Have you watched some of the construction taking place around the county? Sunloft, LaQuinta Hotels, and many others. Ever wondered how an empty piece of land becomes a building with a roof, walls, plumbing, and electrical? Plans, plans and more plans. Drawings, pictures, descriptions, notes etc. This is how someone can be hired, brought on site and set loose building something and magically, that which was vision becomes reality.
Learning to use the computer is exactly the same. Yes, we all have grandkids that when we ask them to help us with something on the computer, they sit down, we watch their hands and fingers fly over the keyboard and push the mouse here and there and sure enough what ever problem we had is solved. Unfortunately, we haven’t a clue what they did, or how they did it. Even I am guilty of this with my own mother. She will call me with a computer problem and I will take over her computer from my office and quickly resolve the problem and not spend the extra time to explain what I was doing.
So some of us at one time or another have signed up for and taken some computer classes. We sit with rapt attention as the instructor uses a computer tied to a projector and explains exactly the steps needed to perform a series of actions and the results we can expect to see. Sure enough the instructor gets exactly the outcome he said he would. We sit there frantically scribbling copious notes and can’t wait to head for home and dazzle others with our new knowledge.
Sometimes though, our computer doesn’t look exactly like the instructor’s. We look at our careful notes and wonder when we learned to write Greek. Worse, we realize that while we can write it, we can’t read it. Lost and bewildered we sit for hours trying to reconstruct the lesson but it just doesn’t come together. There has to be another way.
In the late 1990’s I spent many years traveling around the states educating employees of the company I worked for on how to use their new computers and the programs they would need to carry out their job tasks. I found that to be successful, I need the employees to HEAR what to do, SEE what to do and then DO the task. Then I would tell them to go back to their desks and do it again and again. But, like us, memory would fail and many would be frustrated when they could not remember the steps. In order to save myself many hours of moving from desk to desk trying to get them back on track, I would create a handout of the steps with pictures, descriptions and notes that would guide them to a successful learning experience. By the time the project ended five years later, I had created a library of “How To’s” for almost every function the employees had to perform.
Let’s look at a couple different methods of helping us learn to perform a task we would like to complete. Regardless of what program we are trying to use, there will be a HELP button. Not all help buttons lead to a useful and fact filled primer but most well known programs, Windows and Internet Explorer along with most websites offer extensive help tools. These help contents are also searchable which means that we don’t have to read the entire 5000 pages but can use the help search to look up just the material related to our problem.
The next tool is the Internet. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Excite or any of the search engines out there can be of great use when trying to figure out how to use a program. Let’s pretend that we can’t figure out how to add a picture to a document in MS Word. Just type “tutorial: MS Word” (without the quotation marks) into any search engine and hundreds if not thousands of tutorials will come up for us to review.
Some of us want to “see” how something is done. The steps involved and the order in which they were performed. There is no better place to begin our lessons than youtube.com. Surf to the site and in the search field type in the lesson we want to take. For example, I downloaded the general license program called Gimp. This is a photo editing program, very powerful, filled with features but because it is free there is no documentation on how to do certain things like bend text or replace colors. A quick trip to Youtube and sure enough there are hundreds if not more video lessons covering every facet of Gimp.
I have even used Youtube to find a video on how to replace a side mirror on a pickup truck and how to diagnose the instrument voltage regulator for a 1966 Mustang. Just about any problem we would like to solve, someone has made a video on the steps needed to solve the problem.
Class dismissed.
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Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer (9781467985895): Courtland Nederveld: Books
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Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks! (9781456561734): Court Nederveld: Books
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