Information Technology Goals for Liberal Arts Students'

Background. In 1996 the faculty endorsed the recommendation
of the Subcommittee for Technology and Learning (the "Tech
Group Report") that "The educational experience of our
students reflect computer technology in three progressive steps":
an "Introduction to Learning in a Networked Community,"
"Communicating and Computing Across the Curriculum,"
and "Creative Contributions to a Networked Community."
Since then the Library, Technology and Learning Committee has
been responsible for the development and implementation of these
recommendations, primarily by funding faculty proposals to incorporate
information technology into the pedagogy and substance of courses
across the curriculum.

In the spring of 2000 LTLC revised the guidelines for these awards to encourage initiatives which would apply information technology beyond single courses and shape teaching practices and learning opportunities across a field or discipline, or in team-taught courses. The Committee also promised to support planning to help departments determine how they might meet these guidelines, both through small grants and through consultation and advice. The grants would enable departments or other groups of faculty to hold workshops and retreats, with input from Librarians and computing staff where desired, to develop appropriate technology goals and strategies for students in their majors and minors. Further technical support and training will come predominantly from the Academic Computing Center, the Library and IT&S.

While it is important for academic departments to develop goals and strategies for ensuring that their students acquire discipline-specific information technology skills, at the same time, the Committee believes that the broader curriculum must also expect students to acquire and understand basic IT skills and principles. We therefore drafted a list of basic IT goals for discussion at the January faculty/staff technology Workshop. While no formal faculty endorsement of this list was sought at that time, we believe it reflects, in its present form, widespread consensus about fundamental IT goals for our students.

These goals are meant to provide the basic information technology skills needed to achieve the learning objectives of a liberal arts education at Wheaton College. They are not to be seen as ends in themselves, but as tools for learning generally. As valuable as particular IT skills may be, moreover, our most important goal must be to help our students develop a conceptual understanding of technology and its function in an increasingly global culture. It is this understanding which will best prepare them for a future in which continued rapid technology change will be a pervasive reality.

Our mission with respect to information technology is to provide our students with the educational opportunities to:

acquire the fundamental tools of that technology and the understanding to use them productively and appropriately,
develop a conceptual understanding of information technology sufficient to enable them to learn new applications and programs and to assess new developments in the uses of technology from ethical and social perspectives, and
command the critical ability to evaluate and use electronic information responsibly and productively.

The Committee believes that acquiring, understanding and applying these skills should be a goal for all our graduates. We expect, therefore, that our students will begin to develop these skills and abilities through introductory general education courses, as well as in workshops and other to-be-determined "para-curricular" programs to be offered, for example, by the Library, the Academic Computing Center and the Filene Center. Most of these goals will need to be further developed in major programs and advanced courses in which IT skills and knowledge have become discipline-specific. Though this enumerated list presents technology skills as if they are discrete and unconnected, they are clearly closely connected and our aim must be to help our students integrate these skills broadly into their liberal arts learning.

The Goals:

Students should be able to engage in electronic collaboration and communication.
These skills include, for example, using email, listserves, file exchange (email attachments, drop bins, etc.); understanding interaction between different modes of electronic communication; collecting material from a variety of electronic sources into a single document.
Students should be able to use and create structured electronic documents.
For example: Word processing (composing, formatting and editing texts); beginning knowledge of Web authoring; introduction to hypertext (analyzing documents with links and hyper-enhancements, multi-applications).
Students should be able to do technology-enhanced presentations.
For example: Basic Web skills and/or basic features of presentation software.
Students should be able to use information retrieval systems for research.
This includes being able to define and articulate information needs, selecting the appropriate retrieval system for those needs (web search engines or directories, specialized or full-text databases, online catalogs, etc.), and constructing and implementing effective search strategies (using Boolean logic, keyword and controlled vocabulary searching, etc.). Students should be able to extract, reformat and record, and correctly cite relevant information and its sources. It is particularly important that they learn to evaluate electronic information critically and recognize the limitations of electronic resources. This goal must be addressed at all levels of the curriculum, including upper-level courses in most majors.
Students should be able to use spreadsheets and databases to manage information.
For example: organizing data in worksheets; setting up tables, editing records, conducting simple queries, and constructing simple forms or reports; understanding the range and appropriate applications of spreadsheets and databases.
Students should understand and stay current with major legal, ethical, and security issues in information technology.
They should understand privacy and copyright issues and liabilities, "netiquette," and the ethical issues involving hacking and open-source versus proprietary standards. They should be able to assess critically the benefits and limitations of information technology to our own culture and in the global culture which it has fostered.
Academic departments and curricular areas must determine appropriate IT skills and competencies for their students at advanced or discipline-specific levels.

Last updated on 1/18/06.
Send questions about this page to Jenni Lund or contact Wheaton College.