College Student’s Guide to Computers in Education/Chapter 7: Increasing Your Expertise in ICT



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Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Inventing Your Future

Chapter 3: Expertise and Problem Solving

Chapter 4: Human and Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 5: Computer-Assisted and Distance Learning

Chapter 6: Learning and Learning Theory

Chapter 7: Increasing Your Expertise in ICT

Chapter 8: Brief Introductions to A number of Key Ideas

Chapter 9: On the Lighter Side

References



Beginning of Chapter 7: Increasing Your Expertise in ICT

 * "When you are up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember the original objective was to drain the swamp." (Adage)


 * "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." (Confucius)


 * “In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are without precedent in the cultural history of mankind. “ (Edsgar W. Dijkstra)

ICT is a huge and rapidly growing field. Some students plan their higher education and their work experiences with a goal in mind of building and maintaining a high level of expertise in this area.

Many students tend to see ICT as a possibly useful means to an end, but their end goals may be far removed from being an expert in ICT. They may be quite content to develop some ICT islands of expertise that serve their particular needs.

This chapter explores various topics in ICT from the point of view of achieving personal and professionally useful levels of expertise. Reread the quote from Edsgar W. Dijkstra given above. Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist who made many important contributions to the development of the discipline of Computer and Information Science.

Some Pervasive ICT Uses in Higher Education
Essentially all college students and faculty routinely use ICT. It is now common practice for a college or university to assign all new students an email account and to assume that they know how to use email. It is now commonly expected that all students know how to use a word processor, how to access the Web, and how to use a search engine to locate information on the Web.

All of these activities (and more) are at or below the fifth grade standards created by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE NETS, n.d.). I recommend that you read these precollege standards, so that you can see what college faculty might assume you know, and so that you can (if necessary) remediate some of the holes in your precollege ICT education. As an example, here are four of the items in the fifth grade standards:


 * Use general-purpose productivity tools and peripherals to support personal productivity, remediate skill deficits, and facilitate learning throughout the curriculum.
 * Use technology tools (e.g., multimedia authoring, presentation, Web tools, digital cameras, scanners) for individual and collaborative writing, communication, and publishing activities to create knowledge products for audiences inside and outside the classroom.
 * Use telecommunications efficiently to access remote information, communicate with others in support of direct and independent learning, and pursue personal interests.
 * Use telecommunications and online resources (e.g., e-mail, online discussions, Web environments) to participate in collaborative problem-solving activities for the purpose of developing solutions or products for audiences inside and outside the classroom.

Thus, for example, many higher education faculty members feel free to tell their students to contact them and their fellow students by email, and they do not hesitate to require an assignment to be word-processed and turned in as an attachment to an email message. Faculty members do not expect to have to use class time to teach grade school level uses of ICT.

Course and Learning Management Systems
It is now common for higher education institutions to provide a learning management system or a course management system for use by their faculty and students. Here, I will use the term learning management system (LMS) to refer to both. An LMS is designed to help students learn and faculty teach. As noted in Wikipedia:

A Learning Management System (or LMS) is a software package that enables the management and delivery of online content to learners. Most LMSs are web-based to facilitate “anytime, any place, any pace” access to learning content and administration.

Typically an LMS allows for learner registration, delivery of learning activities, and learner assessment in an online environment. More comprehensive LMSs often include tools such as competency management, skills-gap analysis, succession planning, certifications, and resource allocation (venues, rooms, textbooks, instructors, etc.).

As a student, you are used to participating in small group or whole class discussions. It may well be that you do far more or far less than your fair share of the talking. Relatively few faculty members make an actual count of the number of contributions you make to the discussions or make a written note on the quality of your contributions.

Now, consider participating in online discussions where the input mode is keyboarding or voice. In this setting, it may well be that part of your grade depends on the number and quality of your contributions to the discussion. It is relatively easy for a faculty member to monitor online discussions.

