Source Article.

Granger, Mary J. and Lippert, Susan K. "Preparing Future Technology Users." Journal of End User Computing. Summer 1998 pp. 27-31.

Summary.

The paper describes a revised curriculum for business students at George Washington University. Basically, the curriculum included expanded computer and technology training as well as new focuses on five major areas seen as being the most important in the job market. The five areas are productivity software, Internet research, communication skills, team building, and international familiarity. The computer training course was split into two parts, one which deals with technology for the person, and another which deals with technology for the organization. One part is taken at the beginning of sophomore year and the other at the end of junior year.

Students were placed into teams, which chose to represent a company somewhere in the world. The students used the Internet to track the stock prices of their companies, and used spreadsheet programs to track their changes. They further used the Internet to search for information on their companies. By the middle of the course, each group put together a paper, using word processing, presenting the information it had gathered on its company. Then, each team gave a presentation to the class on its company. In this manner, the five fields listed above are covered.

Periodical validity.

The Journal for End User Computer lacks a stamp as reassuring as the SIGUCCS Newsletter (source critique #1). It seems geared to information systems managers (MIS), but more so than SIGUCCS. The list of editors and contributors are apparently educators at business schools across the country. More insight than that is not discernible from the masthead page; only editors' names and their schools are listed.

It is difficult to make a judgment as to its reliability as a source. Its issues do seem to have a number of articles that could pertain to my research, since these people are interested in technology education as well as use of computers in professional environments. The MIS field has its roots in computer science, but also in business; so it is unclear without a business journal familiarity to sense its quality. Its papers, however, tend to be very detailed and thorough, and their style and presentation seem to be somewhat more professional than those found in SIGUCCS Newsletter. However, it is worth noting that computer scientists tend to be averse to too much traditional professionalism.

Article validity.

The paper is mainly just relating an example of an revisited and modernized computer training course for MIS as well as standard business students. It shows just one example of how computer curriculum can be changed to keep up with modern technology and applications. In this sense it is one-sided; it does not present alternate curricula from other schools, nor is it a comparison of curricula changes at different colleges. However, it seems to be a useful case study. The authors, who were apparently in charge of altering the GWU business curriculum, at least for the course in question, follow premises that are taken from researched sources. The paper justifies the program by claiming that students who have taken the class are more able to use computer technology to solve their problems. The paper also identifies some pitfalls related to the ideal effectiveness of the program. The paper tries to be objective, but the main intent is really just to show what one school has done, as an example for others.

Research implications.

There are elements of this article that I feel I could incorporate into my paper. The main discussion, which is simply a description of the course, is not likely to be useful. However, the intent behind developing this new course was to solve what was seen as a gap in computer competency education. One goal, and which seems to be the overall result, was to encourage students to use computers in ways they may not have used them before. They learned to become not only self-reliant but somewhat innovative in their use of the commonest computer technologies such as word processing, spreadsheets, and database searching (the Internet search engines).

These goals -- giving students new ways of learning how to use computers so that they can apply their basic knowledge to any computer experience, and succeed in that experience from applying similar knowledge - are things I also want to discuss in my paper. The skills the students seem to have learned from this class are skills that can be applied beyond the software they used in that class. However, this paper does not address the main issues I have with traditional computer education. To me, the issues involving computer competency are more fundamental. The course described in the article, on the other hand, assumes a certain pre-existing computer knowledge, which it does not go into.