Information Technology 3301-L2-LK-TI
An entry-level course meant to familiarize students with the basics of information technology. A range of productivity software will be showcased, including tools that students might find useful in their academic exploits. Relevant topics that border on computer science will be discussed, including – but not limited to – online security, cloud computing, operating systems, or artificial intelligence. The primary aim of the tutorials and interactive exercises featured throughout the course is to equip the student with the knowledge, skillset, and confidence to increase their computer literacy and help them function in a society that relies heavily on computer-based technologies.
Detailed topics will include the following (subject to updates, as technologies develop):
• Open source software: advantages and limitations; various methods of searching for information online; web browsers.
• Basic hardware and software terminology
• Effective and safe use of internet search engines (privacy options, clearing browsing data)
• System optimization (regulating system startup and system resource usage, controlling background applications)
• Introduction to word processing software and office suites (Word, Excel, PowerPoint; substitutes (OnlyOffice, LibreOffice, Google Docs). Basic formatting, styles, generating a table of contents, comments, tracking changes, basic Excel equations, medians, pivot tables)
• Presentation design (Google Docs/MS PowerPoint)
• Using research tools in office suites
• Searching for research texts, analyses, advanced searches, saving book excerpts.
• AI and large language models: Limitations, drawbacks, and ethical issues.
• Email communication and netiquette
• Basics of HTML.
• Collaboration, note-taking, archiving, and content aggregator programs.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the classroom is governed by the rules set forth in Resolution No. 16 of the Teaching Council for the programs English Studies, English Studies – Linguistics, and English Studies – Literature and Culture of 9 December 2025 (https:/drive.usercontent.google.com/download?id=1wKaGcMrfFe5GaziQgxXkHS1e6t9TvQcB&authuser=0&acrobatPromotionSource=gdrive_chrome-list).
Course coordinators
Type of course
Learning outcomes
Skills
For the BA program - English Studies - Linguistics
K_U12 use modern technology to acquire knowledge and communicate through a variety of communication channels and techniques nd principles of intellectual property protection and copyright law
For the BA program - English Studies - Literature and Culture
K_U11 use modern technology to acquire knowledge and communicate through a variety of communication channels and techniques
Assessment criteria
- participation in discussions
- written assignments
- carrying out tasks during classes
- projects completed during the semester
Bibliography
• Bott, E., & Stinson, C. (2020). Windows 10 inside out. Microsoft Press.
• Flowers, J. C. (2019, March). Strong and Weak AI: Deweyan Considerations. In AAAI spring symposium: Towards conscious AI systems (Vol. 2287, No. 7).
• Friedl, J. E. (2006). Mastering regular expressions. " O'Reilly Media, Inc.".
• Hawkridge, D. (2022). New information technology in education. Taylor & Francis.
• Kasneci, E., Seßler, K., Küchemann, S., Bannert, M., Dementieva, D., Fischer, F., ... & Kasneci, G. (2023). ChatGPT for good? On opportunities and challenges of large language models for education. Learning and individual differences, 103, 102274.
• McEnery, T. (2019). Corpus linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.
• Ose, S. O. (2016). Using Excel and Word to structure qualitative data. Journal of Applied Social Science, 10(2), 147-162.
• Pignalberi, G., & Dominici, M. (2019). Introduction to LATEX and to some of its tools. ArsTEXnica, 28, 8-46.
• Przepiórkowski, A., Bańko, M., Górski, R. L., Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B., Łaziński, M., & Pęzik, P. (2012). Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego. PWN, Warszawa.
• Shmueli, G., Patel, N. R., & Bruce, P. C. (2011). Data mining for business intelligence: Concepts, techniques, and applications in Microsoft Office Excel with XLMiner. John Wiley and Sons.
• Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., ... & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30.
• White, J., Fu, Q., Hays, S., Sandborn, M., Olea, C., Gilbert, H., ... & Schmidt, D. C. (2023). A prompt pattern catalog to enhance prompt engineering with chatgpt. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.11382.
• Wilson, K., & Wilson, K. (2014). Microsoft office 365. Using Office 365: With Windows 8, 1-14.
• Zaiontz, C. (2019). Real Statistics Resource Pack software (Release 6.8). Copyright (2013–2020).
• Zamfirescu-Pereira, J. D., Wong, R. Y., Hartmann, B., & Yang, Q. (2023, April). Why Johnny can’t prompt: how non-AI experts try (and fail) to design LLM prompts. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-21).