[SWLUG] Employment agencies

[Lyn David Thomas]

On Wednesday 02 March 2005 09:27, Steve Hill wrote:
> Too many times I see people complain that they can't use a machine running
> Fedora (with Gnome) - there's no button marked "start" and working out
> that the red fedora button does the same thing is too difficult for them.
> Then once you show them that they get confused because the menu says
> "OpenOffice Writer" instead of "Microsoft Word" - I mean this stuff isn't
> rocket science, but they've had it drilled into them from day 1 that all
> computers are absolutely identical so they don't try to solve problems
> when presented with something slightly different, they give up instead.

I work in a charity recycling computers and I find that many students do have 
this one track mind, they don't actually want to know how to do something but 
what sequence of keys they press to do the job... subtle difference.  Of 
course that is a wild generalisation but I think its a fair approximation of 
what most want.  Of course we all want hand holding at some point, and with 
many things the instructions assume some knowledge that may well be missing, 
which is fair enough, but the ability to pull relevant information from text 
seems to be disappearing.
-- 
Lyn David Thomas