Support As A Business: Teaching Troubles

      I am often helping people with their computers, in various ways. And often enough this leads to teaching various things. In the course of doing the task I have been hired to do, questions come up and the activity can move towards teaching. Not always, but it does happen.

      While I have no formal training in teaching, I seem to be able to do it well enough. Most of the time, I can tell when the person I am helping has learned what they need to. Unfortunately, there are times where I can tell that my student isn’t learning what I am teaching. That can be challenging, but usually we can change the way we are going about it and work things out in the end. May be a little frustrating, but if at first you don’t succeed…

Drink a Solid

      At times I can tell from what I am being asked to do, that my client does not understand what the computer is doing, and is therefor not making a sensible request. Usually this leads to explanations and then changing the request to meet the desired result.

      Using the real world as an analogy, I might be asked to drive a car to France. To which the obvious response is ‘a car would sink in the ocean’, so how about a boat. End result is reached (get to France), but initial request didn’t happen (not driving).

      A computer example could be being asked to copy someones email from one computer to another. If they are using web-mail (as most people seem to), then there is nothing to copy. Just login on the new computer. So a quick explanation and they are set. Again, the initial request was not fulfilled, but the end result was.

Surprise Sidestep

      As a tangent, I believe changes in the operating systems (and browsers) are at least partially responsible for this. In an attempt to maximize the number of people that can use computers, certain things are streamlined, simplified, or obfuscated. While this can be of benefit, it can have the side effect of the end user not having any idea what they are doing. Fine so long as everything is ‘working’, but as soon as something isn’t, everything is Greek. This leaves the end user unable to coherently explain their problem, let alone ask for help (to say nothing of fix it themselves).

      This does help in the short term, by having more people benefiting from using the technology. In the long term, it causes problems by people not actually understanding what they are doing, while still expecting it to work when they go through the motions. See ‘Cargo Cult‘.

Hear a Flavor

      Which is where the biggest challenge (and frustration) comes in. There are times I am helping people, and can tell from their requests they don’t understand what they are asking. Yet they do not want to learn. Which usually leaves me doing my best to meet what I have been asked to do, knowing that it’s not a proper solution. All while any attempt to explain why get nowhere.

      The failure is entirely mine, as my job is to resolve the issue. Yet it is frustrating when it happens. Thankfully it is rather rare. It reminds me of the saying about leading a horse to water. At the end of the day, I can only do what I can do.

      Keeping particular examples of occurrences vague because no one needs to have their details shared like that…