A typical LMS includes electronic gradebook software. This helps a faculty member to provide easily accessible and up to date information on student performance on assignments and tests. Research suggests that student receiving high quality and timely feedback of this sort learn more than those who don’t.

So, if you are in a course where such online feedback would be useful to you but is not being provided, you might ask the faculty member if this service could be provided. There is a deeper underlying theme in this suggestion. Many faculty members are being slow to learn about roles of ICT within the disciplines they teach. They are not being forward-looking in integrating ICT-related aspects of their disciplines into the courses they teach. Students can help change this situation.

An LMS typically includes provisions for online testing. That opens up a new can of worms for faculty members and students. Should online tests be used just for the purposes of student self-assessment, or should they use them for grading? If used for grading, how does one prevent cheating?

Learning a New Piece of Computer Software
There are tens of thousands of different pieces of computer software. They vary considerably in cost (free to quite expensive), computer operating systems they run under, quality (terrible to quite good), ease of use, and ease of learning to use.

In the very early days of electronic digital computers, almost every computer user was a computer programmer. It took considerable effort to gain a useful level of expertise in representing and solving problems. That has changed substantially over the years.

Modern commercially successful software is designed to make it relatively easy for a beginning user to get started, experience some success, and move into a learn-by-doing mode. That is, a user can quickly gain a personally useful level of expertise and a start along the path of gaining increased expertise by reading the instruction manual, making use of the Help features built into the software, and by hands on (often trial and error) experience. Many pieces of software include a tutorial mode—computer-assisted learning that helps the user learn to get started.

Once you get started in using a new piece of software, there is a good chance you can provide feedback to yourself on how well you are doing. Often you will encounter difficulties or it will occur to you that “there has got to be a better way.” Some standard ways to deal with such difficulties include:


 * Make use of the mini-tutorials that are built into the software system.


 * Experiment. Use trial and error. Remember, however, that if you are working with a document that you have created, make a backup copy before you do something that may damage your document.


 * Use the Help features. Some built-in help has a modest level of artificial intelligence and can provide help in the context of the problem you are currently encountering. You can expect that this type of help will become more common and quite a bit better in the future.


 * Read a relevant part of the manual. Nowadays, the manual is usually not available in hard copy. Rather, it is part of the software package and is accessed online.


 * Seek help from a colleague. Such one-on-one help (individual tutoring) is an excellent aid to learning. One of your goals should be to develop a reasonable level of expertise in both receiving and giving such tutorial aid.


 * Take a workshop or a short course

Since you are already a computer user, you have some level of expertise in the above activities. You should develop computer-use habits that will help increase this expertise. For example, suppose you encounter a difficulty when using a particular computer system and piece of software. First, try to figure it out on your own. Reflect on what the problem is and what you know about solving the problem. Experiment with using some trial and error and the built-in help features. Before you ask for help from a human, formulate your question very carefully. While asking for help, clearly state your problem and give a careful statement of what you have tried to do to solve the problem.

Amplification, and Moving Beyond Amplification
Remember what the first steam or gasoline-powered cars looked like? They looked like “horseless” carriages. They are an example of a first-order application of a technology, an amplification level. As is often the case with a new technology, the initial horseless carriages were relatively hard to maintain and use, the needed infrastructure—paved roads and gas stations—was not yet available, and only a relatively few early adopters were venturesome enough to purchase and try out the new-fangled invention. Eventually the technology got a lot better, the infrastructure got a lot better, and cars transformed our society.

Nowadays, essentially every student entering college has developed a personally useful level of knowledge and skill in using a word processor, email, and the Web. The student likely has a number of other ICT-related areas of personal expertise, such as using a cell telephone, digital camera, and video camera; driving a car that contains a number of microcomputers; making use of digital music; and so on. In all of these examples, the ICT is so transparent that the typical user does not think about the underlying ICT or the roles of computers.

