Computer Wednesdays

Beginning this week, we will do a brief computer tutorial at the start of every Wednesday class. I am doing this for several reasons. The first is that about three or four students per section really do not know what they are doing, and they blunder along, struggling to do even the most basic tasks. Second, many of you never had any real computer teaching, partly because your high school teachers didn’t know this stuff either, and partly because of the myth that any kid who could work Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok had learned it all. (And, to be honest, many high schools function under the delusion that in the future nobody will write anything anyhow.) And third, there is always something new to learn, even for experts. I recently showed a colleague who was writing a PhD dissertation a quick, easy formatting trick for his References page. He had years of experience, but had never seen that one.

Personal note here: I have been around the computer world for a long time. My first computer was a TeleVideo running WordStar on the CP/M operating system. That was about 1980. From there I moved to an early Apple computer and finally landed on Windows 2.0. All told, I have learned about a dozen different operating systems and the same number of word processors. One thing I have seen is that the computer world is remarkably bad at writing documentation, the “How-To” instructions that enable ordinary users to get things done. That’s a main reason I am doing this series of lessons.