You Know More Than You Think You Do
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Tech Training Tips for Yourselves, Each Other, and Your Patrons How to use the tech you know (more than you think you do!) to learn more, help your coworkers, and help your patrons.
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You Know More Than You Think You Do
- 1. You Know More Than You Think You Do Tech Training for Yourselves, Each Other, and Your Patrons Laura Crossett | MHEC Conference | 4 November 2021 lauracrossett.com/2021/10/mhec2021/
- 2. Hi, I’m Laura Some people might say I have a problem.
- 3. When they learn they're capable of much more than they thought, they've learned the most important lesson I can teach them. Dorothea Salo
- 4. How Computers Appear to Work
- 5. How Computers Actually Work
- 7. Things you probably already know* (that your patrons might not) Save your work Restart the computer Right click Copy/Paste Attach a document or picture Download/Upload Printing What a “required field” is You’re not going to break the computer *don’t panic if you don’t!!!
- 11. right click
- 12. We all have failures.
- 13. macaroon fail
- 14. dress fail
- 15. Le Creuset fail
- 18. pizza fail
- 19. aerial yoga fail
- 21. Remember some of the things you probably already know? Save your work Restart the computer Right click Copy/Paste Attach a document or picture Download/Upload Printing What a “required field” is You’re not going to break the computer And if you don’t know them, you can learn.
- 22. I get knocked down, but I get up again. Chumbawumba Try again. Fail again. Fail better. Samuel Beckett
- 24. Recommendations ● If you do nothing else, read this. ● Practice explaining things to a friend or family member who is “afraid of computers.” ● Keep a log of problems you encounter and what you learned from trying to solve them (hint: Google error codes). ● Try one of the extra credit projects in the next slide. ● And remember, you know more than you think you do.
- 25. Extra Credit Projects • Customize the look and feel of your computer • Make a logo, social media post, or other design in Canva.com • Design a custom Word template (creating a template, custom color) • Make a bootable Windows installation DVD or flash drive • Make a website using one of the many free services available • Set up a password manager • Try a command line tutorial (Windows, Mac) • Upgrade the RAM on your personal computer (Windows, Mac) • Choose another project from IFixIt.com • Install a Linux distro on an old computer (Ubuntu is popular and pretty easy)
- 26. Questions? Comments? Rants? lecrossett@gmail.com @newrambler on social media lauracrossett.com
- 27. Credits • Dorothea Salo, “How I Teach Technology,” Library Jouranal (March 7, 2013). • Rube Goldberg Machine comic originally published in Collier’s, September 26, 1931, public domain. • TCP header image by Sajidur89, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons. • “Recycling Insecurity” graphic by John Hain, public domain. • ”Ticket machines always crash in the first month” image by Andy, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0. • Reset Vector” image by Xeno Kovah and Corey Kallenberg, “Advanced X86” BIOS and System Management Mode Internals: Reset Vector” CC BY-SA 3.0. • “Fail” pictures courtesy of Sarah Svengalis Brindle (macaroons), Lisa Heineman (hat), Trina Smith (painting), Rochelle Hartman (Le Creuset), Liza Kessler (pizza), Emily Doucet (yoga), and the speaker (dress). • “Fail better” quotation. Image of Beckett by Di Yuma CC BY-SA 3.0. • Chumbawumba photo by Ralf Shulze, CC-BY 2.0. • All images not otherwise credited are photos, screenshots, or graphics made by the presenter and are licensed CC BY-NC-SA. Guide to Creative Commons licenses
Editor's Notes
- But really it’s just a hobby—not that different from those that many of you probably have—and like many people with hobbies, I enjoy learning more about mine and teaching other people about it (or boring them to tears, depending on whom you talk to). Explain computers/OSes, ancient equipment.
