
I Teach Seniors How to Use Technology - DinahDavis
https://medium.com/code-like-a-girl/i-teach-seniors-how-to-use-technology-b9e4788d8ce7#.mc1ylj9bc
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eyelidlessness
I'm really disappointed at how many negative comments I found shortly after
this was posted.

While the author surely could use some guidance editing for both grammar and
finding an appropriate way to express bona fides, the content is clearly
expressed as a person who has already faced an uphill battle learning how to
participate as an outsider in existing tech circles, and has learned how to
bring others who have been treated as outsiders in to participate. This should
be encouraged!

My advice to the author is that if you're publishing an article for general
consumption, declaring your qualifications may be taken as defensive.
Unfortunately, the expectation is that your qualifications will stand out and
that you'll be barely noticeable in your humility. "Your work" is supposed to
"speak for itself". Fortunately for you, your work absolutely does and will.

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ocdtrekkie
Teaching seniors how to use technology is a great way to learn how a lot of
recent trends in software development are awful to certain groups of people.
Namely, when you teach someone a button is somewhere, and it looks a certain
way, that's what they look for.

Today's trend of constantly redesigning and refreshing the UI is a TERRIBLE
experience to these sorts of users. For seniors, a Comcast or AT&T mail
website is actually better than a Google account, because the former two
change their UI less often.

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jolux
This is basically my life as a high school programmer except I never thought
it was interesting enough to write a Medium post about. Newsflash: old people
want to use technology but can't. You can help them learn how. It's not
difficult.

If I sound snarky it's because this reads like a college essay which while not
problematic of itself makes it extremely distracting to read as someone who is
not an admissions officer.

Nonetheless it's still cool and vitally important. I just wish it had a less
clinical feel to the writing.

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sandworm101
>>You can help them learn how. It's not difficult.

You have to be really really careful. Most of us learned about technology when
we were young, before we had credit cards and retirement plans. Handing an old
person the internet, opening them to the world of scam artists that implies,
is very dangerous.

When working with seniors one must also be ready for stereotypes to be true.
Not all old people have bad memory, but many do. It can be very frustrating to
work with someone every day only to have that work disappear overnight. Often
lack of memory manifests as aggression and paranoia. It is not unusual to work
with someone every day for weeks, only for them to suddenly accuse you of
stealing. You have to be ready for these setbacks.

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Natsu
I actually did both. That is to say, I taught seniors [0] both how to use
computers and about the scams they would find online, with specific examples
and even some taken from the spam of my own email account. I gave full
descriptions of different variations on the scams and how they play out for
the people who actually buy into them. It's not too hard for them to get the
basics down with a little practice and they remember the scams better if
they're presented in story form.

[0] Technically, the classes were open to anyone in the community, but nobody
under ~50 was interested in those topics at those times, so almost everyone in
every class appeared to be retired.

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keypusher
This reads like a college application essay, and I don't mean that in a good
way. The first half of the piece is just a list of high school accomplishments
and the second half is vague and full of platitudes. Tell us what you learned
when teaching seniors. Specific techniques you have found that worked, and
ones that didn't. The highlight of the entire piece was a description of how
one senior didn't understand how to tap his cellphone screen correctly, and
that particular part desperately needed a proofreader.

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jacobolus
It’s great when high school students volunteer to help local senior citizens.
Makes everyone feel great, and can be a huge help to the seniors. There are
plenty of retired people who have time to engage with technology, and could
get a lot out of it, but aren’t able or willing to dive in without some hands-
on help and support.

Side note, if Briana ever reads this: the extensive listings of awards and
affiliations in this piece are kind of distracting

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iandanforth
Aside: Is English this person's native language?

"I showed to him how to tap _with the warmth of your finger_ " is a _very_
interesting turn of phrase and I'm curious what language it comes from.

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Animats
Maybe she thinks touch screens are heat-sensitive.

