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New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit)
redOrbit
looks at a Linux PC that is aimed at senior citizens.
"A new computer called SimplicITy has been aimed at people over the age of 60 who have never before used PCs or the Internet, BBC News reported.
The simplified desktop has just six buttons directing users to basic tasks such as e-mail and chat and each machine is pre-loaded with 17 video tutorials from television presenter Valerie Singleton. The SimplicITy computer has no login screen when started up, and contains no drop-down menus."
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New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 12, 2009 21:43 UTC (Thu) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]
I forsee a pretty standard problem that might arise from these units, as nice as they are.
It's called WYSIAYG.
What you see is *all* you get.
In short, if you dumb something down far enough, what you get is not a simpler thing, but a *different* thing. The learning you get from it, such as it is, does not translate to anything you'll need to replace it with once you outgrow it, so itonly postpones the need to learn how "normal" computers work, stranding those people in a computing ghetto.
Worse -- and this will make me sound somewhat elitist, but that's never bothered me before -- unless you choose to treat the Internet as a read only experience, learning how the *computer* works is not the most important part of your learning experience.
AOL dropping Usenet did *not* end the Eternal September, I'm afraid; let's not turn millions more people loose without the first clue about the 'net, shall we?
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 13, 2009 6:43 UTC (Fri) by njs (guest, #40338) [Link]
> this will make me sound somewhat elitist
Not at all. Senior citizens top-posting on Usenet are threatening our very way of life.
WYSIAYG Posted Nov 13, 2009 10:04 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]
Being a LaTeX user, I always considered oowriter and similar tools to be cursed with the WYSIAYG property and thus a dumbed-down form of document creation.
So I used to foresee a similar problem with those products. But they seem to be more useful than I expected - even Microsoft has one! I guess the world is big enough for lots of different solutions :-)
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 19, 2009 6:39 UTC (Thu) by lysse (guest, #3190) [Link]
> let's not turn millions more people loose without the first clue about the 'net, shall we?
I think, sadly, that this particular genie is not only out of the bottle, it's eating everything in the fridge, smashing every container it can find, sitting in your favourite sofa firmly grasping the remote and singing "la la la, you'll never get me in there again!".
Another one Posted Nov 12, 2009 22:44 UTC (Thu) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] This looks like a similar product, only aimed at people who are too cool to dork around with computers, not too old: litl (They don't mention Linux, and the Mainstream Media mentions the lack of CAPS LOCK but not the underlying OS.)
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 13, 2009 1:21 UTC (Fri) by samroberts (subscriber, #46749) [Link]
I've set a laptop up with ubuntu 9.10 for my almost-grandmother. She's never used a computer before, and while she's exploring the googling, her level of intuition is mind-expandingly low. mind-expanding for me.
If you don't know what a directory is, what a file is, what is the difference between a passive and active user-interface element, then using computers is close, but not entirely, impossible.
She is not intimidated, but is continuously perplexed.
I'd love to be able to give her a simple desktop, all she wants to do is get email from her kids, and reply, see the pictures they send, and follow the links they send.
What you see is all you get would be enough for her. We are talking about somebody who I switched from windows to linux, and didn't even notice...
So, I'm slowly poking around. Trying to convince her to learn to type with TuxType, trying to explain why it takes three clicks to shut down her computer, etc...
Any recommendations? What do other people do to set their grandparents up? I can't be the only person doing this!
Things that work for 7 or 8 year old kids would maybe be appropriate, but without the condescending content controls! Are there distros for kids that allow slowly escalating sets of menu items, so that as kids learn what they see, you can add compexity to the UI?
Whats the simplest email client? The simplest photo viewer? The simplest browser?
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 13, 2009 4:14 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
What I have done with a Fedora box is setup is to remove anything except what is required on the desktop and setup what is needed to work out to the box. Put large icons on the desktop for the common actions. Increase panel size and fonts and disable notifications as much as possible. Then wrote some documentation with screenshots and FAQ as a quick introductory guide. Works fine.
Granny computing Posted Nov 13, 2009 4:35 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] Any recommendations? What do other people do to set their grandparents up? I can't be the only person doing this! I wrote about my similar experiences about a year ago in this LWN comment, which also got one informative followup. Some added detail: Whats the simplest email client? The simplest photo viewer? The simplest browser? We used a simple free webmail service, and I think it the best solution as it allows access to mail and the mail archive also from other computers if needed, and with the familiar interface. I used a local "Wippies" service, but in retrospect Gmail might have been better because it can display many Microsoft-format attachments without requiring them to be downloaded. The browser is Firefox. I think less-common browsers are not good in this context because you want all pages to render without quirks as much as possible. Technical explanations about web standards and how many pages break them won't convince the granny. Photo viewer was a bit of a problem. For a long time it was not needed, when it was, an immediate good solution was not installed on the machine and I was not at hand to help except by phone (I live some 300km away). I too would like to hear a good suggestion. Something that works just like a "slide projector" (one program on the machine was close but the UI was a bit too complex and I could not find out how to make it step through a directory full of pictures in a sane order: apparently the program used whatever was the directory entry order... i.e. essentially random).
