Introduction
You may well have found the opener to this chapter a bit insulting. Most of us are so familiar with using ICT these days that we do tend to take it for granted. This does give rise to a couple of problems for students, though. Firstly, not everyone has the same level of knowledge and experience and it can be very off-putting to feel that you are miles behind everyone else. Secondly, when you find yourself using technology to produce your assessed assignments, whether this is for the research or the final production, you may encounter one or two gaps in your knowledge.
Terminology familiarity checklist
Have a look at the following, just to ensure that you know what all of them mean.
You are probably familiar with all of them; if not, check your own computer to find what is where, talk to people who know more than you do, and consult ICT staff if you are really worried.
Do not go thinking it is an age thing
Sometimes, if you are a mature student, you have particular worries about ICT. Not that you are necessarily any less competent, and you may indeed have more experience of application ICT than some of your school-leaver peers. Sometimes it is the confidence rather than the competence that is lacking. You just assume that other people will know more than you, and it is often in ICT that this kind of anxiety surfaces. Whatever your experience with ICT before you started your course, remember that computers are your friends, not your foes. They are useful in five specific ways.
Word processing
This is simply typing written text, but with the facility to change it, improve it, and make it look more attractive. If you are working on an essay and you suddenly find that the paragraphs read much better in a different order, you can simply move them around. If you come across some new material that you want to add, you can easily slot it in at the appropriate point in the text. You can use your grammar and spell check, as long as you do not use these as an excuse for bad spelling or poor grammar.
Presentation software
If you have to give a presentation to others as part of any assignment, you can use presentation software to help you. This will help you to present material more attractively and more neatly. Just one word of warning, make sure that there are facilities available to run your presentation: it is more than infuriating to find you have done with that preparation, only to find yourself confronted with no more than a white-board and a clapped-out overhead projector. You can use your computer to prepare good OHP transparencies too.

Spreadsheets, databases, and statistics
Even if you thought you had not opted for a maths degree, you might be hard pressed to get through three years without encountering some statistics to interpret, or even wanting to produce some of your own. While a computer won’t necessarily fill in gaps in your mathematical knowledge, it will make it much easier for you to draw tables and charts, present financial data, and go through basic mathematical calculations.
The Internet
This is simply a brilliant research tool, like a giant library, but you have to know how to use it wisely.
There are various search engines (Google is probably the most well known) that allow you to find links to key words, names, etc. They give you access to millions of pages. Like any other information research, you can get far more out of it if you are clear about what you want to know, otherwise you just find yourself trawling through loads of information. Used well, it can help you with almost any subject you can think of, providing links to academic information and useful contacts.
Email
Perhaps you have already used email to communicate at work. If not, your use of e-mail has probably been confined to emailing friends and you would have found out that it is an easy way to keep in touch. As a student, there are two good reasons why email is useful. Firstly, it is a good way to keep in touch with tutors and lecturers when you can’t catch up with them in person. Secondly, if you are doing any research that entails contacting businesses and other organisations, email is an excellent way of making initial contact and often a highly successful one.
A few tips for email success
Email is instant, this is usually one of its benefits, but there are drawbacks. If you are displeased with your marks on an assignment and you feel a tutor has been unreasonable, it is easy to fire off a stroppy email. If you have to go and find them in person or put something on paper, you gain a valuable cooling off period. Think before you press “send”. More common, and less dramatic, is the tendency not to write clearly and succinctly. For someone on the receiving end, whether he or she is a tutor or a work colleague, this can waste their time and yours.
What you should not use your computer for
Apart from illegal activities that do not need an explanation here and the dangers of hasty emails mentioned above, there is another consideration when you are using ICT. It has made obtaining already completed assignments easier. This is plagiarising and cheating, and in the end, it will do neither your academic nor your working career any good. The fact that it is easier to import information and incorporate it into your own text does not make it any wiser. Academic staff are becoming increasingly alert to this problem. Have a look at Chapters 15 and 17 (should chapter references be included as they aren’t used to organise content in the CWS? Consider rewording) on essays and dissertations respectively, for further information on this.
Know your keyboard
If you have a good command of the keyboard, it will make all of the above benefits flow that much more easily, and this is especially true of word processing where you hope to work quickly and accurately. Not everyone can touch-type, but try to get beyond using two fingers. There are plenty of online typing tutorials that will really help. You will find that if you can use the keyboard well, you are faster, you make fewer mistakes, and you probably end up with fewer aches and pains in your hands, back, and neck.

