Step 1 – Click the File menu and select Open.
Step 2 – Navigate to the folder that contains your document.
Step 3 – Select your document and click the Open button.
Wouldn’t it be great if anything you ever needed to do on a computer could be done by following someone’s step-by-step instructions? When I was an undergraduate in the chemistry lab, we called this “cookbooking it”. When you had no clue about an experiment, you asked someone to write out the steps to follow. In the end, you could get the experiment finished without learning a single thing.
Unfortunately, my students want to cookbook too many computer skills. I try to communicate to them that the real world rarely produces problems that can be cookbooked. Here’s a typical project.
Create a graphical navigational tool for a web-based activity. Using the navigational tool, a user should be able to move through the site in a linear manner or jump to a specific page in the activity. Here is an example.
A student this week asked if I had a step-by-step guide for completing this activity. I answered with a question. “Which step?”
We learned how to create graphics in a multimedia class. The links were from an HTML class. Navigational aids were discussed in several classes… Integration, Multimedia, Telecommunications.
Too many times our students choose the cookbook method of completing a project. In the end, enough isn’t learned about the underlying processes involved and the knowledge cannot be used to synthesize more complex projects.
In my freshman technology course, I have resorted to assigning the creation of tutorials. There are certain questions that most of these students ask me during the junior year when they create the junior portfolio. They cannot remember how to put the things together from a course taken two years earlier. Anticipating this, I have them create tutorials in Word. This first one is simple. Create a tutorial showing how to capture the screen from the computer, crop the picture and place the cropped picture into a Word document. Each step must include a graphic with corresponding written instruction.
Two years after they create these tutorials, I point them back to them when they ask me how to cookbook the portfolio. Cookbooking is ok if you write the cookbook.