The big lie: I can use a computer

How do we feel when we have to admit in public we can’t use a computer for a particular purpose? Like Paul Miller perhaps.

I started working with computers in 1985 at university. Although my career in Artificial Intelligence research ended before it started when a large tech company offered me an astronomical (for a poor researcher) salary to become a Knowledge Engineer with them, I never stopped using computers.

I can say that I know how to use a computer. Yet, looked at another way, this is a big lie.

I could code Lisp, Prolog, spent more hours than I care to remember in the depths of the Computer Science department counting parenthesis,using Unix terminals for my work, drinking far too much coffee and playing text based adventure games. I still remember our excitement the first time we got to use email in our university. I remember discovering the hyperlink and being excited by what I imagined its potential to be.

I can use a computer, right? Yes and no.

My dissertation that year was held in this archaic floppy disk but I had stopped handwriting my material by that time. In those days we still had to go through several steps to get a properly formatted document. This meant more coffee and middle of the night adventures in the basement of the computer labs at Brunel University.

Fast forward a few years. I have now been using PCs for years at work, I am a demon working with DOS and fixing anything that happens to fail on this machine, and it fails often. I am no longer a knowledge engineer working as a consultant to large corportations using big dedicated Sun Microsystems LISP Machines (I had one at home!) but somewhere along the way I went back to working with people in business not computers.

I can use a computer, right? Yes and no.

That early awe I felt for the hyperlink, became the World Wide Web but all that happened whilst I was busy elsewhere in technoland. I could teach others how to use a computer and yet not have a clue about how the web worked and how it was being used. And I didn’t have a clue. I got my first Apple computer. Learnt how to use that. I still did not have a clue.

About that time my friends still think of me as a techie. They ask me to help them with their technology woes. I have had a website for years, but I never attended to the environment in which it lived. It was a business tool to me. I was on the web not of the web until late 2012. About then, I discovered educational technology and a little while later I discovered open education.

I have a techie mind, I love technology. I love learning. Learning about how to live and learn on the open web has been a joy for me and it has mostly felt like being a kid in a sweet shop. I learnt the tools and marevelled at its potential. I wanted to share what I was learning and use it in my work in teaching and consulting. Everybody can use a computer, right? Let’s use it to collaborate, to learn remotely, to connect, to access the amazing resources that open education is creating on the web available at no cost to everyone.

<Falls flat on her idealistic face>

No, people cannot use a computer. We all say we can and nobody ever questions the specifics of what it is one can do on or with it. Using a computer for email, and having your PA create everything else on it counts as using a computer. Using it just for word processing in Word counts as using a computer, yet how to use it for collaboration and education is black ops to that user. Using your smart phone to Facebook the world, counts as being digitally aware, but in no way prepares you to use that same device for educational purposes. My greatest success from my initial enthusiasm was Pinterest, a platform I don’t even like. For some, still to be explained, reason my clients seem to love it as a place for me to store resources for them.

I learnt to use a computer for the purpose of living and learning on the web only just over 2 years ago. I have had to work damn hard to catch up with all the techie talk that is taken for granted in the open education community. I dedicated months to learning about digital storytelling tools to enable me to create, interact, and work on the web. I did not know how to use a computer in that context.

<Hides head in shame>

I just started to teach a course and my students can use a computer. I checked if we needed a bootcamp type experience to learn how to use it for the purposes of communication and learning before the course started. I was told that they knew how to use it and that there were many tutorials on how to use the Learning Management System available.

They know how to use a computer, the university said.

Here is a list of what I have had to teach them the first few weeks alongside the subject matter:

What is a hyperlink?

What is a permalink?

Why do we need them?

What is the difference between a blog and a blog post?

How do I embed media in my blog post?

How do I upload media to the site?

What is Skype?

What is the difference between a comment on a blog post and a post on a discussion board?

Why use different spaces to learn?

Can we just have it all in one page?

Why are you asking that we create our own content?

What is the point of collaboration?

I have been shocked by the extent this particular LMS forces a design that does not treat students as self directed adults. They know how to use a computer. They have spent their whole academic life being given checklists to follow each day of the week and once completed, they get a score and move on to the next module. The light inside has gone but they are still working in the safe environment that is the LMS.

I have come in and am trying to use the LMS as if it were the open web. It cannot cope, they cannot cope. I am giving them options, asking them to self manage small group learning, engage in dialogue beyond ‘write 100 words on the topic and post it’.

It is challenging and no, they cannot use a computer in this way.

In conversation with Rochelle Lockridge, who also tries to bring the values of the open web into closed spaces, we explored what is it that makes us assume everyone can use a computer and not question it. Rochelle said that the only way you find out what your students can do with a computer is by role-modelling what you want them to do and, importantly, role modelling that whilst you yourself can use the computer in some ways, you also cannot use a computer in other ways.

In the digital storytelling course, DS106, we call this ‘futzing’. You can see an example of this in this video, posted to You Tube showing a student failing to get her Google Hangout going. Students in DS106 are taught that it is okay to ask any question, it is okay to try, fail and keep trying until you get it. And to do all of this in public and be proud of it! Technology has that nature. Some of my students and many others, have one default. ‘It’ does not work, fix it for me.

Alarmingly, some of my students do not even know how to use a computer to ask for help. I find myself teaching them about googling for learning, about the importance of search terms to find an answer, about asking IT for help with specfic steps and screenshots. And some still don’t do it.

Why?

Rochelle and I came to the conclusion that we have so much invested in preserving the fantasy that we can use a computer that we are too scared to ask for help. This may be particularly true in a closed system; your colleagues might think you a ‘basic stupid person’ and that cannot be.

It is much easier to blame the tool and be passive. And who can blame my students? The LMS has given them many hours of training in being passive and following steps unthinkingly. It is a tough challenge to teach against this stream. The key educational theme here seem about seeing beyond the obvious. Or a Alan Levine put it on reading an early draft of this article: “Can my students develop the conceptual and intuitive savvy to see the potential of the computer to do things beyond the tasks I currently use it for?”

A happy ending to this story seems to be evolving. My students are starting to ‘get’ the need to learn this way of using the computer for conversation, they are finding workarounds the limitations of the LMS, as indeed am I. I am using open educational resources to help them understand why the effort might be worth it.

Never believe anyone when they say ‘I can use a computer’ and always ask ‘what can you use it for?’

We don’t know what we don’t know. The cost of not considering ‘what else could I use it for?’ may be high in terms of future career prospects for some of today’s students. I am heartened by the willingness of my students to engage with the potential of technology for collective thought and futz in the LMS along with me.