These are all examples of amplification-level use of ICT. None get at the depth of ICT capabilities in the various courses you are studying. This is where a combination of bottom up and top down approaches can make a big difference. In some courses, you will encounter faculty members who are near the cutting edge in use of ICT in their research and other scholarly activities. They have moved well beyond the amplification stage in use of ICT, but do not yet bring such ICT use into their courses. You, as a student, want to encourage the teacher to being these ideas into the course you are taking.

Alternatively, you may find that you and some of your fellow students know some things about ICT that should be in the course. You should bring these ideas to the attention of both the teacher and the other students in the class. Work to create a situation in which the students and faculty learn together.

Each discipline offers its own challenges. For example, have you ever tried to use a standard word processor to word process mathematics notation? This problem has been addressed by special additions to standard word processor software, and special mathematics word processing software. For example, Microsoft Word includes an Equation Editor that facilitates use of more than 150 math symbols. A Math Department faculty member may be familiar with such software. Perhaps you should be learning a little bit about it in a math class?

A second example is provided by information retrieval. As noted earlier in this book, one of the most important aspects of problem solving is learning to make effective use of the previous work of others. This means that an important part of learning any discipline is learning to retrieve, understand, and make use of the stored information of the discipline. Thus, every course could (in my opinion, should) include explicit instruction in how to locate, retrieve, understand, and use important aspects of the accumulated knowledge of the discipline.

Here are some other aspects of information retrieval. Suppose that a couple of years after taking a course, you decide you need to relearn key ideas from your course. Where will you find information about these ideas and aids to learning them? What are the key Web search engine search terms and search ideas to use in finding a good Website? Are there long-lasting Websites that you could have learned how to use when taking the course? Are there computer programs that can solve or help solve some of the important problems discussed in the course? Where can one find the new ides that are being developed and are relevant to the course?

Word Processing and Desktop Publication
This section uses word processing to help illustrate moving beyond amplification. It is estimated that a typical user of a full feature word processor such as Microsoft Word only makes use of about three to five percent of the capabilities of the software. A word processor provides an excellent example where it is easy to achieve a personally useful, amplification level of knowledge and skill.

Chances are that by the time you first began to learn to use a word processor you already had learned to read and write. You were experienced in detecting and correcting errors in your writing. You had developed skills as a copy editor of your own work. All of this previous learning was available to you as you learned the rudiments of writing and editing using a word processor. The following personal story illustrates this situation.

One evening many years ago, my younger daughter who was a high school sophomore came to me and asked if I would teach her how to use a computer. She had a written report that was due the next day, and she believed that it would be helpful to write it using a word processor. (Notice that she brought with here knowledge that her parent used a word processor and that they had talked about how useful this was.)

Aha! A teachable moment. She was a good typist—I had required all of my children to take a typing course. With about two minutes of instruction, she was started. There is considerable transfer of learning from a typewrite environment to a word processor environment. Correcting keyboarding errors and making small edits to a sentence are very easy to learn to do in a word-processing environment.

Perhaps a half hour later she asked if there was an easier way to get back to earlier parts of the document than just repeated back spacing. (This computer system did not have a mouse.) Aha, another teachable moment. Still later came the question of how to save and to print out the completed document.

Even for a long-winded professor like me, the total amount of instruction time was less than ten minutes, and my daughter was pleased by the results. She had developed a personally useful level of expertise in word processing. In essence, she had learned to use a computer as a typewriter with some added features.

Moving Beyond Using a Computer as a Typewriter
Even a rudimentary level of knowledge and skill in using a word processor is valuable to a student—even a student who uses a hunt-and-peck approach to keyboarding. However, a word processor is a quite powerful tool, and it takes considerable effort to gain a reasonable level of expertise in using this tool.

