional, out-of-field computer education is flawed and limiting, and that informal computer training often causes more damage as it tries to make someone's life easier. The method and rationale of training people to use computers has to change, and these students have to be encouraged to use these basics as clues to learning new technologies - and to filter what they learn from others in the same way.