> > I told him that the first step was to get him comfortable
> > enough with a computer and the internet to be able to send
> > emails back and forth with his children. I didn't think this
> > was going to be too much to ask.
>
> my immediate response is hysterical laughter.. not at you, but
Ohhhh Yeeesssss!!!
I remember when I replaced an obscure error message with "Huh?" in a
program that I had my mother enter data into. To her, it meant essentially
the same thing. And when she first saw it in response to a mistake, we
heard hysterical laughter coming out of the room. The thing was
alive?!?!!!
> the real problem of learning computers isn't mechanical.. the
> sequences of mouse-clicks and menu items and so forth.. it's
> metaphorical. the combination of an operating system and a
> piece of software comprise an environment which has a
> surprisingly large number of basic assumptions you have to grasp
> before any of it makes sense.
Exactly.
> interchangeable. she'd tell me that "there was a problem with
> her HTML program, because when she opened the file, it wasn't
> there." after a great deal of frustration, i'd learn that the
> "program" was actually a webpage, and that the "file" was the
> directory where she thought it had been saved. the real
> problem was that she was looking in the wrong directory.
Similar.
> trouble. small children have a phenomenal ability to absorb
> and assimilate new information.. heck, who else do you know who
> can learn a language from scratch just by listening to the kind
> of babble adults inflict on babies? ;-)
I remember some of that babbling! A large dose of that learning is
determining whether the giants are telling the truth, or trying to get you
to play their game, while thinking you are an absolute idiot without a
clue! (How can I be a photographer if I am carrying an empty box the
camera came in, and Uncle is taking the picture? Mom and Aunt are lying
again!)
> there's a study out there somewhere which correlates level of
> formal education with ability to absorb technical information.
> twelve-year-olds score highest, and people with PhD.s score
> lowest. it has to do with the "chunk size" of information
> people choose. a twelve-year-old will look up the instructions
> for the specific thing they want to do at the moment, and have
> done with it. someone with a doctorate will try to read and
> comprehend the entire manual before ever touching the mouse.
> given that computer technology is pretty much a cick-and-observe
> position, the latter strategy doesn't work very well.
This is indeed an interesting observation. The first thing most of
us would-be computer geeks did when we read computer manuals, was to test
each of the instructions or operations to see how they worked, and whether
we understood what the book said. We started to stick them in to existing
programs we had written to see other effects.
And then... armed with some idea of what these things were, we tried
to see places where we could use the stuff.
Most of the relatives we are trying to teach take the opposite; they
know what they want to do as a large piece, then wonder why they can't
understand how to do it at once. And we try to teach them by getting them
to memorize, by rote, what to do.
It does not work that way, folks! Even I get brain dead under those
conditions unless I start writing everything down. Start with the pieces
and a few thins that can be done with them.
Linux/Unix DOS
echo bunch of words >file echo bunch of words >file
echo bunch of words >file echo bunch of words >file
cat file type file
echo bunch of words >file echo bunch of words >file
echo bunch more words >>file echo bunch more words >>file
more file type file | more
ls file dir file
rm file erase file
ls file dir file
oops, it's gone! Is it really?
cat file type file
Yup, it's gone!
So go change the name to something else, like boat
echo cheapa banana >boat
now go edit it with
pico boat edit boat
etc.
So that is what a file is, just a bunch of typing.
mail yourself@yourdomain < boat
elm
see, you got mail!
And other fun things that repeat the kind of fun toy stuff you did
when you first got those toy bricks, Lincoln logs, or home nuclear
laboratory kit.
(Hey, that last one we had to dispose of ten years later, when they
changed the danger levels on radium. I don't recall for sure if the
manufacturer send us a warning on that (I think they did;) but it wasn't
as bad as the kid in the March Reader's Digest. It would never pass NRC
today. And if you think that was bad, Herr Professor, a for real prof I
know from the surplus yards and electronic flea markets, tried to build a
cyclotron in his garage when he was a kid. Had he managed to get the
oscillator working, he says would have probably fried his parents and
neighbors. And himself. After he got into college, (a few years early,)
he learned he'd used the wrong kind of bricks for shielding. His parents
had taken out an extra large life insurance policy on him, having learned
the hard way there was absolutely no way of stopping him.)
I wasn't that dangerous. Well...
Letter to my father when I was 44:
http://www.mall-net.com/space/rockets.html
-J- (C) 1999, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------- http://www.mall-net.com/javilk/
----- Mad Scientists of the World, UNITE! Join [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----
----------- Home of the New, Improved Whatever-the-heck-It-is! -----------
----------------- Fred? You still there, Fred? Fred??? ----------------
GulP!
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