Are we spoon-feeding our users too much?

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some people just don't get it, even if they really want to

When he was in his late 50's my grade 8 graduate father was given a laptop to do some reporting. He brought it home and played with it and figured out what he had to do. Just like without any formal education he taught himself how to tear down and rebuild a car motor. 30 years later my brother "handed down" an old PC to dad. He's been trying to do some simple stuff, but he just doesn't get it. I walked him through the process of burning a CD and wrote out step by step instructions. But he still didn't get it. He wasn't familiar with "syntax". He simply didn't know where to look, even with the screen beeping and displaying a big informational message, which he didn't even notice. He's still trying, I got him a "dummies" book to play with.

The teachers mentioned, remind me of my teaches, oh so many years ago. You know the ones, like the great social studies teacher who couldn't run the film strip projector or 35mm film projector, and depended utterly on the "AV Geeks". The tech was cave man simple compared to a computer, but they just didn't get it. So they found a way to live with it and got on with the job.

Sure, maybe their life would be "better" if they could learn to use the computer. But for the most case, their jobs are not essentially teaching computing, it is teaching kids other subjects. If it takes extra "hand holding", fine hold their hands while trying to make them at least competent enough to get on with the job.

I thought the comment about "getting gas when the light goes on". The "idiot" light being a technological inovation because people were too technophobic (or simply too focused on driving where-ever) to read the analog fuel guage, causing them to regularly run out of gas.

To each his/her/it's own...

Posted by: Ron_007   Posted on: 01/06/09  (Edited: 01/06/2009 @ 08:02) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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