Key Fluency Links ...

NRC's Being Fluent Report

My most recent FIT100 class Web site

Fluency with IT Students & Instructors

Fluency with IT Adoption Info

AW's Catalog, Fluency with IT

How I Teach Fluency

BeneFIT100 free course

Fluency with Information Technology

Fluency Table of Contents

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  NRC Report: The Fluency concept originated in a report by the National Research Council.
  
  
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  UW's FIT100: My recent offerings of FIT100 were Winter 2004. Winter 2006.
  
  
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  Fluency Text: There are several important links at Addison Wesley for the Fluency with Information Technology text.
  • Students & Instructors: Course materials including labs and exercises
  • Instructors: Information about adopting FIT for class
  • Readers: Addison Wesley's Catalog Entry
  
  
  
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  How I Teach Fluency: A walk-through of the UW Fluency course with emphasis on teaching Fluency's more complex concepts. Details are from the Winter 2004 offering.
  
  
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  BeneFIT100: The free online self-paced version of UW's FIT100 is called BeneFIT100. Just Do IT!
  

NRC's Fluency Study

In 1997 the National Research Council (NRC) -- the research branch of the National Academies -- initiated a study under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to determine "What everyone should know about information technology." The study was motivated by several concerns:

• Effective Use of IT: Though information technology is in wide use in the United States, many people who use IT daily do so only for a small set of applcations, e.g. email, Web or a few work-related specialty applications. They are not confident users, and they believe that there are many ways in which IT could be useful to them if only they knew more.
• Access: There is a substantial fraction of the population that does not use computers at all. Though there is often an economic constraint, the greatest barriers are knowledge and expertise.
• Education: Every year a new population of students enters school. These students' lives are constantly affected by information technology now and will continue to be in the future. What should they be taught?
• Workforce Readiness: Business and industry exploit IT heavily to be competitive, but the technology must be applied by the employees. Though business has a training role for its specialized systems, employees must come to work knowing the fundamentals.
• Citizenship: Many IT topics from strong encryption to electronic voting are part of the public debate. Citizens need to understand the technical basics of these concepts in order to contributed to that debate.

What is FITness?

In contrast to traditional computer literacy, which is characterized as "the ability to use current computer applications," the FITness Report defines Fluency with IT to be the acquisition of three types of knowledge, skills, concepts and capbilities:

• Skills refers to proficiency with contemporary applications such as browsing, email, word processing, etc. It approximations traditional computer literacy.
• Concepts refers to foundational ideas such as how computers execute instructions, TCP/IP, data representations, etc. Conceptual information is drawn from the disciplines underlying IT such as computer science, library science, EE, etc.
• Capabilities refers to higher-level thinking abilities such as logical reasoning, problem solving, complexity management, etc. Capabilities apply in many areas of life besides IT.

The purpose of teaching immediately useful knowledge (skills) with foundations (concepts) and higher-level thinking (capabilities) is to prepare students for a lifelong learning process needed to keep pace with the inevitable changes in IT.

UW's CSE100 Inaugurates Fluency

Using the report as a guideline, I developed a curriculum for a Freshman level Fluency course under the auspices of the Computer Science and Engineering Department and the School of Information. The five-credit course has three lectures and two closed labs per week. Students produce three projects. With no Fluency textbook then available I produced class notes for the jointly offered course that is taught every term. My last offering was Winter 2004..

A FIT Textbook

The class notes for Fluency with Information Technology have evolved into a textbook Fluency with Information Technology: Skills, Concepts and Capabilities published by Addison Wesley July 2003. The textbook covers all of the topics recommended by the NRC report.