I’ve bought laptops for old people who know nothing about computers and put OpenSUSE 11.2 with GNOME on them. I’d like to sign them up to this forum and have a section for the older peoples to come and ask questions, it would be good for OpenSUSE too I think it is a friendly distro to older people apart from deciding to show the bootup messages instead of hiding them with an ubuntu style splash (for me that’s good, it will probably scare granny).
Can we have an elder people on OpenSUSE forum section? Then I can create them accounts and they can ask you questions. I will teach them the basics and show them IRC. It could be an extra selling point for the distro too, I mean, these are the truly technically illiterate, and if they can get all going well and good with OpenSUSE it’s saying good things for the distro PR. Could even have additional support tools for them
Nobody can see a poster’s age on the forum, unless they choose to make it obvious, so why not just treat old newbies like any other newbie? You’re never too young or too old to be a newbie.
True, a poster’s age is not shown (and in an ideal world ought to be irrelevant anyway) but in reality a lot of newbies (and that’s not just on the OpenSuSE forums) get put off by some of the comments & replies they might receive - the language, acronyms, racy style, etc are often alien to older people.
Rob-fortune: this is a great idea and I hope your project is successful; a lot of older people are keen to learn as long as they can do things at their own pace and don’t have teenagers rubbishing their questions. One of our users is 85 and uses SuSE 9.3 and Compaq Tru64 UNIX systems quite happily in his maths -physics research work.
On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 14:56:02 +0000, rob-fortune wrote:
> Can we have an elder people on OpenSUSE forum section?
What typically happens when a community creates a “bucket” that’s used as
a catch-all for any group is that that bucket becomes a catch-all for
everyone. The additional segmentation also means it becomes more
difficult to determine the right place to post questions - something that
we’d rather avoid, I believe.
I’d just point them to the forums. I know we’ve got a few elders who
read and post in the forums.
On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:36:01 +0000, dragonbite wrote:
> Could try an promote them to say they are “elder” instead of the usual
> “noob”? It would be a social change more than a technical one.
That would be a good idea - in my mind (and I think in many others",
“noob” implies youth (for me it evokes an image of the PFY from the BOFH
series on The Register - from his early days), and the term itself
carries a fair amount of baggage as a result - assumptions get made that
the poster is inexperienced not only with whatever the forum is about but
also in life.
:"New To openSUSE But With Live Experience" or something like it may be a new social group.
And is there any rule against using a real photo as avatar and using e.g. “fritz-build-1925” as username? If someone pays fritz-build-1925 not the appropriate respect - I think the community will know how to act.
pistazienfresser
+1 to using ‘elder’ rather than ‘noob’ or even sign-up with elder-$$$$$$$ whatever as their name which will clearly indicate they may not be up on all the afaict, imho, moo, afaik … jargon. Wow! we could be the first community to treat elders with respect.
>
> dragonbite;2177131 Wrote:
>> Could try an promote them to say they are “elder” instead of the usual
>> “noob”? It would be a social change more than a technical one.
> :“New To openSUSE But With Live Experience” or something like it may
> be a new social group.
> And is there any rule against using a real photo as avatar and using
> e.g. “fritz-build-1925” as username? If someone pays fritz-build-1925
> not the appropriate respect - I think the community will know how to
> act.
> pistazienfresser
WTF is this all about, anyway? I readily qualify for any conceivable
definition of “elderly” - and damned thankful I made this far. Along the
way I’ve had the misfortune of spending far too much time instructing
instead of doing, enough so that I can pretty well tell that not many of
the folks here have any substantial background in training or support.
Like I tell student pilots, I’ve more flying time on final approach than
most pilots have total time.
You are wasting time and resources trying to pre-sort and segregate based on
arbitrary classifications such as age. Do you think that separate fora for
males and females would be beneficial as well? I had less trouble teaching
my mother to use email than teaching my wife the same thing - age is a poor
indicator of ability.
I would agree that one additional forum might be beneficial: call it New
User Problems. Get some laid back, patient souls to monitor it with the
intent to make it a traffic cop for those who feel that they are beginners
and point questions - along with advice on how to ask it - to the most
appropriate forum or to a FAQ that covers their question. Face it, most
newby questions tend to be FAQs and/or wiki topics. Make the path obvious
and simply point them in the right direction.
One of the first studies of micro-computer use in the 1980s showed that, after adolescents, the second largest group of computer users were elderly people. Another one in the late 1990s confirmed this.
Of course there are elderly people who have never used a computer just as their are elderly people who have never used a mobile phone but the problem is nothing to do with being elderly.
The intelligence of those adults who in the forties keep their minds active continues to increase until well into their eighties. The intelligence of those adults who have got into a rut in their forties tends to increase until around sixty and then plateau. Willingness to try anything new is something which tends to become settled by mid-adulthood rather than in old age.
That said, I think it is better to introduce elderly novices to Linux rather than to Windows but with a warning over the language. An elderly friend was asking about Wi-fi recently and I had to talk to him about ‘radio control.’ For him ‘wireless’ is a passive medium; ‘radio control’ is the active one; so the idea that ‘wireless’ could be active was foreign to him.
techwiz03 wrote:
> +1 to using ‘elder’ rather than ‘noob’ or even sign-up with
> elder-$$$$$$$ whatever as their name which will clearly indicate they
> may not be up on all the afaict, imho, moo, afaik … jargon. Wow! we
> could be the first community to treat elders with respect.
really? seems everyone is assuming the ‘elders’ are n00bs to computing
(or otherwise hobbled by mental deficiencies), when they are more
likely to be just new to Linux or openSUSE…
i sat up an openSUSE machine for a granny several years ago and never
gave her the root password…as far as i know it still hums along…
Second, it is true that the language used here may be off-putting to new users. Of course I don’t mean off-color language but jargon and acronyms.
It is not condescending to speak (or write) simply and clearly. Inexperienced people appreciate friendly, simple instructions. They will “graduate” themselves to the more technical questions/answers when they are ready.
I would be happy to see a section of simply-worded, thoroughly detailed, tutorials and how-to’s.
