I’m getting sick and tired of the “excuse,” “Kaya nga ako nag-English” as an excuse not to know basic math concepts and technology concepts.
I’ve been involved in IT education as writer, editor, trainer and consultant largely because part of my personal advocacy is the importance of IT. I do think that technology education should be given as much weight as math, science, and English courses in basic GE. However, since that education policy is still non-existent, we must do something about our current generation of learners.
It is frustrating that in terms of research methodologies, we language scholars are still stuck to early 90s qualitative approaches. Especially in today where research tools for doing corpus-assisted research such as textual analysis software are now widely available. It’s not because the software is too expensive as freeware versions are already coming out. It’s because of students’ limited knowledge on computing.
In my thesis, I was able to use such software to fuse together qualitative and quantitative approaches and, as such, I believe that my claims are better substantiated. Anyone who has tried doing manual frequency counting of, say, pronouns in a 10,000-word corpus would attest to the difficulty. I did not had to go through such an issue all because I was willing to explore and experiment with these tools.
I still encounter people who would rather create their TOCs and bibliographies manually even though MS Office have had ways to automatically generate them. The efficiency these tools provide can help free students from the life of clerical drudgery so that they can pay attention more to deeper levels of analyses.
I believe that there is a need for basic IT courses to be offered. I know that several movements in the University. But can’t we have it institutionalized so that it will be required? Especially now that the RGEP is under review?