I’m not sure it’s an older person thing. I don’t really feel like I’ve “gotten” what I read unless I actually read it in print. Older people might be the most resistant, but I’ve come across some studies (doing research for a paper) that show that people in general retain 75% less of what they read when it’s online and that they’re more likely to feel like they have to go a lot faster than when they read in print. Maybe it’s just older people who are vocalizing it?
Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now there are three of us that aren’t completely insane. It was so lonely all these years…
I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that balance/gravity had something to do with it as well. A book is usually held with one hand under the spine, leaving the other hand free to turn the pages. A book that is too wide is going to be difficult to hold and read that way, because the outer sides are going to want to keep dropping. That would force the reader to constantly tilt the book one way or the other to keep the page he’s reading facing him, hold the book with two hands, or do all his reading with the book resting on a desk or other surface.
I spent a little bit of time in the past trying to teach basic computer use to computer-illiterate people, and I encountered more than one person who simply couldn’t grasp “point and click”. They’d understand the “point” part, but when it came time to click, they’d click the mouse button while simultaneously “jabbing” with the entire mouse, so that every attempt to simply click to select an icon turned into a “click & drag”. It reminded me of those people who play a video game on a console and wave the controller around despite the fact that doing so had no effect whatsoever (I’m speaking of pre-Wii days, obviously). A simple example of this is somebody playing, say, Super Mario Bros. on a Super Nintendo system, and waving the controller upwards every time they made Mario jump, or trying to get more distance out of a horizontal leap by waving the controller to the right.
In this case, what would happen was that she would take a first read, underlining in blue ink. Then a second read, highlighting in yellow; the parts being highlighted would be pretty much the same ones she’d underlined. Third read, add more highlights, in green. Fourth would be pink, and by that time, pretty much everything would be colored, but a fifth reading would see the leftovers highlighted in blue; if she got around to a sixth reading, she drew frames in pencil. I think it wasn’t so much a matter of putting markers over important points as of using the act of going over the text with a pen as a learning mechanism in itself.
My college Students’ Union sells self-published books; one of the sources for these is students’ class notes. They’ve used two of mine as “the Cliff Notes’ versions” of those courses (I think they’re both still in use, I graduated some 15 years ago): those items which the professor repeated would get marked with a five-point star for every repeat. Eventually, my classmates’ notes for one of those courses had the “Steel Diagram” six times, while mine had it once, with a row of five stars (and yep, it did crop up in every exam). My notes for those courses were the briefest but they also were completely done in blue ink, making them easy to photocopy. Paulette Bunyan’s notes would have been impossible to photocopy by the time she was done.
Oh, christ, welcome to my life. Let’s try again to explain the dreaded double click! No, faster! Like this! (raps on table twice) No, that’s not quite it…
Yeah, I gave up trying to teach this stuff. I’m sure there are teaching methods that would have done the trick, but I didn’t know them. I’ll admit it’s something of a mental block on my part: how do I explain concepts that I, myself, grasped intuitively? My first experience with GUI and mouse came in 1990, on a Macintosh SE. I had to learn to use these Macs for my English Comp class at the local community college. Prior to that, my only computer experience had been with the Apple IIe computers in the school library during my senior year of high school ('83-'84), and PCs running MS-DOS. But I got sat down in front of these Macs, having never seen a GUI or a mouse before, and grasped the concept instantly. And I don’t think it’s so much an age issue; my mom had never even touched a computer until she was 50, when she married my stepdad, who loves computers. She learned how to use her new Mac very quickly. Now, in her mid-60s, she’s slinging a smart phone and an iPad with no trouble. Before she married my stepdad, she’d been a career housewife and mother, with no college education or outside-the-home work experience.
I have a theory that training on use of a mouse for someone who is not comfortable with computers should begin with the computer switched off. Practice clicks and double clicks without the distraction of things on the screen.
Unfortunately, it’s my job. I try to get out of the beginning computer classes because I just Do. Not. Have. The. Patience, but I got roped into, get this, Intro to Computers I this spring. There are two parts. God help me.