I Teach Seniors How to Use Technology
medium.com
medium.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
I don't just hand them the internet, I teach them everything I learned. And it's never a one time deal either. I've hit the setbacks you describe several times already too, and I still come back to help them. Often it's not about learning permanently but about helping them accomplish specific tasks. A lot of old people don't want to use the internet constantly like we do, they just want to FaceTime their grandkids once a week or look at sports scores and such.
I appreciate your concern that I know these things, but again, this is my life. I've been working on it several times a week for the past four years.
Side note, if Briana ever reads this: the extensive listings of awards and affiliations in this piece are kind of distracting
"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.
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.
You have to disable javascript to read it.
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.