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VLM
Some google shows its a rare belief but there are people out there who've
convinced themselves its true and like to talk about it.

I think its brilliant for teaching. I suspect opinions about it will be
similar to attitudes toward anthropomorphizing, does the value of the noble
lie outweigh the ethical concerns of knowingly lying? A teacher could work
around the ethical issue by babbling onward with a correction to make the
teacher feel better at the cost of confusing the student "Yeah press and hold
like it as to sense the warmth of your finger, it doesn't really work that
way, but the point is you need to hold still for a second or two"

She could have made an interesting non-college admissions essay on that sub
topic.

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jtlien1
Well a lot of "seniors" like me have used computers since they were programmed
by punch cards. Bought my first PC in 1983 and have built my ever since.
Ubuntu user now. Back when I learned to program, you needed to know the inner
workings of the machine you programmed for. I'm not sure many of the younger
programmers do.

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AndrewWorsnop
This article has now been deleted? Anyone grab a copy before it went down?

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Buge
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160718120856/https://medium.co...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160718120856/https://medium.com/code-
like-a-girl/i-teach-seniors-how-to-use-technology-b9e4788d8ce7)

You have to disable javascript to read it.

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mindcrash
Status 410 - Article removed by author.

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raresp
Great initiative. Good job.

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VLM
I propose the business model of being a live helpdesk-lab for non-
technologically fluent people.

Essentially the apple genius bar/desk thing for non-apple products.

Where I live the parks n rec dept competes with the local community college
for what boils down to "intro to XYZ for seniors" classes where XYZ is
everything from basic operation to office applications to photoshop to CAD.
Similar to the linked article topic although obviously on a much larger scale.
My wife convinced my MiL to attend and she enjoyed it with three problems:

1) They had seniors running the lab on the theory that seniors are less
intimidated and some aspect of monkey see monkey do. It is true that a 66 year
old retired CAD draftsman is probably pretty well qualified but they also had
70-80 year old instructors and you know how MS has to completely change the UI
for office every two years or so, so it decays into blind leading the blind.
Of course a kid isn't going to be any better or faster at using the new UI
they'll just have a better attitude. But yeah... there's a demand for course
beyond "wheres the power button" and its VERY hard to find knowledgeable
instructors for those higher level courses.

2) They actually made the local paper by banning students from taking classes
more than 3 times, some people took the same course 20 times, being a
laboratory format people were encouraged to bring in real life examples from
home and its cheap because retirees are "poor" and getting help at the lab is
more pleasant than using telephone support, so retired people were signing up
twenty times for the same photoshop class to methodically redo entire
scrapbooks full of photos. See also the genealogy class and some others.

3) The third and final problem they had was assuming it was almost a weed-out
engineering class like multivariate calculus at uni where 200 of my closest
friends sat in a lecture hall. Well not quite that bad. But they miss the
point that its fundamentally a special ed program. 99% of the population "just
does it" so via natural self selection they have students who really need
help, like some are functionally illiterate or innumerate as a fundamental
problem, for example. You can staff a multivariate calculus discussion group
at an engineering school with 25 high math achievers and one non-English
speaking TA and it'll work, but a special ed senior computing skills class
requires near 1:1 ratio for some of the students, leading to the problem above
of some stubborn students take the class 3, 4, 5 times before they figure
everything out. You need teachers who know special ed and old people primarily
with all this IT or CS stuff secondarily or even irrelevant. You don't need
someone who can do red/black trees, you need someone who can handle "impatient
and anger mgmt issues" or is smart enough to do it themselves other than being
illiterate or is just plain ole mental illness level depressed and needs to
talk or whatever. Special ed students mixed in with regular ole students of
course, because they aren't pre-testing or tracking students based on ability.

At any rate, whats portrayed as a disaster for a community college with its
predetermined teaching model and assigned from above curricula could be
someone else's business model of "physical helpdesk as a service". Maybe for
more skilled users a virtual helpdesk as a service, I donno.

