Being Fluent with Information Technology (1999) / Chapter Skim
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3 Collateral Issues
3 Collateral Issues
Pages 41-50
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From page 41... ...
Second, for many years the library science community has promulgated the notion of information literacy. Because information literacy and fluency with information technology share certain elements, an explicit comparison between the two is warranted.
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From page 42... ...
Recipes with precise quantities of ingredients and precisely described preparation and cooking steps are programs executed by cooks. Toy manufactures write programs, called assembly instructions, for parents to follow, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)
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From page 43... ...
· "Primitive" specifications are essential to provide assurance that the steps to be performed are within the operational repertoire of the executing agent. The programmer may understand the task as "pi times R squared," but if the executing agent doesn't know what "squared" means or how to accomplish it, then the programmer must express the task in more primitive terms, perhaps revising it to "pi times R times R." For many taxpayers, the word "qualifying" in the IRS's instruction phrase "subtract qualifying contributions" would likely fail the test for primitiveness, because they would not readily understand what the term means.
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From page 44... ...
44 BEING FLUENT WITH INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY principles of conditional and/or repeated execution. In addition to experience with conditional and repetition constructs, FITness requires experience with at least two other fundamental programming ideas: functional decomposition and functional abstraction.
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From page 45... ...
This question has absorbed much energy of computer scientists, but the committee believes that while FITness does imply a basic programming ability, that ability need not be acquired in using a conventional programming language. For example, certain spreadsheet operations and advanced HTML programming for Web pages, among others, demand an understanding of enough programming concepts that they can provide this basic programming experience.
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From page 46... ...
Recognizing the centrality of programming, some traditional "information technology literacy" curricula have focused almost exclusively on programming in a conventional programming language. But programming cuts across the FITness spectrum, being essential to some aspects and nearly irrelevant to others.
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From page 47... ...
Furthermore, while not every personally relevant application will be available as prepackaged software, a person with a basic knowledge of programming may be able to "script" a solution using some of the large number of software building blocks now available commercially. Construction of complex systems from commercial software using macros, scripting facilities, shell commands, or other compositional tools is one way for non-specialists to use information technology in a personally relevant way.
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From page 48... ...
from Clifford Lynch, director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) , "Information Literacy and Information Technology Literacy: New Components in the Curriculum for a Digital Culture," position paper submitted to the Committee on Information Technology Literacy, February 1998.
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From page 49... ...
Much of today's information technology and supporting infrastructure is intended to enable communication, information finding, information access, and information delivery. As it relates to FITness, information literacy implies that the skills and intellectual capabilities usually associated with traditional textual literacy authoring and critical and analytic reading (including the assessment of purpose, bias, accuracy, and quality)
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From page 50... ...
For example, they need to be guided in developing mental models of the relationships among documents on the Internet and in proprietary databases, library collections, and the like as a basis for learning to evaluate what information sources are likely to be most appropriate for their various information needs.
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