Thankful for Digital Literacy

Today in the Cedar City Library in the Park I was using one of the public computers when a fifty-something man with salt and pepper hair and a red baseball cap sat down at the computer next to me. After about a minute he asked me, “How do I get the Internet to work?”  I leaned towards his monitor and saw that he had Internet Explorer open.
“It looks like it’s working.  What are you trying to do?”
“Where do I write the dot com?”
So I showed him where the address bar was.
“You just click in here to highlight the text and then erase it.”  I took his mouse and showed him, then hit Backspace.
“That key gets rid of the words?”
“Yeah, that’s the Backspace key.  It means erase.”
“Oh, I thought that arrow was to erase.” He pointed with his mouse at the Back arrow in the browser. “They’ve gone and changed everything on me since I last used one of these.”
“You haven’t used a computer in a long time?”
“It’s been about ten years.”

This experience helped me realize how crippling it could be to lack basic digital literacy.  I don’t consider myself among the extremely digitally literate, but I realize now I’ve taken for granted how important my fairly basic knowledge is to accomplish tasks online.  Without that knowledge, much of my homework and many day-to-day tasks would be impossible to accomplish.

And it’s not just the technical knowledge of how to navigate the web that’s important.  It’s also understanding the culture of the Internet so you know what to look for and what to avoid.  When my acquaintance at the library navigated to the website he was looking for, it turned out to be one of those “one weird trick” advertisements, this time to “evade Obama’s energy monopoly and reduce your energy bills by half.”  I wanted to explain to him that that sort of advertising wasn’t any good, but I wasn’t sure he would believe me, so I didn’t say anything.

As the Digital Age becomes more and more digital, lack of digital literacy is going to become a bigger and bigger problem for people like the man I met in the library.  What will these people do if services that are traditionally offline move online?  How will they function?  I hope that as digital literacy becomes increasingly important, more communities and organizations will offer free computer classes to help.  In the near future, not knowing how to use the web may be just as crippling as not knowing how to read.

Argument for an Apple Pie Internet

When Dr. Burton talked about open content again in class on Tuesday, I thought of a metaphor, like the English major I am.  What if people who grew apples didn’t let people they gave them/sold them to share with other people or make apple pie?  In other words, what if apples weren’t open?

I’ve decided to share this tasty metaphor with you, in hopes of giving you a little more information about what open is.  I’ve taken concepts from David Wiley’s opencontent.org  and changed them to make them about apples, partly to have fun and partly to make an argument for openness.  Enjoy! 

Apples that Aren't OpenPay to Use Apples-- You can’t have this apple unless you pay for it.
Free Apples-- This apple is free, but all you can do is consume it in its original form. You can’t make it into anything else.  No apple pie, no apple crisp, no apple sauce, no baked apples for you!

The 4R’s of Open Apples
Reuse—you can grow identical apples from the apple’s seeds, but you can’t necessarily alter the apple or its “copies” from its original form.
Revise—you can alter the form the apple takes by blending it into apple sauce or apple butter or baking it.
Remix—you can combine this apple with other ingredients to create tasty things like apple pie or apple crisp or apple Jello or an apple-pomegranate salad!
Redistribute—you can revise and remix this apple and share it with as many people as you want.  You can also share identical apples you’ve grown (copied) with as many people as you want.

Apples are tasty.  Free apples are tastier.  So are apple pie and other tasty apple things!  Life is better because apples are open.  Could the same concept apply to online content?  I realize that there are situations when it might not be desirable for content to be open, but in general, wouldn't more openness be better?  Wouldn’t we find ways to make life better (and tastier) if more online content was open?

Jesus teaches us computer science and kindness

My husband Brandon and I were recently called as Primary teachers for the seven-year-old class in our ward in Cedar City.  Last Sunday one of the counselors in the Primary asked all the Primary children to draw a picture that would help them remember Jesus.  Brandon and I drew pictures too while we supervised our class’s drawing.  Brandon is a former computer science major and whimsically drew some ticker tape with binary code and two stick figures, with the caption “Jesus teaches us computer science and kindness.”

At first I laughed, chalking the picture up to my husband’s goofy sense of humor.  But when I found his picture again today, I felt like it had deeper meaning worth discussing here.  The profound truth enclosed in the seemingly lighthearted statement “Jesus teaches us computer science and kindness” is that Christ is a teacher of all good knowledge as well as the source of a moral code that teaches us how to live.

I remember at the very beginning of the semester having the attitude that digital literacy was not important knowledge.  It seemed frivolous since I saw the Internet mostly as a way to waste time.  But very early on this class forced me to confront the real good that can be accomplished through the Internet.  The first time I remember this happening is when Dr. Burton showed us the Youtube video of the virtual choir.  I was moved when I saw so many people uniting to create something beautiful.   I began to open up to the possibility that the Internet was a tool that could be used for good.

Now I believe that the Internet is, in many ways, a blessing from God.  Like any powerful tool, it can be misused, but it also has incredible potential to unite us with others in creating good things, like information, art, music, education, communication, wholesome entertainment, or missionary work. 

I believe that Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ want us to use this medium in good ways and that they are willing to help us learn to use it properly.  Jesus can teach us to be kind and live morally, but he can also teach us secular subjects like computer science or digital literacy, because that knowledge comes from Him as well.  Most importantly, he can inspire us to apply spiritual values to secular subjects, even to the Internet.  So, yes, like my husband, I believe Jesus teaches us computer science and kindness.