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You would be surprised how many normal adults simply cannot reliably save a file in a known place, much less retrieve it. I'm not talking about dummies either.

You would be surprised how many normal adults simply cannot reliably save a file in a known place, much less retrieve it. I'm not talking about dummies either. Try teaching some community education classes some time, it will give you a enhanced appreciation fornthose who design user interfaces for things like ATMs, pointnof sale systems and such. Kids do do better than adults, but the are learning a particular set of interface conventions, and worse they are learning it as a language, rather than as a set of abstract principles. When the paradigm changes they often have just as much trouble as their parents.

singular 16y ago
A real-life example:- a significant chunk of people I have worked with, who are working with computers every day, don't know how to open an application if the application's icon does not appear on the desktop. Seriously.
- hackerblues 16y ago
  I am 23 years old and today I watched a youtube video to learn the proper way to cut up an onion. I cook a lot with onions, maybe two or three times a week, and before today I didn't know how to dice an onion except to slice it into rings and then hack at it a lot. Seriously. Is this evidence that I am fundamentally unable to cut an onion? No. After I watched the video I went and did it. It's just that in the past I knew enough to get the job done and so learning anything more on the topic didn't have a huge priority.
  - commieneko 16y ago
    I have spent hours in a class room trying to teach adults to reliably save a file in a known location and later open it. How to create folder to hold related files for a project. Some students are insulted by the simplicity of those exercises, but others _never get it_. I can walk them through the motions, draw tree diagrams till we are all sick of them. Some times I can train them to recreate a particular example, but they are still unable to generalize what is going on. And the are not dummies I'm talking about.

singular 16y ago

A real-life example:- a significant chunk of people I have worked with, who are working with computers every day, don't know how to open an application if the application's icon does not appear on the desktop. Seriously.

hackerblues 16y ago
I am 23 years old and today I watched a youtube video to learn the proper way to cut up an onion. I cook a lot with onions, maybe two or three times a week, and before today I didn't know how to dice an onion except to slice it into rings and then hack at it a lot. Seriously. Is this evidence that I am fundamentally unable to cut an onion? No. After I watched the video I went and did it. It's just that in the past I knew enough to get the job done and so learning anything more on the topic didn't have a huge priority.
- commieneko 16y ago
  I have spent hours in a class room trying to teach adults to reliably save a file in a known location and later open it. How to create folder to hold related files for a project. Some students are insulted by the simplicity of those exercises, but others _never get it_. I can walk them through the motions, draw tree diagrams till we are all sick of them. Some times I can train them to recreate a particular example, but they are still unable to generalize what is going on. And the are not dummies I'm talking about.