How do old dogs learn new tricks?

[Roj]

Have you ever tried to teach Amigas (or anything else, for that matter) to someone who has the god-awfullest hard time learning and remembering how to do things with a computer? Maybe it isn't the fact that they can't remember anything so much as they just won't remember, and are either afraid or reluctant to try anything that might reveal a "secret" as to how the thing works without receiving a 45-page description complete with arrows and captions about what a particular button or gadget will do before they get the nerve up to click it.

How do you guide someone from being terrified to click something because they're afraid they'll wipe their hard drive to someone who's able to figure things out on their own without recoiling every time they hit mouse button? Anyone have any tales to tell to boost my morale on the subject? Patience only goes so far. :-)

[Roj]

Once UAE is set up, that's where the problems start. Simple things like finding the amount of free space on hard drives, how much memory is available, or just remembering that there's a difference between the two can be a challenge.

One of the things that brings about lots of fun is when error requestors pop up. You know the kind: "Are you sure you want to delete ALL the files on drive DH0:?" and out of either confusion or obliviousness (I'm not sure which yet) the OK button gets clicked. Joy. I've got complete backups of the drives, so it's not a major ordeal. But I see requestors getting ignored, ("click the first button the mouse points to as quickly as possible and hope") both on Windows and the Amiga.

Is it normal to completely ignore the info the OS just popped in front of you, and then turn and ask a question that was answered by the requester that just got completely ignored?

This happens often.

How do you deal with this type of stuff and still keep your manly hairstyle? I'd really like to see this person become self-sufficient, but I'm not entirely sure how to get there. She's got the smarts for it, but there's like this fog-thing going on that has to be worked through.

[Roj]

@Holley

Well... the person happens to be my girlfriend. And despite my warnings and insistence that Amigas aren't for everyone, she's hungry to learn what she can. Unfortunately, her hunger isn't self-sustaining like mine was back when I knew nothing. When I'd get stuck, I'd dig in and wring the answer out. When she runs into trouble, she stops and won't go any further until I've written out 47 pages of notes with arrows and captions detailing what the next step is.

@Ilwrath

I think you've hit the nail on the head. I haven't done much in the way of building confidence. So far my approach has been 1) pump out information and instruction and 2) experience shock and horror when my elaborately presented information and instruction isn't immediately absorbed. That's where I can certainly do better.


In some ways, I think starting out with a system like my first A500, a system which had plenty of appeal at the time but didn't automate much of anything, and relied on floppies and user know-how to get anything done taught me that if I was going to get anywhere, I had to grab the bull by the horns and just dive in. Nowadays, with Windows being fully functional and productive right after installation, people don't have the same prerequisites. In a way that's good because people can focus more on the software they're using. But it's also not so good because when things go wrong, they're completely lost until the machine comes back from the shop.

Another simple problem that cropped up today was a misunderstanding that the location of a file on a hard drive determines the type of the file, what can load it and what can't. Saving a jpg in with other pagestream documents and then loading that jpg as a pagestream document can cause all kinds of funky stuff to happen. Windows is a little smarter about it than the Amiga is, but it still helps to have a grasp on what's really going on there.

So here's the question: do you think it's worthwhile to set up a completely out-of-the-box A500, show a few things that'll get the learning process started and let nature take its course? She wants to learn, and I think the things she's wanting to know aren't retained as well on a fully-configured system. I'm thinking if she uses a system that doesn't do anything Windows users (or halfway decently configured A4000 Tower users) take for granted, and makes some progress with it, she'll come away with a better understanding of what makes computers tick in general. Does this make any sense?

I'm afraid though that having used Windows as long as she has, she's kind of spoiled in what she expects computers to do for her, which is going to make it more difficult for her to grasp some of the pieces that'll put things in better perspective.