I actually strongly disagree with the idea of an Electronic Literacy class, at least I disagree with it as a class which basically teaches people tricks like control-f that can save them time. Let me relay a story:
In college I worked as a T.A. for in intro programming class for non majors. For some the course started out teaching the students to use Nano as a text editor and assumed that they would choose a more full featured editor whenever they saw fit. Now Nano is a really bare bones editor, it doesn't even have line numbers. And not having line numbers is a serious problem when you're trying to debug c++ compiler errors that reference lines by number. I kid you not I saw kids counting down 100s of lines from the top of the file to get to the listing of the errors.
Now the thing about this situation is: these were perfectly electronically literate people. They all knew about Ctrl-F. And could easily be taught more tricks. The problem is they'd never grasped the philosophy of computers. Specifically that when a task that's so simply stated is taking too long there's normally a better way to do it. Or if there isn't it's an opportunity for you to make a better way to do it.
All of the students simply assumed that if there was a trick they'd have been told about it already so no one inquired further.
Hey, don't diss nano like that. Try alt+c, or ctrl+g. Looks like you didn't try looking for a solution either (=
First thing you should teach in a class like that is to teach them to fish for tricks in the manpages/docs rather handing them individual tricks throughout.
Alright, I guess I'm not fully aware of all of Nano's features. And yes, my entire point is that it's much better to teach them to fish for tricks in various places rather than teaching them individual tricks. Also I was only a T.A. in this class (and actually only did grading) so I never got a chance to teach.
No, read the comment you just responded to. I only did grading. It wasn't until I asked a friend of mine who was in the class what he thought of it and he responded: "Line numbers are a bitch" that I discovered what was going on. At which point I mentioned to the professor that she might want to bring up man pages.
Yes, that they got poor instruction is my point. Furthermore more my point elaborates on why it was poor. Because they were taught many individual tricks and never how and when to search for new tricks.
In college I worked as a T.A. for in intro programming class for non majors. For some the course started out teaching the students to use Nano as a text editor and assumed that they would choose a more full featured editor whenever they saw fit. Now Nano is a really bare bones editor, it doesn't even have line numbers. And not having line numbers is a serious problem when you're trying to debug c++ compiler errors that reference lines by number. I kid you not I saw kids counting down 100s of lines from the top of the file to get to the listing of the errors.
Now the thing about this situation is: these were perfectly electronically literate people. They all knew about Ctrl-F. And could easily be taught more tricks. The problem is they'd never grasped the philosophy of computers. Specifically that when a task that's so simply stated is taking too long there's normally a better way to do it. Or if there isn't it's an opportunity for you to make a better way to do it.
All of the students simply assumed that if there was a trick they'd have been told about it already so no one inquired further.