Source Article.

Wolfe, Barbara B. "Achieving Computer Literacy." SIGUCCS Newsletter. Summer 1998. ACM. pp. 29-32.

Summary.

In attempt to solve the problem of training students in computers to the point where they are "computer literate" based upon some standards of ability. Wolfe blames the problem on the inadequacies in the teaching system. With this in mind, she devises an elaborate and almost endless scheme of arranging academic teaching resources and methods which, according to her, will result in students achieving a certain acceptable level of competency in computer use.

Her suggestion on, first of all, judging whether a student has become competent is to test the student's ability on completing computer tasks. There cannot be computer literacy, she argues, if there is no way to measure it. Unfortunately, she doesn't provide any framework for doing this.

Most important to her is that computer teachers need to be computer literate themselves. Her solution is first, to assess the relevant computer literacy of the members of the faculty according to five progressive categories. Then, by taking the appropriate number or ratio of certain categories (the second and third most advanced), they are deployed in certain fashions. Along with appropriate software, these teach the rest of the faculty in the lowest two categories to move up to the third level. The highest level of computer users, she says, have no bearing on the computer literacy process.

Wolfe raises a lot of "needs" for this process but does not offer any ideas on how to solve them. Simply, they are needs that must be filled -- availability of "large amounts of computer equipment" and "much time available." Her vision seems extraordinarily optimistic. She envisions that after the general faculty has become sufficiently computer literate (at least to the third level of competence), they will begin to use computers to develop educational tools for their students. According to her, one hour of computer-based material will take anywhere from 100 to 300 man-hours to create -- hence, the need for teachers to have "much time available." And expansive computer technology (and staff!) must be available to all teachers in case they have a sudden serendipitous burst of creative ideas.

This is her framework for adding adequate computer literacy to a course curriculum. She doesn't offer any solutions to the generating of the resources needed, nor does she refer to any evidence of its success.

Periodical Validity.

Like the rest of the plethora of magazines published under the wing of the ACM -- Association for Computing Machinery, a well-known computer professionals' guild -- SIGUCCS Newsletter is expected to be a respected journal in its particular focus area. SIGUCCS focuses on computers in education, particularly college curricula. The ACM stamp alone is usually enough to convince most computer professionals and academics that the journal lives up to a certain reliability and quality.

Article Validity.

There is not much in the way of credentials given for Wolfe. She is only introduced as being from the Computing Center of SUNY Albany. From this I would assume her focus is really MIS - a business field focused on management of computing resources for schools or companies. But her lack of explaining how to fill all the needs she attributes to the computer literate faculty confuses this assumption. I don't know what background she has in education. However, she makes a few practical observations about how students across the fields are being taught computer skills and a few problem areas.

Research implications.

Wolfe attributes the problems in computer literacy education to problems with the teaching staff and the development of computer literacy education within a curriculum. This is helpful to my point, but she does not focus on particular problems that need addressing. There is a sense that the current results are inadequate but doesn't show how this is judged.

Parts of her method of solving this unexplained problem are helpful. She focuses on a need for computer instructors to know more than simply how to use a program to perform particular tasks (her fourth competency category), but to advance to a level where they are actually able to use the tool to solve new problems (ones for which they have not previously used the tool). She does not however give much insight as to what category the student should be in, in order to be adequately computer competent.

Since her focus is on the teachers and not on the students, her paper may be useful to me in assessing the problems with traditional computer education, which will be an important premise of my final project. However, her elaborate deployment scheme of instructors and resources, which is the bulk of her essay, is not explicitly useful to me.