WikiTeach

For some time, I've been worried about who in academia teaches students how to use information technology. I gave a presentation on the subject at the Association of Tertiary Learning Advisors of Aotearoa/New Zealand (ATLAANZ), on Massey's Albany campus, 20 Nov 2009. This is an outline of what I said; you can download a PDF of my slides as well and follow along.

Students enrolling now will, as soon as they graduate, be using indispensible tools that haven't been invented yet. Facebook was invented in 2004, and opened to the general public in 2006; Twitter came out in 2006 too. These two tools are hot stuff at the moment, but it's likely that last year something was invented that will be just as big in 2011. And next year they'll invent the hot website of 2013. How do we prepare students for this?

Universities almost all mention information technology skills somewhere in their list of graduate attributes. The usual phrasing is "information literacy" or "appropriate use of technology". What does this mean in practice?

I suggest that "appropriate" IT skills, for both undergraduates and postgraduates,

• start from a high-school baseline of Microsoft Word, saving, printing, file management, web use, and email
• are ones that will crop up both during study and immediately on employment
• exclude mandatory (and non-transferable) use of educational software like Moodle or Blackboard
• are the skills graduates might need in 2015 (that is, the freshmen of 2010 + 3 years on + the 2 years it takes a university to organise anything.)

Here is a suggested list for the year 2015, in order from most essential to least, with which the audience concurred.

• Manage passwords
• Assess the reliability of a web source
• Manage multiple email addresses including forwarding
• Manage dozens of emails a day
• Crop and change the resolution of a photo
• Format a long document
• Use presentation software professionally
• Create better-than-default charts from a spreadsheet
• Edit a collaborative online document
• Use [Twitter/whatever] to maintain a social network
• Create and edit a wiki
• Create a blog
• Register a domain name
• Create a simple website
• Use bibliographic management software
• Record and edit sound
• Shoot and edit video

IT topics can be sorted along two axes. Some are tools, for accomplishing any number of things, like Wordpress. Others are specific tasks that need to be completed, like creating a class web page. Another way of sorting is by contrasting generic topics that useful for multiple different contexts with course-specific specialised (or embedded) content. Here's an example.

We can then arrange all IT topics in a space, from general tools to course-specific tasks; I've put some examples below.

OK. So how is this stuff actually taught in universities and polytechnics? There are four key players: the library, the IT department, individual lecturers, and the Learning Skills/Academic Support unit.

When I surveyed individual institutions and the audience, I found a wide variety of strategies for covering the bases. No institution taught all, or even most, of the list of IT topics we all agreed were important. The best case was where both the library and Learning Skills collaborated in covering main topics. IT gave generic workshops, and lecturers or teaching assistants taught whatever was necessary for students to pass their course.

In some institutions, though, the IT department had absolved itself from training students, and concentrated on staff. In others, Learning Skills did not touch on IT at all, and the library had to pick up the slack in both general and specific topics. Which of these matches your own institution best?

Three questions arise from this exercise.

1. How much do we assume about the abilities of "Digital Natives"? (see Prensky’s papers and book on this.) My concern is that lecturers will assume these students arte generally tech savvy and can pick things up on their own, but the evidence suggests their abilities are very narrow and practical—Facebook and txting, essentially.
2. Most topics on the essential-skills list are not being taught. Who is able to teach all this? It's essential to have IT staff on board, but they aren't usually trained teachers, and may have little experience with the curriculum and current student needs, so we can't just pass the buck.
3. The conversation on IT training is centred around workshops, but the workshop model might be the wrong one. Given we all have to learn new IT skills every year for the rest of our lives, how do help students move from being passive learners, waiting for the institution to supply training, to active learners that teach themselves new technology as they need it?