A student can learn fast keyboarding, and a student can learn to use some additional features of a word processor. Since touch typing has been a school subject for many years, there is a lot known about how long it takes an average person to achieve a level of automaticity that does not decline rapidly when not being used. For example, a typical fourth- or fifth-grade elementary school student can learn to type (or keyboard) about twice as fast as hand printing or handwriting. It takes perhaps 30 to 40 hours to gain a speed of 25 or more words per minute.

Typing classes in middle school or high school used to be a half-year or a full year in length. The longer courses tended to stress skills related to becoming a professional secretary or typist. For example, how do you center a heading when using a typewriter? It is much easier to learn and easier to do using a word processor.

A word processor provides different fonts, and these in turn allow for different type sizes, italics, and boldface. All of these are easy to learn to use, and they are all beyond the capabilities of a typical typewriter.

There are many other word processor features that are not available on a typewriter. I find the spelling checker and the grammar checker to be quite useful. I also find it quite useful to have the computer system automatically finds and correct some of my common typos. As an example, my fingers frequently keyboard the word education with the i and o interchanged. When I noted that was happening, I merely instructed my word processor to automatically correct this error, without even bothering to bring the error to my attention.

As another example, look back at the tables used discussing cognitive development theory in Chapter 6. Do you know how to create such tables using a word processor? Look at the References near the end of the book. The layout was done by making use of a hanging indent—a type of indent feature easily implemented in a modern word processor. The alphabetization of the list was done using an alphabetical sorting feature built into the word processor.

Desktop Publication
The microcomputer-based word processor blossomed into a transformational technology when sophisticated desktop-publication software and a relatively inexpensive laser printer became available in 1984. The linotype that had been a mainstay in publishing for nearly a hundred years was doomed. The combination of microcomputer, desktop publication software (even a good word processor sufficed), and the laser printer completely transformed an industry. Some of the areas of expertise of a linotype operator were no longer useful.

Historically, the overall publication process used to involve content editors, copy editors, and layout designers. Many people acquired the hardware and software to do desktop publication without thinking much about these other areas of expertise required to produce high-quality products. I have learned to do some of these tasks at a modest level. Thus, most of my current books are being published without the benefits (and cost) of professional content editors, copy editors, and layout designers.

I have not included any pictures in this particular book, but I have included a number of graphic diagrams that I created using computer graphics software. A modern word processor makes it quite easy to add pictures and diagrams to a text. However, the word processor does not know if these pictures and graphics help to communicate the intended message and are a useful part of the content. The human writer provides this type of intelligent insight.

Notice that this book has a table of contents and an index. While writing the book, I highlighted various heading and told the word processor that these were to be Table of Contents entries. Similarly, I highlighted various words and phrases and told the word processor that these were to be in the Index. In both cases, most of the rest of the work was done automatically. On a book of this length, the computer can read through the entire text, select all of the terms that I have specified to go into the Index, alphabetize them, attach the appropriate page numbers, and add the results to the book in just a few seconds. Later, as I am editing the book, perhaps moving large blocks of text and adding more index entries, the re-indexing process takes only a few seconds.

It is helpful to keep this example of word processing versus desktop publishing in mind as you explore other computer applications. Typically, a new computer hardware or software tool is developed to help solve some problem or accomplish some task where there is considerable demand for “a better way.” Often the computer system is powerful enough so that it can empower a novice with just a little training to accomplish tasks that previously required many hundreds of hours of training and experience.

However, professional level use of such software typically requires considerable education and/or training. A big part of the education and training focuses on learning the discipline within which the tool is being used. Another big part focuses on things that humans can learn to do much better than computers.

For example, even the best of modern computer-based spelling checkers are not as good as a good human spelling checker. The best of computer-based grammar checkers are not nearly as good as a good human copy editor. We are a very long way from having computer systems that are good at content editing. Being good at using a word processor may help you to write more and to edit your writing more carefully. However, a word processor does not make a good writer out of a poor writer.