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 16:00 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Any mouse dragging is a problem in my experience, as sometimes people drag things without realising it. GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to the side of the screen where it's very hard to drag it back if there are lots of icons - no spare space withouth icons! You can lock down the GNOME panel at least - see http://library.gnome.org/admin/deployment-guide/ for this and other lockdowns.
I've also had to write a simpler version of the standard GNOME clock applet which doesn't show a calendar at all, just the date/time - this was confusing someone who would click this without realising and then not know how to hide the calendar (it would help if it was a standard window with an 'X' to close). Fortunately PyGTK makes this quite easy.
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 19:44 UTC (Sat) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to the side of the screen [...]Same thing in KDE, and yes it has caused confusion with the relatives I support... It really is a stupid misfeature no matter how one looks at it. It is not like changing the panel location is so common operation that it needs such a shortcut.
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 22:03 UTC (Sat) by ABCD (subscriber, #53650) [Link]
>> GNOME is as bad as Windows in this respect (panel is easily dragged to
>> the side of the screen [...] > > Same thing in KDE, and yes it has caused confusion with the relatives I > support... It really is a stupid misfeature no matter how one looks at > it. It is not like changing the panel location is so common operation > that it needs such a shortcut.
And it appears that, at least in 4.3.74 (that is, current trunk), KDE4 no longer has that behavior (to move the panel to a different edge, you now have to explicitly request it).
Granny computing Posted Nov 14, 2009 23:36 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
With recent versions of GNOME, this is not the case
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f11/es-ES/sec...
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 0:36 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
That's good - unfortunately Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has GNOME 2.22, which does have this problem until end of support in 2011, though it's replaced next year by 10.04 LTS.
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 18:17 UTC (Sun) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
Yeah, my daughter is constantly "rearranging" my desktop for me and when she moves my top panel to one of the sides (I have a widescreen monitor) all my icons are shoved together and there's NO space to move the panel back again. Serious PITA: I used to have to delete icons until I found space.
What I did was enable the "hide" buttons on the panel. Even though I never use them to hide the panel, it's handy to have that space to drag it around. It will be nice to have this harder to do by accident (although my daughter is doing it on purpose :-))
Granny computing Posted Nov 15, 2009 22:29 UTC (Sun) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
At least in GNOME, it's quite easy to lock the panels with gconf-editor - see my other post. KDE supports this in bleeding edge versions, as someone mentioned.
Granny computing Posted Nov 16, 2009 13:54 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]
This seems to make the panels completely immutable: that's not what I want. I just want them to not move, but I still want to be able to move things around in the panel and add things to the panel. Maybe I missed it but I didn't see anything that allowed just the movement to be disabled.
Granny computing Posted Nov 17, 2009 9:02 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
There is a panel-movement lockdown feature in Ubuntu 8.10 onwards that is a bit easier to use, which might help: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/moving-the-locked-top-panel... - it points to this GNOME bug https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309721
I believe this 'lock panel movement' feature is what you want.
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 13, 2009 16:18 UTC (Fri) by langagemachine (guest, #56890) [Link]
> explain why it takes three clicks to shut down her computer
This would beyond anyone's common sense (except if one has had long exposition to computers, and has somehow become used to this annoyance).
> What do other people do to set their grandparents up?
Now, I have just installed for them Linux Mint 7, and it serves them all right.
By the way, I have just discovered this for remote desktop, not tried it on Linux Mint yet, though:
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 14, 2009 19:49 UTC (Sat) by samroberts (subscriber, #46749) [Link]
> You could configure the "power options" of the system, so that a single press on the power
button just shuts down the computer ?
Good idea, I'll try that.
Though explaining why she shouldn't use the menu might confuse things, too.
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 13, 2009 12:09 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
This is a great idea - apart from having what looks like a suitably simplified interface (on top of Linux Mint), it comes with good training videos that start with the absolute basics, such as how to use the mouse (though that could still be improved as it didn't explain about how the mouse's 'up' direction is towards the back of the desk.)
From my experience of trying to get several elderly people started with using computers, you need to start with the real basics, and remove as much extraneous detail as possible. The mouse is by far the biggest problem, one person I know never mastered this at all.
Since this is Linux Mint under the covers, it should be quite easy for a technical friend/relative to add remote login for support, but at least most of the 'make it a kiosk' work is already done.
New Linux-Based PCs Encourage Seniors To Learn The Internet (redOrbit) Posted Nov 16, 2009 18:47 UTC (Mon) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]
> From my experience of trying to get several elderly people started with using computers, you need to start with the real basics, and remove as much extraneous detail as possible. The mouse is by far the biggest problem, one person I know never mastered this at all.
My experience is that a number of elderly people (and some younger) cannot use a mouse comfortably due to poor eyesight, trembling hand and poor movement coordination and are much more agile with a keyboard-only interface (which they use slowly but surely).
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