It's not only important background information.

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In almost all of my lectures, either as part of an introduction or snuck in somewhere among the meat of my presentation, I make a point of telling something that I think is important about myself. I tell my audience that I am not a computer person but instead that I'm an educator and a humanist who many years ago reached the conclusion that if we (after all, my audiences are almost always educators) don't learn not only to feel comfortable with computers but also to define how we think they should be integrated into our lives, then the computer people out there are going to do that for us, and the results aren't going to be what we want. Too many educators seem to see the way in which computers are used as a lost cause, a foregone conclusion - they have no control over defining our needs with the computer but can instead only adjust themselves to the way computers work. And of course if they do that, they'll never be able to be on the defining side.

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Go to: It'll never work?, or
Go to: Digital Democracy