How can we know what we don’t know?

When every one of your students was born in the microcomputer age, and none knows a time without computers, how much should you assume that they know about the basic operation of a desktop computer? What basic vocabulary can you be certain will be understood? Can you take for granted that they can use the standard features of an operating system and of applications? Do the fundamentals of the interface need to be explained? What about the shortcuts that enhance productivity?

And if students don’t know what they don’t know, how can you ask them to tell you?

I quite like my students: they’re personable, friendly, polite, respectful, energetic, engaged, enthusiastic, intelligent, diligent, and committed. But I’m sometimes surprised by the gaps in their knowledge. They’ve spent their whole lives with and around computers, yet to them much of a computer’s operation is a black box.

I always worry about spending too much time on fundamentals at the risk of boring the more knowledgeable students, and about spending too little time at the risk of losing students to whom the funda­mentals have never been taught.

My job in both cases is to turn a black box into a glass box; but in a community of learners, how can my students take responsibility for what they don’t know they don’t know?