Re: [dm-l] Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities computing course?

-- Daniel Paul O'Donnell [/pda] Department of English University of Lethbridge Lethbridge AB T1K 3M4 Canada Tel. +1 (403) 329-2377 Fax +1 (403) 382-7191 E-mail daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca Web http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ -----Original Message----- From: James Cummings Date: 22/8/05 23:40 To: Digital Medievalist Community mailing list Subj: Re: [dm-l] Should Medievalist Graduate Programs require a humanities computing course? Abdullah Alger wrote: > Anyway, now that I am at the University of Manchester I see that there is > an enormous gap that needs to be filled. Some of the students here cannot > even copy a file correctly or do simple tasks in Word. We do have some > courses that enable some students to understand some basic concepts, but > if you ask them what HTML is or how to write a web page there will be > question marks written all over their faces. Is it really the job of humanities departments to provide this education? These tasks are basic computer literacy which has little to do with 'Humanities Computing' per se. Almost every university in the UK has some provision for IT training should students require it. Even at the University of Manchester where you are students can take courses via the IT Services: http://www.itservices.manchester.ac.uk/trainingcourses/ Surely what you should be doing on any course which requires basic IT skills (or heaven forfend more advanced skills!) is stating this as a prerequisite and directing students to the IT Services to receive training in these skills. If teaching a course (say on use of XML for producing critical editions or general text encoding) I don't think that we should feel any compunction in listing basic familiarity with HTML as a prerequisite, as long as students have access to training in that area. (I'm not suggesting you say they must have taken specific course X, simply that they are aware that it is a prerequisite and so they should have learnt it somewhere.) It just seems to be an inefficient waste of resources for us to duplicate training that is already available to most students. Great, offer topics which use a higher level of technology to drive the learning process, but where it isn't the end in itself (teaching palaeography on computer is a good example of this). If increasingly all the interesting courses list 'At least basic computer literacy' as a prerequisite then students will start to make sure they have these skills. But of course, I was using mainframes at the age of 8, so my perspective may vary from yours. ;-) -James _______________________________________________ Digital Medievalist Project Homepage: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org Journal (Spring 2005-): http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/journal.cfm RSS (announcements) server: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/rss/rss2.cfm Wiki: http://sql.uleth.ca/dmorgwiki/index.php Change membership options: http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l Submit RSS announcement: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/newitem.cfm Contact editorial Board: digitalmedievalist@uleth.ca dm-l mailing list dm-l@uleth.ca http://listserv.uleth.ca/mailman/listinfo/dm-l