wex@ittvax.UUCP (Alan Wexelblat) (08/16/83)
Something which I have observed might be of interest here: I am an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania. I make money in my spare time (10-20 hrs per week) working in the terminal room, assisting the new computer students. I have seen that a significant percentage of these students suffer from "computer phobia." C.F. is a collection of phenomena characterized by abject terror of the computer, which is seen as some sort of fearsome "god-machine," which hates each and every one of them personally. The most extreme cases are fearful of doing any editing of their programs, for fear of "destroying" something (the what-you-see-on-the-screen-is-what-you-get mentality), and are fearful of submitting programs for compilation (we use PASCAL, mostly) out of a fear of something terrible happening to them or their programs. Some of these people outgrow this syndrome, others never do. All are hampered in their learning by it. So, my question is: can (or should) we design systems to help this sort of novice? To what extent do we let these people impact the system as used by highly experienced "hackers"? Do we design entirely separate systems to handle these people, despite the load that it might place on the computer (not to mention the programming staff)? Yes, for those who are wondering, I AM serious. These people DO exist; I have spent many hours helping them, and wishing that the computer would help me to help them. In addition to discussion, are there any projects (completed or ongoing) that look into this area which y'all are aware of? --Alan Wexelblat decvax!ittvax!wex
taylor@sdcsvax.UUCP (Dave Taylor) (08/19/83)
After proctoring an entry level Pascal course here at UCSD for over a year, I agree with Alan that computer phobia definitely exists in a suprising percentage of the students, but I disagree that the burden of overcoming this is ALL on the computer. Specifically, consider the Xerox STAR (tm) system, with icons as symbols. To edit a file, the user points to the icon (file folder symbol) with the name of the file written on it (actually appears on the icon -- pretty darn neat!) presses the button on the mouse (which is how he pointed there in the first place) and then, with the icon flashing, drags it across to the center of the screen, and then, pressing the button again, opens the file up and can peruse and/or edit it. The important thing here is that the original file icon STAYS there, so the user instantly realizes that it is a COPY that he is going to play with/edit. This sort of instant realization needs to be duplicated in computers for the CP (computer phobia) syndrome to lessen. Consider, though, how it could be done on a text-oriented computer that has no pretty pictures or mice (or even light pens!)...I think that if the screen said "copying file FOO for editing" before it immediately cleared the screen and presented the file, and similarly said "using file FOO as input only to pascal compiler" it would alleviate a reasonable number of CP peoples' worries. The key is that you need to KNOW what the heck the computer is doing! If I type some random characters, and the computer whirrs off into never-never land, it is understandable that I would become just a little terrified about what it is doing! On the other hand, if it tells me "looking for mouse input from ttyh5" then I just laugh, and hit DEL to get out of it. Of course, this does not eliminate the need for well-informed people to hold the hand of the slower (or more paranoid) students because sometimes they just won't BELIEVE what the computer is telling them. (I still recall one time when I typed 'rm *' and the computer said 'are you sure? ' so I typed "y" because I didn't think I had typed the rm command...sigh) Anyway, here's to making these darn things SMART! -- Dave Taylor UCSD Computer Science Dept.