Henry in Guyana

As mentioned in my last post, over the past two weeks I have been running classes at Mercy Wings in the IT lab. Mondays sees the Introductory class, Tuesday the Intermediate class and Thursday the Using IT for Teaching class. As of this weekend there will be a 2 week break for the Easter holiday (when I disappear back into the interior again!) followed by two more weeks.

I also did a one-off session on how to install a computer from scratch-right from wiping the hard drive up to installing drivers and service packs. The idea is that every computer comes out the same, and crucially if a virus or some other problem affects it, there are people in place (with instructions and CDs) who can easily wipe it and restore it to a good level. My personal opinion is that a lot of the time, if a computer is playing up (running slowly, mysterious behaviour) the best solution is to do a fresh install.

Anyway, the classes have been going OK. The introductory course is the most popular with about 8 attendees and has so far involved turning on, using the mouse, and saving documents. It's an interesting experience to have to go right back to basics; things many would take for granted, such as double-clicking, are naturally quite alien to those not computer-literate. A problem I have found is that after moving the mouse, someone will then take their hand off and click. This has the slightly frustrating effect of moving the cursor ever so slightly, such that something else is clicked on. Bring in a double click and things get even more fun as the mouse scoots around, and the clicks are far enough apart that the computer thinks you just clicked on two different things.

It also makes you appreciate how a user interface is designed - and its flaws. Using a fresh copy of Windows XP SP3 and Office 2007, to those in the know things are pretty simple. To a complete novice however, things are quite tricky. For one, it is tricky to come up with rules for when to single click and when to double click. Of course we double-click something on the desktop to open it, but those handy links that appear in folders that shortcut you to My Documents only require a single click. Double-clicking on these has unpredictable results as something different may register on the second click. Especially if you missed in the first place.

Often these situations have led me to hop over and quietly fix the situation using what probably looks like black magic with multiple mouse buttons and key combinations to the newcomer, but I simply understand what buttons do what.

We have been saving things in My Documents. This is handy as it is the default save area and easy to get to. Having said this, there are multiple routes to My Documents. You can get there through the Start menu (single click), open My Computer and click a link to it (single click) or navigate through C drive (double clicks). Things get interesting again when you are saving, as Office's save dialog makes My Documents look quite different to how it looks after navigating through the Desktop (and is navigated by double clicks, or selecting and clicking Open...I could go on).

The long and short of it is, for people who grew up in or became accustomed to using computers, these multiple routes are tolerable and even handy. Teaching it to newcomers is a bit more of a challenge.

A simple solution is to always do things in exactly the same way. This is an approach I have tried and my lessons are mainly based around sets of numbered instructions on how to complete a task. So we might open a document and write "Hello, everyone." (complete with the correct capitalisation, commas and full stops please) with step one being "Double Click on Microsoft Word on the Desktop" and the final step covering where to find the full stop.

This is a handy way of doing things as you can then take away these handouts and practice yourself. Until...Microsoft's handy new ribbon interface in Office 2007 (which I think works quite well) can be hidden, if it gets in the way, by clicking a small button which if you know what it does will minimise the ribbon. However, if you're a novice, and you arrive at a computer without its ribbon showing, you have no idea what to do. There are a lot of little standards like this in normal IT use which I take for granted, but if you've never met them, you would have no idea.