Research

Information technology literacy is the focus of my current research. I have also conducted research on IS curriculum, e-business, security, and diffusion of innovations. Publications in which my work has appeared include Journal of Information Systems Education, Journal of Computer Information Systems, Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, and Journal of Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology.

On IT Literacy
Education systems around the globe share a long history of assessing and amplifying reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. Not so for information technology literacy, which has been termed the fourth literacy.

The premise of my research is that the time has arrived for IT literacy. The phenomenal growth of the Internet, the digitization of popular media, and the ubiquity of the personal computer are driving the rising relevance of what has been labeled computer literacy, computer fluency, information literacy, ICT literacy, IT literacy, and so on. Adoption of a common term for the construct has been elusive; more difficult still has been coalescence around a universal definition that reconciles the dimensionality of the construct. Standardization in this regard, with the ultimate aim of assessing and augmenting IT literacy, is a challenge faced by educators at all levels.

In my research, IT literacy encompasses three dimensions: hardware and operating systems; productivity applications such as database and spreadsheet software; and information literacy, networking and the Internet. With my colleague Meg Murray, I have created an IT literacy course entitled Computers and Your World, developed an IT literacy self-assessment instrument that has been administered to hundreds of college students in the U.S. and abroad, and published and presented numerous articles on our explorations.