Email
Email is another productivity tool that is easy to learn to use at an amplification level. For a person who can read and write, a few minutes of instruction and practice allow one to send and receive email messages. Compare this with the time and effort it took telegraph operators a little over 160 year ago to learn Morse code and use the telegraph system.

However, there is much more to learn about email. How does one organize, save, and later retrieve message one has received? How does one avoid getting unwanted ads and other spam? How does one deal with email lists? For example, how does one avoid responding to the whole list when one wants to respond just to one person? How does one create a mailing list? How does one include pictures and graphics in an email message? How does one send and retrieve attachments? How does one add an automatic signature to one’s messages being sent? It is not so easy to learn to use the various additional features and to use them wisely.

It has been a very long time since I have written and sent a hand written letter. During this time, I have written some letters using a word processor and sent them by surface mail or as email attachments. I find this useful because I give careful thought to what I am writing and I do a careful edit of the results. In addition, the letter goes out with a personal hand written signature at the end.

Most of my email messages are composed in an email system, perhaps very briefly edited, and then sent. They often contain typos. However, I have not adopted writing techniques such as using only lowercase letters, abbreviating many words, and not paying much attention to “good” grammar and spelling. Now and in the future you will need to decide for yourself how you want to present yourself in email messages and in other forms of written communication.

Here is a hard question: When should one use email in communication, and when is this a bad idea?

One way to answer this question is to think about other modes of communication. For example, consider a telephone voice or video conversation. If you are good at “reading” voice expression, you get information that is not available in an email conversation. If the video is of sufficient quality, you can pick up some of the body language.

In a face-to-face conversation, you can “read” the facial expressions and other body language of the person you are talking to. You get feedback from this body language, and you get feedback from the content and emotions in the voice responses of the person you are conversing with. All of this is missing in an email message or sequence of interchanges of email messages.

Thus, you now have three commonly used modes of human-to-human communication: email and chat groups, telephone (voice or video phone), and face-to-face. Each has advantages and disadvantages. You can take a trial and error approach to learning about when and when not to use each of these modes of communication. Through your use of these three modes of communication, you have developed some level of expertise in the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Spreadsheet
An entry in Wikipedia describes the development of VisiCalc, a 1979 spreadsheet program:


 * Dan Bricklin has spoken of watching his university professor create a table of calculation results on a blackboard. When the professor found an error, he had to tediously erase and rewrite a number of sequential entries in the table, triggering Bricklin to think that he could replicate the process on a computer, using the blackboard as the model to view results of underlying formulas. His idea became VisiCalc, the first application that turned the personal computer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a business tool.


 * VisiCalc went on to become the first “killer app,” an application that was so compelling, people would buy a particular computer just to own it. In this case the computer was the Apple II, and VisiCalc was no small part in that machine’s success.

Most of the first people to learn to use spreadsheet software already knew quite a bit about bookkeeping or accounting. Thus, it was relatively easy for them to learn to create simple spreadsheets. However, over time, spreadsheet software grew much more powerful and many people with no business background found it useful to learn to use the software. Often they had to deal with business-oriented examples and instruction manuals as they tried to learn to use the software as an aid to solving problems in science and other disciplines.

While it is easy to learn to use spreadsheets developed by others, it is a considerable challenge to learn to design, develop, and test spreadsheets that help to solve challenging problems and accomplish challenging tasks. One can build a career at being a spreadsheet expert.

Over the years, spreadsheet software has come to contain many of the features of a computer programming language. Indeed, a spreadsheet software package may well contain a computer programming language such as BASIC as one of its features. Excel, Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, is exceedingly powerful and exceedingly complex, and it includes BASIC.

One of the key uses of spreadsheet software is spreadsheet modeling and simulation. How does one use a spreadsheet to develop a model of a business operation such as payroll or inventory? One needs to know the business operations and one needs to know how to design, create, test, and debug the relatively complex spreadsheet model and simulation. This means one must have a reasonably high level of expertise in the business areas and in the software. Similar statements hold for developing spreadsheet models in other disciplines.

