Mac Justice: The Blog
Macs and Mac and games and drinks and stuff. You know. Internet people things.
Feb 22 '10
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“Why is the cursor arrow colored black instead of white on this computer? Is that bad?”
“This computer is making noises…the one I have at home doesn’t make these noises…shit, SHIT, I need a little help here, is it going to blow up or something?”
“John! There’s no tab key! There’s one that’s the same size, in the same place, but it has some symbol on it. Where’s the tab key?”
“Why the heck does this computer have TWO shift keys? Which one am I supposed to use?” And so on, and so on, and so on. Now, imagine what happens when somebody comes face-to-face with these little quirks for the FIRST time, when there’s nobody around to explain it. That person might just assume that they screwed something up, and they’d be that less likely to take chances in the future (i.e. clicking on different menus to try and find what they need, clicking “OK” and continuing with work when an unimportant error screen comes up, etc). However, if somebody learns from Day One that every computer is a little bit different, and that sometimes you have to click around a little bit to find what you need, they’re a lot more likely to see the computer for the versatile, fluid tool that it is, and will learn to adapt in order to accomplish their task at hand. I actually require my students to sit at a different workstation every day so they’ll be forced to adapt.”
“This computer is making noises…the one I have at home doesn’t make these noises…shit, SHIT, I need a little help here, is it going to blow up or something?”
“John! There’s no tab key! There’s one that’s the same size, in the same place, but it has some symbol on it. Where’s the tab key?”
“Why the heck does this computer have TWO shift keys? Which one am I supposed to use?” And so on, and so on, and so on. Now, imagine what happens when somebody comes face-to-face with these little quirks for the FIRST time, when there’s nobody around to explain it. That person might just assume that they screwed something up, and they’d be that less likely to take chances in the future (i.e. clicking on different menus to try and find what they need, clicking “OK” and continuing with work when an unimportant error screen comes up, etc). However, if somebody learns from Day One that every computer is a little bit different, and that sometimes you have to click around a little bit to find what you need, they’re a lot more likely to see the computer for the versatile, fluid tool that it is, and will learn to adapt in order to accomplish their task at hand. I actually require my students to sit at a different workstation every day so they’ll be forced to adapt.”
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Letters from Namitembo: Hands-on Teaching
John here is describing what I wish I could do with so many of my users every day. He’s lucky that he has the opportunity to teach them to be real computer users, rather than simple operators. I know people who cannot function if you so much as move an icon on their desktop to somewhere they didn’t look, or even if you remove one that they didn’t use at all! There’s a lot that we, the computer literate, take for granted, and it’s easy to forget that huge amounts of people never had the opportunity or interest to learn how to talk with a computer.
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