RE: [TCLUG:15761] End-Users (was:Re: [TCLUG:15722] Docs in 'share')

["Eric Hillman" <ehillman@cccu.com>]

> IMHO, what distinguishes a geek from a marketing person; is that a geek will
> give you lots of cool tools, and expect you to figure out what to *do* with
> them. a marketing person will tell you what something is good for, and then
> hope you believe them and go along with them like a good little sheep.


As long as we're on the subject...

I've been mulling over this sort of thing for some time, mainly in some sort of
attempt to figure out if it's possible to turn our hordes of technophobic users
into people capable of doing at least basic troubleshooting on their own...

There's a quote, don't know who said it first, that goes something like this:
"Experience is a terrible teacher -- it gives you the test first, and the lesson
second."

Terrible or not, I'm sure this describes exactly how most of us were "taught"
computing.  Whether or not you've had formal training, you probably made your
biggest leaps of understanding when you were confronted by the need or desire to
do something you had no clue how to do, and worked it out bit by bit.  You
assembled data from various sources, experimented with putting them together in
various ways, until you eventually found your answer (or something close
enough).

Every day I'm confronted by people who, when they encounter a situation they've
never run into before, immediately go into some kind of mental kernel panic
because "nobody ever told me how to do this."  I regularly have people come to
me with questions about programs I have no more knowledge about than they do,
because they apparently feel I was born with the ability to understand software.

I'm not sure whether this is human nature or something for which blame can be
assigned, but it seems to me that our educational system trains people to think
backwards -- that everybody expects to be given the opportunity to memorize the
Right Answers before they take the test, when in fact pretty much nothing in
life works this way.  It's not so much that I expect everybody to be able to
handle computers as well as I do (after all, I probably wouldn't get paid as
much) but this stark inability to apply basic problem-solving skills is totally
beyond me.

OK, that's enough ranting out of me for now...

--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/./printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
(74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex$&]/ge;'