Once students have taken and (ideally) practiced and mastered the skills involved in Intro. to Computers and Intro. to Windows, they are then ready to take on one of two courses. Introduction to Word is the first of many classes by which students begin to learn the productivity software available through Microsoft Office. Intermediate Word follows the introduction, followed by a number of choices. One can choose to learn Intro. to Excel, File Management, Intro. to PowerPoint, Publisher or Advanced Word — or one can take them all.
Students can also follow another path after Intro. to Windows beginning with Learning the WWW. From here, students can learn more information-based, Internet related classes such as Hotmail, Shopping on the WWW, Intro. to Library Services and Information Literacy. Sadly, only Shopping the WWW will be taught before the end of the year — classes end at Thanksgiving due to low turn out during the holiday season.
In Learning the WWW there were eight people in the class. Taught by a different librarian, a part-time librarian, I knew this class would give me an opportunity to observe another teaching style — and I wondered immediately why she was speaking directly to one lady in particular when there were six other people in the class. I soon accepted it as something of a public speaking technique. By picking out one person among eight, perhaps this made the experience more of a one on one encounter. However, as she explained to me after the class, three students in the back row, a mother (I am assuming) with two daughters on either side of her, were expecting a more advanced class; four others were attending the class for the second time. This left the one student the librarian was lecturing directly.
The lecture began with the history and development of the Internet and an explanation of networks generally. It struck me particularly when she said the Internet is not regulable and then, at another time, something to the effect that Internet access is ubiquitous thanks to satellites. This opening part was followed by a lecture on the WWW. URLs were discussed and their component parts were dissected.
When I attend these classes, I stand in the back of the room and monitor the students’ monitors, making sure they don’t get caught up at any moment and fall behind. Through the first half of the class, however, since there was only lecture and nothing hands on, I just sat in the back of the room and listened.
About half an hour into the lecture there was a slight disruption when the eighth student finally arrived. She was a little old woman with a very large coat and purse. As there is slight room between each computer station, this little woman’s struggle in pulling out her chair was perhaps not unlike a drunken bell ringer tugging at his rope as the clapper redounded off the seats of the students to either side. When she had fitted herself between her chair and table, and set down her purse, she began to remove her large overcoat and scarf.
But she settled in finally, after pulling out a sheet of notepaper and clearing the keyboard and mouse from her writing space (whether the keyboard and mouse were her own or the student’s on the one side of her) and squinting and observing from the far side of the monitor, then readjusting to look around the other side (and clearing away the mouse of the other student), until about half an hour later, she went through the whole process again in reverse order, taking everything with her to the restroom. The students on either side of her exchanged looks, but nothing violent ensued.
By the time the hands on portion of the class took place, the students had imbibed the librarian’s lecture and learned the title bar, the toolbox, and the browser, and were now being shown Yahoo’s subject directory and search engines, specifically Google. There was some obvious trouble on my side of the room with typing in particular, as well as understanding the difference between entering search terms into the browser and entering them into a search box.
One lady entered her search terms into the search box then would click on the Go button next to the browser. She couldn’t understand why nothing happened. I think this was the first time I began to wonder about the patience one must have to teach these classes regularly. The difficulty of typing in the right box, the difficulty clicking in the right place, the difficulty in using the backspace button to correct mistakes in typing, the difficulty in typing, the difficulty in highlighting a mistake to delete it, the difficulty in understanding what went wrong in what you wanted to do . . .
