Bayview Beach Resort, Batu Ferringhi Beach, Penang, Malaysia

27-30 September 1999

A Computer on Every Desk: Computer Literacy in the Age of the Web and the Net

Professor Robyn Usher

Director of Research, Faculty of Education and Training, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

 Bill Gates has said that he envisages a future where every school pupil has her or his own laptop computer. No doubt the future he wants to project is one where Microsoft will reap the maximum commercial advantage. Nonetheless, whatever our doubts and reservations, it is a future fast approaching. Already in Australia there is a scheme for low cost finance to help parents buy laptops for their children and a similar scheme is just starting in the UK. Thus the notion of a computer on every desk is no longer a speculative technophiliac dream. The issue therefore of the place of new technology in education assumes an increased urgency. In this paper, I will look at this issue by asking what computer literacy amounts to in the age of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

I shall begin by noting some of the practical problems that arise from the vision of education of on-line. I shall then go on to consider apparently contrasting responses to new technology which emphasise on the one hand, the reductivism of information technology (the way knowledge and understanding are reduced to 'information') and on the other, the liberating possibilities of working educationally with the 'Net and the 'Web - and here I will take cyberfeminism as an example of a different way of thinking about new technology that aptly brings out both its limitations and possibilities. This initial discussion will then enable me to focus more precisely on computer literacy.

I shall argue that questions of curriculum structure and content are raised rather than resolved by the increasingly significant role played by new technology in education. There are important issues of both an educational and ethical kind that cannot be answered in purely technical terms. It is too often the case that the technophiliac enthusiasm of the proponents of new technology makes difficult a sober assessment of the real educational benefits.

I will attempt to sketch out what such an assessment might involve by arguing that computer literacy can be seen at one level as the acquisition of a certain kind of competency ­ with for example, a keyboard, the use of certain programs and applications and limited accessing of Web sites. At another level, however, this limited notion of computer literacy blends into a richer sense of literacy that is about critical sensitivity and cultural breadth. Literacy in this sense is deficient if the world of information technology remains a closed book. However, I will argue that this in itself is not enough since what is also needed is the gaining of a distance from new technology that for example, cyberfeminism provides. This implies that an important task for contemporary educators is to provide the means for learners to assess the kind of pedagogy that new technology sustains and through which increasingly they are themselves learning. This further implies that it is the structure and semiotics of the 'Net and the 'Web that need to be addressed.