Continuing my Mumbuntu saga …
Wed 17th Feb
Today my Mum went to the local library to ask about computer training. I had a brief chat with her and she seemed to enjoy it. Apparently the woman in the library showed her Google for searching and Google Maps so she could see a picture of her own house. She’s been given some notes and has arranged to go back next Friday when apparently they will look at ‘email’.
The librarian asked my Mum to bring in email addresses of friends and family and she’d set her up with an email address to send some mails out. As I’ve already setup an email account for Mum I’ll give her all the credentials and access details for the webmail system and they can use that, which will be a good starting point.
It’s interesting to me that the first thing a user gets shown is nothing to do with the software on the local machine, but a browser and an online service. How things have changed since the days of “This is a DOS prompt, type ‘win’ to start Windows” 
I’ve been wondering how to get Mum up to speed outside of the training she gets from the library. One concern I have is that once they get past ‘playing’ with online services they’ll start looking at Microsoft specific desktop applications, rather than generic ‘Word Processor’ type tutorials. I think I’ll take a trip to the library at the weekend myself and take a look at their offerings to evaluate them.
One thing that I can do as an alternative is of course teach Mum some fundamentals myself. Some of that could be done in person at her house – or indeed mine. I will have a copy of her machine in a VM and can therefore show her what things will look like on her own desktop but at my place. I’d need to schedule some time for that, and with a job and family of my own that will be a challenge. Especially given this is very new stuff for my Mum so I’ll likely need to show her stuff multiple times before it sinks in.
So I have come up with two alternative strategies. The first is to look for training course that my Mum can attend to get her up to speed. Canonical have some training courses which are outsourced to training partners around the world. The Ubuntu Desktop Course looks the most appropriate for my Mum however the UK Ubuntu Training Schedule shows that it’s not running in the UK, and I don’t fancy paying the air fare for my Mum to go to Brazil for a 2 day desktop course!
The course also runs as an e-learning event which can be ordered from the Online Training Store for less than £40 which seems like an absolute bargain to me.
Once paid up and registered on the course my Mum can pace herself, taking her time over the sections she wants to, and repeating sections if she wants. The course content is based around Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) which was the last release before the last LTS (Long Term Support) release, and it’s no longer supported. So I don’t want to install 7.10 on her computer because I’ll only have to upgrade it at some point very soon, and I’ll get no patches/fixes whilst she’s on 7.10.
I dropped a mail to the training department at Canonical asking some questions about the course and releases and got a nice prompt response. They tell me the content is pretty much generic so much of it applies to releases after 7.10, and I can see how that’s the case as much of Ubuntu has stayed the same for the last two years. I was told that Canonical are currently updating the Desktop Course for Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) which is due to coincide with the Ubuntu release at the end of April this year. So I could sign her up for the 10.04 version of the course when it’s ready. That gives me 2 months between now and the end of April to keep her entertained.
Which brings me onto my second alternative strategy. Screencasts! I’d like to create a bunch of very short screencasts (2-5 mins maximum duration) which go through the basics of computer use. These could be kept as a library of short tutorials which Mum can tap into and watch as and when she’s ready. I could put them on her computer so she’s got them on day one. In the future she will no doubt ask me questions, and I can create more screencasts to cover those topics. Here’s the cunning bit. I can record them at home, using my Virtual Machine copy of her desktop and then save them into a shared Dropbox folder which syncs to her desktop PC. So all she has to do is turn on the computer and connect to the Internet and she’ll get the new tutorials automagically on her computer – once I make them
I think a combination of the following may be right for her:-
- Initial hands on with librarian
- An introduction to her specific computer setup from me
- An online course from Canonical
- Screencasts
Suggestions and comments welcome!
9 Comments
Popey, We know a chap called Ian Lynch who provides on-line courses (via Moodle) via his company The Learning Machine and qualifications called INGOTS. I think the courses themselves are free to read/view; you only pay if you want to be tested and certified etc.
They are strong supporters of FOSS and the commons. I haven’t looked through the material that is available on line but there might be some suitable material for your mum to look through…
Note the screenshot on this page: http://theingots.org/community/ITQCourse2
Al
I had the same thing with my mum about 2 years a go, she was new to PC’s and wanted to learn but I live in Sussex and she lives in Lincolnshire
The whole screencasts and dropbox is a fantastic idea.
Right now she has a laptop with Vista installed and she doesn’t get on well with it at all. After reading this im tempted to take a live cd with me next time and do a dual boot and see if i can move her over to Ubuntu and use your screencast idea to help her learn as she is always keen to do. Time to work out how dropbox works me thinks!
Don’t want to rain on your parade. But it sounds like she is going to get a lot of fragmented incompatible information. From an education point of view, it might all do more harm than good. I’ve seen these posts on planet.ubuntu for a while now and everything i’m a little baffled about your plan of attack.