Applications That Are Inherently Beyond Amplification
There are a number of computer applications that are so powerful that they make it possible for the user to solve problems and accomplish tasks well beyond what can readily been done by hand. A few examples include computer modeling and simulation, statistical packages, computer algebra systems, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), MIDI (music) interface systems, computer-assisted design (CAD) and computer-assisted manufacturing (CAM) systems, and digital audio, photo, and video editing systems.

Each of these provides an example of where an accomplished user can gain a considerable competitive advantage over non-users and novice users. These applications are so powerful that they have significantly changed entire disciplines. For example, consider computer modeling and simulation in the sciences. In 1998, one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in chemistry received the prize for his many years of work in computational chemistry (computer modeling and simulation in chemistry). Computational biology, chemistry, mathematics, and physics are now major components of their respective disciplines.

Here is a personal experience I had with powerful software. More than 15 years ago, I was teaching a computers and mathematics course for preservice and inservice teachers. One day I opened my surface mail and found that I had received a copy of the computer algebra system Mathematica, designed to run on an Apple microcomputer. After a little experimentation, I took the software and my old freshman calculus book to the class meeting later in the day. I first demonstrated that the software could do various impressive calculations, such as exactly calculating 50 factorial. I then began to give the program problems from the end of the book chapters. After seeing success on the easier problems, I began to use the “starred” problems in later chapters. My class and I were “blown away” by what this software could do. In essence, it could solve each of the procedurally oriented problems in the book.

Mathematica is a product of Wolfram Research. Quoting from their company history Website http://www.wolfram.com/products/mathematica/history.html:


 * It is often said that the release of Mathematica marked the beginning of modern technical computing. Ever since the 1960s, individual packages had existed for specific numerical, algebraic, graphical, and other tasks. But the visionary concept of Mathematica was to create once and for all a single system that could handle all the various aspects of technical computing—and beyond—in a coherent and unified way. The key intellectual advance that made this possible was the invention of a new kind of symbolic computer language that could for the first time manipulate the very wide range of objects needed to achieve the generality required for technical computing using only a fairly small number of basic primitives.

Over the years, computer algebra software has been greatly improved and microcomputers have become thousands of times more powerful. Quoting from Wikipedia:


 * A computer algebra system (CAS) is a software program that facilitates symbolic mathematics. The core functionality of a CAS is manipulation of mathematical expressions in symbolic form.




 * The symbolic manipulations supported typically include:




 * change of form of expressions: expanding products and powers, rewriting as partial fractions, constraint satisfaction, rewriting trigonometric functions as exponentials, etc.


 * partial and total differentiation


 * partial and full factorization


 * solution of linear and some non-linear equations over various domains


 * solution of some differential and difference equations


 * statistical computation, theorem proving, graphing, etc.

In computer algebra systems and in many other powerful applications, software has been developed that incorporates a significant amount of the accumulated knowledge of one or more disciplines. However, one cannot learn to use the software at a worthwhile level without having substantial knowledge of the discipline. While use of the software can be taught independently of a content course in the discipline, it is highly appropriate to integrate instruction in the software with instruction in the content of the discipline.

Such powerful software is disruptive to traditional coursework in areas where the software is particularly useful. For example, suppose that a person is taking a traditional freshman calculus course in which the existence of computer algebra systems software is not even mentioned. Students will spend a great deal of time learning to do a variety of procedures by hand and by use of math tables that computers can do very rapidly and accurately. The issue is this: Should the course continue to be taught in the traditional fashion or should it be taught with content that effectively merges the traditional content with the capability of the software? Various research projects conducted over the past 20 years have produced strong evidence supporting the merged course. Most mathematics departments have been slow to adopt this change.