More about the keyboard
Familiarity with the basic keyboard certainly makes you faster and more efficient. Once you understand the basics, check that you know how to use keys such as tabs, control, and the arrow keys. The function keys, F1 to F12, apply different functions according to what packages you are working with, so do not assume that just because you know what they do when you are working in
“Word”, it would be exactly the same if you are working in “Quark”.
Remember that user manuals and online help for whatever software you are using are most valuable resources.
What else do you need to know?
The mouse and the screen are the other two pieces of hardware with which you must become familiar.
Find out how to control your mouse, so that you can click and drag things easily. Work out which button does what. Never work out any of this in the middle of a really crucial piece of work. Keep your mouse clean, otherwise it becomes jerky and inefficient. Battery-powered radio mice are brilliant, but they are expensive. Understanding the screen is rather like the keyboard, get familiar with where to find things, how to move things and how to use menus and toolbars.
Your access to computers
Of course it is very annoying to read all this about what to do with your computer and the wonderful advantages of using your computer to help your academic career, but what if you do not have one?
While ICT provision is not identical at all universities and colleges, you will usually find very good ICT learning resources available to you. In the first few days of your course, you are likely to be offered a tour of and introduction to whatever facilities your institution offers. Note opening times and that at least you have the advantage of help on hand.
Some pitfalls
No ICT will sort out any weaknesses you have in your working style. It is, after all, only a tool. Having a kitchen cupboard full of cleaning materials does not mean you always have a clean kitchen or that you know exactly what is in that cupboard. Having good ICT skills and facilities does not always mean you use them to their best advantage. Three common problems are collecting too much information, failing to be tidy and organised with all the work material you have on your PC, and not making backup copies of material to cope the occasional technological disaster.
Too much information
It is great to use the Internet as a research tool for any academic assignment you are working on. It can genuinely save you hours and hours of research on paper and you do not have the problem of the book being out of the library. There is a danger though; you can do too much research. Every link leads to another link and if you are either a perfectionist or a hoarder, you just keep on looking for more and more material and more and more explanations. You are not helped by that finite, concrete feeling you get from finishing a chapter or closing a book.
It is not called a desktop for nothing
It can be stressful, sitting at your desk and looking at the piles of paper heaped up on the desk, the floor, the window sill, etc., making yet one more resolution to keep it tidy. The same applies with your
PC. If you do not get into the habit of storing things properly in clearly marked electronic files and folders, you can waste just as much time as you would sifting through piles of paper. It is really easy

to think it is obvious what a file means to you, but that seemingly “obvious” can soon drift into the utterly “obscure” as weeks and months go by.
Lost forever
If you throw something in the bin, it may end up in a landfill site: irretrievable forever. If you are careless about saving your work in progress, the same thing can happen. Use the save function often when you are working: it only takes a power cut or some other technical glitch for hours of patient research to vanish forever. Be careful when you delete something; make sure you really do not want it any more before you get rid of it. Make back-up copies on disk of important material so that if the worst happens, you can stay calm and relaxed.
True, it is not a pet, but look after it well
If you take good care of your computer and the material on it, you will get better returns. Apart from the obvious like not spilling coffee or wine all over the keyboard or not allowing your cat to run off with your radio-controlled mouse, there is not too much you need to do. There is one very important thing: install proper virus protection and update it. When your budget is tight, it is easy to be tempted to cut corners, but do not; if a virus ruins your work or a hacker gets into your system, it will cost you far more than the protective software.
ICT and your job search
If you are applying for a specific ICT job, network engineer, systems designer, applications, programmer, etc., then you will have to produce specific evidence that you possess the appropriate skills. For other jobs, the requirements are likely to be less specific. Many adverts and job specifications will simply say “a grasp of basic ICT skills”. Others will fall somewhere between the two and ask for a reasonable understanding of word processing and working with spreadsheets or databases. You do need to be truthful in your application (as always, of course), because your ICT skills can easily be tested as part of the selection process.
Not what you know, but what you could know
What is of real interest to most employers is whether you have the capability to learn about and become competent in using ICT applications. In other words, if they give you appropriate training and support, are they spending their time and their money wisely? Keeping this in mind, it is worth emphasising how quickly you learn new things or how much you enjoy learning something new, if it is clear that you will have to develop new ICT skills in any job you apply for. These might be learning to use a customer database, an engineering control system, desktop publishing, and much, much more.
Informal learner or informal teacher
One of the good things about working with information and communications technology is that it is one of those areas where you find there are things you learn quite a lot about that other people find difficult and conversely, other people become expert with problems that baffle you. Because everyone goes into the job market with different levels of knowledge and experience, you often find you are called on to help out a colleague and if you become the office ICT guru you can become very popular.
It is an excellent way to develop your teaching and training skills and add these to your CV.
A changing world
If you ask many people in a broad selection of professions what major changes they would predict for their industry or business, a common reply is that they expect the impact of technology to be very significant. This could be anything from speeding up a legal transaction to performing a medical

procedure or monitoring energy consumption. It encompasses financial management to waste management. What new entrants to any career need to have are an open-minded attitude, a willingness to learn, and an acceptance of change. It is for these reasons that employers are not always too concerned about exactly what skills you have to date.
A world of opportunity
Because technology is changing quickly and because employment patterns are such that you may find yourself changing jobs several times throughout your career, learning new ICT skills is almost bound to become part of your working life. Many companies provide excellent in-house training, especially when new systems are introduced. You will also find that ICT training is offered widely, through local adult education institutes and private colleges. You will have ample opportunities to keep on developing if you want to. If you understand computers you know when you are just being fobbed off with an excuse that something went wrong with the computer.