Here’s a very effective path I used with the grandfather of my ex:
-> I started with a full-screen simplified firefox on boot up. <–
The core experience was learning to turn the computer on, search for stuff on the internet. And print interesting page. (add the print button to the toolbar). They are not used to reading on a screen, they prefer paper. The simplified firefox only had the search bar, back&forward buttons and the print button. No chrome, just full-screen kiosk style.
This alone will entertain for a weeks. And you can deal with questions as they come up. A typical question I got was: "how do you know where you can click on?" ..
When she is ready for more .. enable more parts of the browser.
Eventually disable auto-fullscreen (but still auto-launch! so she can always get to her browser by just turning the pc off and on again)
This was she can set her own pace. And she starts with the most interesting stuff: browsing the internet.
It sounds silly, but these basics of how to get back to known grounds if you get lost are VERY IMPORANT. This way they feel they can experiment.
And with experimentation comes questions. You don't learn by being told. You learn by doing. Then she tries to make a mental model, and then the questions popup. Most courses learn very operating specific tasks. I've literally have seen people unable to launch their browser because some window popup covering the part of the desktop they knew they had to click twice to get there.
============
As to the technical tricks used; it's very simple.
– Set the gnome-panels on auto-hide.
– Turn of desktop icons with gconf-editor. (look at nautilus/desktop settings)
– Add auto-hide-menu and menuX extensions to firefox. This will allow you to hide the menu by default and make it launch fullscreen.
- Simplify the firefox toolbar. Either only stick with the address bar (which does google I feel lucky) or the search box. So back/forward | search | print.
No need to immediately confront her with the semantics of search-engines and urls. Millions of people browse the internet without actually knowing the difference.
Just my two cents. But if you are really serious about teaching, you should be more careful what information sources you expose her to. Mixing and matching different browsers, pheripherals, operating systems, etc. will make it confusing, scary and something she likely won't enjoy.
“Just my two cents. But if you are really serious about teaching, you should be more careful what information sources you expose her to. Mixing and matching different browsers, pheripherals, operating systems, etc. will make it confusing, scary and something she likely won’t enjoy.”
I’m not sure where you got that from. I have installed both Windows XP and Ubuntu, but not so she can flit between them. Merely hedging my bets that if she doesn’t get on with Ubuntu for whatever reason, we can easily switch her to XP and she can get going without going through a re-install. I figured that losing 80G of disk to an XP install that she _may_ never use won’t be a catastrophe. If in the future she decides she really is happy with Ubuntu then I can very easily wipe XP and use the space – although as I’ve indicated I’d be surprised if she’d need it.
My plan wasn’t about mixing and matching. My plan has always been about showing her Ubuntu, getting her Ubuntu training and then supplementing that with Ubuntu screencasts. I would _like_ her to never have to use XP, but I have a family that seem to be fighting against me.
I was talking about the library course! Which likely uses different browsers, different mouses, different keyboards, different operatings sytems… etc.
Popey, are you really meeting resistance from other family members who are != Mum?!?! I have a few words about that which wouldn’t be safe for work. Maybe I read too much into your reply (with which I completely concur). I’m curious if some of your fans might be able to contribute, or do you think you will just do the bare minimum screencasts based on Mum’s use cases?
Great work, following the blog. Keep the story going.
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CafeNinja
Yup. Both my brother and sister have said that Mum shouldn’t let me ‘talk her into’ using Ubuntu. Frustrating and causing friction.
I’m sorry if it sounded a bit harsh!
It’s just that I think, that if she really never operated a PC before, the learning curve is about a million times higher than you assume it is.
We take so much knowledge for granted.
- how to operate the hardware (turn on/turn off)
- how to operate a mouse
- how to operate a keyboard
- understanding the visual language (windows, buttons, popups, links, icons, form fields, focussing fields for text input, scrollable areas, notification bubbles, navigational controls)
- having a mental models of file hierarchy, window managers, etc.
While you are planning screencasts .. she will likely have questions like:
– when do I know the computer is ready to use?
– how do I know which button to click (hint: get an apple mouse)
– how do I know when I have to click twice or once?
– how do I know what I can click on?
– how do I hide a menu?
– i clicked on this link and suddenly i couldn’t go back (turned out it spawned a new window)
– how can I see the rest of the page (talk about scrollwheel, scrollbar or keyboard buttons, but pick just one )
Perhaps I’ve misunderstand her abilities with computers up to this point.
But if she really never used a PC before, I think you need a reality check.
I really do suggest you try my suggestion: make the laptop kiosk mode, and see how that goes first.
I have to say that I tend to agree with Meneer R. Keep it simple and support her own learning by doing and making mistakes.
By all means show her how to use the browser and Picasa or whatever specific things it is she wants to do, but any more than that could be over the top and off-putting. Then again, you know your own Mum, maybe she will enjoy all the other stuff, too? I suppose it really depends on what her preferred ‘learning style’ is and what is she wants to learn.
Anyway, good luck!
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