I am personally very passionate about teaching Information Technology as literacy and/or fluency and am brainstorming about what the “perfect” course about technology might be for freshman/sophomore/high school.
I have several rules about such a course: (1) it must be useful to any student regardless of their major, (2) it must be interesting and lively, (3) it must cover a wide range of topics and only go deep enough in each topic to be useful to the student, (4) it must give the students both short-term and long-term skills, (5) it must waste any time on detours designed to prepare students to be computer science majors, and (6) it should expand student’s thinking about technology and how they might use technology during the rest of their lives and careers.

I came up with two courses.

Your Personal Portfolio

This course will help you plan for and build a web-based personal portfolio that you can use for the rest of your life. You will learn both the technologies needed to develop a web site and learn how to design a portfolio and use your portfolio to present yourself to others. When students complete the course they will have built an initial version of their portfolio and have it up and running on the Internet. Students will also have the skills to maintain and expand their portfolio as their career progresses. This course will introduce the students to a number of technologies including HTML, CSS, graphic design, media development, and hosting sites on the Internet. The course will also cover Information Architecture and the design of usable and accessible web sites as well as giving students instruction on how to use a portfolio in a job search.

Fluency with Information Technology

This course will examine how the technologies we use every day work and give students an insight as to how they can better use Information Technology throughout their lives and careers. Topics covered include: understanding the technology of the Internet, writing programs to search and analyze data, writing programs to interact with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, building web pages with HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, fundamentals of how computers work, exploring how search engines work, how databases store and retrieve information, understanding the potential and limitations of information technology, how computers represent and store information.
This course is very much aligned with the ideas presented in the “Being Fluent with Information Technology” report from the National Research Council – http://www.nap.edu/html/beingfluent/

A possible textbook for this course from Addison-Wesley titled “Fluency with Information Technology” written by Lawrence Snyder of U Washington – http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/snyder/

http://www.mypearsonstore.com/bookstore/product.asp?isbn=0321512391

You can see the table of contents under the tab titled “Description”
Thanks to Mark Guzdial of Georgia Tech and Jim Eng who helped me think through some of these ideas on a Facebook discussion over the weekend.

Comments welcome – please send E-Mail since my blog software is an antique.