hammer wrote:
>
> The "reason" for all this seems to me coming from somewhere "outside"
> of the logic/use of the (still, relatively new) comuter application.
>
> As you seem to work at a school lab, perhaps you could think of a
> pedogogic experiment ?
I'm way ahead of you. <grin>.
BTW, I dont work there "officialy" anymore. Finished high-school,
however I still have my login and the (new) admin always glad to have
me drop around to help.. I guess that it good when the girlfriend
is busy and there is nothing to do in a weekend. :)
Here are the results of the behaviour experiments:
> (a) a Win-set up 'puter without mouse
This happenes very oftenly, as the students just love to take out
the rubber balls from the mouse devices. The mouse is then, obviously
left crippled and non-functional. All of them obiously called the
admin to replace the mouse or fix it. Until it was fixed, this is
what happened: The more "expert" users (those who have computers for
several years) used the keyboard-shortcuts. Those who knew less,
tried to move the cursor by manipulating the mouse movement sensors
with their finger (it worked, but bulky.). The total newbies and
those who "just plain hate computers" sat down, stared at the screen,
or talked with the person who sat near them about what was illogical
in the last episode of "sliders".
Its intresting to note that since Windows 95 was installed, non
of them even thought of trying to use a DOS-box or rebooting to DOS,
like some of them used to do with 3.11.
> (b) a mouse-driven DOS-shell
> (I don't use any but I think the better shells offer that)
I guess we can use Norton for this example.
Norton Commander was the single most popular file-management in that
school, besides fileman.exe from 3.11. The novices either refused
to touch the system, or asked someone to run their programs, the abit
more advanced asked for fileman.exe. The experts either used command
line or NC. 70% of the experts also prefered to exit Windows 3.11
before performing a DOS task, the rest just starting a DOS window.
Its intresting to note that almost all of them (novice, expert)
forgot to close the DOS box apon coming back to Windows, and just
kept opening new ones, resulting in many DOS tasks, and a system
crash a short while later.
Last year, the entire system
was replaced from a Novell with DOS/3.11 clients to an NT running
Novell, with W95 clients. Nobody use anything else but "my computer".
The more experts dont touch NC anymore, instead they access the
"full featured" explorer (not via "my computer".). I got mocked
many times there for being "cought" using NC and DOS Navigator
(which I had on my home-dir.)
> (c) a Mac without mouse
We almost have no Macintoshs at all in Israel. (MS is very strong
here.). However, I do have a program called McShell GS that emulate
the Macintosh GUI on DOS. When I used it, people either asked why
I am still using 3.11, or since when the school have Macs.
All of them refused to get even near it. (Although they did liked
the MiB wallpaper I putted on it.)
BTW, I want to try and make a small contest: Zip a file, create
a new directory, move the zip-file to there, and unzip it. One
will be using Windows applications only, one will use DOS utilities
only. compression/decompression times and efficency would not be
calculated, however the time it will take for each to perform the task
(including loading time of the used software, not including Windows
or DOS booting) would.
This should be intresting.
Or Botton
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- "Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense."
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