Here is a final example of powerful software described in Wikipedia:


 * A geographic information system (GIS) is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to the earth. In the strictest sense, it is a computer system capable of integrating, storing, editing, analyzing, sharing, and displaying geographically-referenced information. In a more generic sense, GIS is a tool that allows users to create interactive queries (user created searches), analyze the spatial information, edit data, and present the results of all these operations. Geographic information science is the science underlying the applications and systems, taught as a degree program by several universities.


 * Geographic information system technology can be used for scientific investigations, resource management, asset management, Environmental Impact Assessment, Urban planning, cartography, criminology, sales, marketing, and route planning. For example, a GIS might allow emergency planners to easily calculate emergency response times in the event of a natural disaster, a GIS might be used to find wetlands that need protection from pollution, or a GIS can be used by a company to find new potential customers similar to the ones they already have and project sales due to expanding into that market.

Learning by Doing
One of the weaknesses in much of higher education can be described as delayed gratification. There is often a considerable time and place separation between the learning processes and the application of the learning (other than to pass tests and do homework assignments).

Some faculty members make a significant effort to provide authentic and immediate opportunities for students to use what they are learning. Others seem to feel that the traditional assignments and tests suffice.

You, personally, can contribute to the authenticity of the learning and assessment. In terms of ICT, the approach is simple enough. Whenever it seems useful and appropriate to you to make use of ICT in your studying, deciding what to learn, doing assignments, and so on, consider making use of ICT tools. As you use these tools, reflect on their capabilities, limitations, and applicability to the situation you are using them in.

You can push the envelope. For example, suppose that you are doing a major term project, either individually on as a member of a team. This is an excellent environment to make use of ICT. If you are working on a team, learn to use collaborative software such as a Wiki or a collaborative word processor (Writely, n.d.). Also, perhaps the product produced by the project could be interactive multimedia. Perhaps the end of term inclass presentation could make use of a projection system and multimedia. Ask the teacher if this would be okay.

Summary and Self-Assessment
This chapter illustrates several very important ideas. Here are two of them:


 * There are many pieces of software that are inherently interdisciplinary in nature. Often one can gain a personally useful (amplification) level of knowledge and skill in the use of one of these pieces of software in an hour or so. However, you can begin to gain a competitive advantage by learning one or more of these pieces of software at a substantially higher level of expertise.


 * There are a number of pieces of software that are so powerful that they have changed entire disciplines and/or helped to create major new components in existing disciplines. GIS provides an excellent example. A student can gain a significant competitive advantage by learning traditional geography or traditional environmental studies and at the same time, acquiring a high level of GIS use in geography or environmental studies.

In these two examples and in many other “powerful software” examples, the underlying idea is that a person and computer system working together can often do much better than either alone. You already know it takes thousands of hours of study and practice to achieve a high level of expertise in a traditional discipline. Thus, it is not a modest request to suggest you spend many hundreds of hours developing a moderately high level of expertise in using each of several powerful pieces of software that are relevant to your specific (non-computer) discipline interests.

This situation of powerful software becoming a critical part of a discipline will continue. This does not mean that traditional disciplines and traditional knowledge and skills in these disciplines will go away. Rather, it means that people who want to excel in such disciplines should give careful consideration to how they balance their coursework and studies between the old and the new.

For self-assessment, think about the various disciplines you have studied or are thinking about studying. Reflect on whether you have gained a beyond-amplification level of knowledge and skill in using ICT in these various disciplines. Compare your level of ICT knowledge and skills with your fellow students in the disciplines that interest you. Try to determine if you are gaining a competitive advantage.

Links to the chapters of the book. You are currently reading Chapter 7.
Title Page

Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 2: Inventing Your Future

Chapter 3: Expertise and Problem Solving

Chapter 4: Human and Artificial Intelligence

Chapter 5: Computer-Assisted and Distance Learning

Chapter 6: Learning and Learning Theory

Chapter 7: Increasing Your Expertise in ICT

Chapter 8: Brief Introductions to A number of Key Ideas

Chapter 9: On the Lighter Side

References