- Right now I’m also an IT student. I can’t exactly recommend going back to school in your 40s—most of my fellow students are half my age and were born with game controllers in their hands and were building their own systems as teenagers. But I have one thing they don’t—I have a lot of life experience, a lot experience with regular computer users, and I long ago stopped caring about looking stupid.
- I feel like every time IT people say “magic!” they kind of contribute to this idea. And when they don’t say “magic!”, they can be kind of condescending. “Sigh… did you try restarting it?” Librarians have a LOT of advantages as teachers over IT people in that sense.
- Luckily, you don’t really need to understand all that (even I don’t have to understand it).
- Often, when we approach things we don’t know or understand, we’re confronted with FUD. In the case of computers, I think that we also have a lot of learned helplessness,
- But remember, mostly we aren’t going to be called upon to explain the way TCP works (thank goodness). Most of our patrons are just trying to get stuff done, and they don’t have the time to “just play with it.” (More on that later) I bet every single one of you out there has experienced one or more instances when they or someone they were helping had a difficulty or a disaster with one or more of these tasks—which, let’s face it, are what most people need to do with computer most of the time. One of the tools we have that IT people often don’t is the reference interview: we know how to figure out what the patron is trying to do. Often times that’s half the battle. We also know how to find out how much they know. Do they know what an address bar is? Do they want to learn? Or do they just want to get something done? SNAP benefits, immigration stuff, etc.
- Invariably, someone doesn’t know about saving their work. I always tell people that losing a 10-page paper is a horrible and unfortunate right of passage. (Fun fact: My IT instructor has twice decided to upgrade one of his computers without backing up his files first. Guess how that turned out?)
- So many options! Especially on library computers, it’s usually important for patrons to understand a little about what “saving” something means.
- As I mentioned earlier, I suspect we’ve all been told “Did you try restarting it?” So, I had no idea why that worked either until just recently, when I learned about something called the reset vector.I know this doesn’t make any sense either, but do we have any knitters in the house? Ever heard of frogging something? The reset vector is like frogging your work but having it magically remake itself from the point of the error to the place you got to.
- We’ll get back to this list in a bit, but remember when I told you no to panic if you don’t know? One of my favorite tricks for both killing time and sometimes discovering an answer is right clicking (protip: on a Mac, try Ctrl-click). It doesn’t always solve your problems, but it’s a thing you can try if you can’t figure out how to do something or where to find something. Computers are so often like cooking in someone else’s kitchen. “Wait, crap, where’s a spatula?”
- The friend who sent me this considered this a fail, but come on! She tried a new thing! How is that a fail???
- Photo from SLC Public Library. You probably can’t tell, but you know who said it? Dude named Michaelangelo.
- So remember our list of things you probably already know? I told myself if I had time I’d tell you my “required field” story.
- The full line from Beckett is “Ever tried. Ever failed. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” I usually see it as advice to writers, but it works here, too. I almost thought about playing the Chumbawumba song, but I wasn’t sure how appropriate it was for this hour in the morning. For those of you who missed the 90s hit “Tubthumping,” the full line from the chorus is “I get knocked down, but I get up again. You’re never going to keep me down.” Maybe both of these lines speak to you; maybe one; maybe none—but find something to say or play for yourself when you’re down that reminds you that failure isn’t failure—it’s learning.
- I truly wish everyone in the world would stop saying this about technology, because really, what does it mean? But what do you do instead? I have two kinds of recommendations—ones for learning as you teach, and ones for you to learn more.
- Think of these as “afternoon projects” or “weekend projects”—the kind of thing you might do if you were a beginner at home improvement or a craft or whatever. I have done everything on this list—almost all of them I initially failed at, or they took a long time to figure out, or I’d figure out one part and then mess up another, rather like a Rubix cube. But it turns out I made that bootable Windows installation in the nick of time, as my kid’s computer crashed out about a week later. With my handy bootable flash drive and some Googling and a little patience, I got it running again in under half an hour. I have howto links on all of these on my website and in a handout you can download and print out.