My friends sometimes refer to me as an old soul. They are, of course, referring to my disdain for reading off of computer screens, my use of snail mail, or the way that I fumble around on my phone like it is a hot ember as I attempt to multitask across professional, personal, and social applications. I imagine their assumptions about thirty-year-old males who are privileged with ample access to technological devices and applications are at odds with my actual predilections. In short, while just as dependent on technology as the next person, I sometimes think that I hate it—not just for the ways that it has fundamentally changed the nature of our inter/personal processes and conceptualization of the world, but also due to a feeling that the manner in which I think and process is fundamentally less compatible with so-called “computational thinking” than that of my peers.
As I reflect on my experiences in this course, I cannot honestly say that my feelings have changed. I am not convinced that the ability to think computationally and to enjoy it are as teachable as Bocconi et al. (2016) or Sanford and Naidu (2016) presuppose (as a matter of extent), nor am I sure of the utility of the idea, implied in an early lecture, that human-computer interactions are, at core, new iterations of the same old processes.
Nonetheless, the way that society now controls and interacts with information is inseparable from these technologies, and perhaps there is little use in opining for older days (during which I was, admittedly, not alive). As such, this course has been valuable to me as a means to better understand, at least conceptually, a small subset of the range of technological tools available to me. Prior to the course, I had knowledge of and experience with Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as Google Slides. I had employed HTML, WordPress, and Google Drive at an incredibly basic level—much more so than in this course—and had not worked with CSS, JavaScript, Google Forms, Google Sites, or Scratch. I had made two edits to a Wikipedia page once and had no recollection of how I did so. I was even, thanks to Mr. Robot, under the false impression that cybersecurity was cool rather than dry and mundane. I certainly had experience with other important and complex tools not covered in this class; I was an assistant instructor for a Massive Open Online Course, in which students remixed code in R in order to conduct statistical analyses, and I had worked extensively in database management. In my current job, I resolve issues with access to e-resources and am situated within the Systems department. Again, one might make a lot of assumptions based on my experiences and demographic characteristics. One might not expect that I would experience a breakdown of normal mental functions during a rather basic final exam on CSS.
Perhaps nobody ever feels fully technologically literate. As with any area of expertise, there are always endless opportunities to continually learn and develop. A friend who is a programmer once told me that sometimes, when she cannot figure out how to overcome a particular coding obstacle at work, she cries in the bathroom. This was reassuring, though unfortunate. At the same time, her confession prompted me to consider how, in some ways, technological fields are distinct from others because they are more fundamentally rooted in exploration, experimentation, and (often virtual) collaboration and sharing. I believe that this spirit of uncertainty and exploration, in part, explains why some individuals enjoy computational thinking and others dread the frustration and anxiety that comes with it. Facility with technology is presumably correlated with demographic characteristics, such as age, which implies, at least to me, that confidence and beliefs about oneself in regard to technology play a central role in one’s demonstrated technological competencies. However, personality traits, learning and processing styles, mental health concerns, and a number of other factors, I would presume, also correlate with technological competency.
As I make these broad statements about technology, however, one of the areas that I am most interested in moving forward is the question of what technology and computational thinking actually are. I was particularly intrigued by the discussion in Bocconi et al. (2016) about computational thinking as an ill-defined concept. Do many of the claims I have just made hold up when one acknowledges the lack of a concrete definition to distinguish between the technological and the non-technological? If computational thinking has always been fundamental to human cognition, if not constructed as a concept until recently, then can “technological” processes really be fundamentally different from “non-technological” processes?
This course has developed my knowledge of the tools currently available to me (which will surely change rapidly in the years to come), but more importantly, it has prompted me to think about what exactly technology is, why it elicits such divergent reactions from different individuals, and the ways in which I can harness “technological literacy,” whatever that may be, both for myself and for those I serve as a library and information professional.
References:
Bocconi, S., Chioccariello, A., Dettori, G., Ferrari, A., Engelhardt, K., Kampylis, P., & Punie, Y. (2016, June 28-30). Developing computational thinking: Approaches and orientations in K-12 education. Paper presented at EdMedia 2016, Vancouver, BC.
Sanford, J. F. & Naidu, J. T. (2016) Computational thinking concepts for grade school. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 9(1), 23-32.
Scott Carlton 