A new perspective on teaching computer literacy

Abstract

The first step in designing a college level computer literacy course is to define what is meant by computer literacy. Unfortunately no consensus exists as to what the label “computer literate” should imply. The difficulty in both defining computer literacy and designing a satisfactory computer literacy course is evident by both the frequency of change and experimentation occurring at many institutions and by the forests of textbooks that exist for such a course. In this paper we present a definition of computer literacy that is independent of any specific application or application genre and introduce the notion of application literacy as distinct from that of computer literacy. Finally we describe a course implementation strategy commensurate with our philosophy.