Comments on: Reference Question of the Week – 1/18/09

By: Anne

Anne — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:42:00 +0000

I overheard another interesting conversation in the library yesterday along these lines. Another staff person was helping a woman set up a gmail account. She told her she would have to choose a user name and create a password.

The woman then stated/asked that her son had a laptop at home all setup and she would be using that, so wouldn’t she need to use that password?

It’s always a good reminder that there are a lot of people out there who have no experience with the things we take for granted every day!

Cheers all!

By: Auntie Nanuuq

Auntie Nanuuq — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:50:48 +0000

Mac games? Eric’s Ultimate Solitaire and Ishido… they were both on both of my MACs , but I did buy them from someone who had upgraded. I like my MACS for the games that I can not get on my PC.

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:44:25 +0000

@Jessamyn: It seems like a fairly common initial reaction, but not just with technology. Many people seem to expect to get whatever they want simply by virtue of wanting it, and thus seem incapable, at least at first, of accepting “no” as an answer (which might be our own fault, because we try to never say “no” to a patron).

There have been cases when someone comes in looking for a book on a topic, and when I can’t find one, they look at me as if I am personally responsible for not having written before they arrived.

It is a bit of a leap to go from that specific anticipation to accepting the actual reality of the situation, but it does amaze me that people walk around in this frame of mind.

That said, I do agree that when dealing with unfamiliar technology, this phenomena might be even worse. With limited understanding, people have even less to grasp on to, and so cling to whatever they can as hard as they can. The sensible approach certainly seems to be to absorb the new information to adjust expectations and move forward.

By: jessamyn west

jessamyn west — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:42:23 +0000

Some Macs come with some games but they’re just in the Applications directory and they’re not that nifty. I have no idea if 10.5 has any games that come with.

I find the “but someone else told me that I can do whatever I want!” reply to attempting to help really strange. It’s as if they don’t like the answer ["no, I don't think so"] and instead of sort of handling that, they want to blame someone else that the answer is no. I think more to the point, they just have no idea what is possible and what isn’t and get dejected when they take one person’s word for it and then have to decide what to do when someone else’s word conflicts.

It aseems to me that some people don’t want to learn to be critical thinkers about technology and, unlike the TV or other passive forms of entertainment, it’s pretty hard to be a totally passive technology user.

By: Brian Herzog

Brian Herzog — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 21:12:05 +0000

Any time I have to help someone practice logging in to their email account, I just presume that something like importing/exporting is over their head. What she thought the Mac would let her do is have a single address book that she could access from any of her accounts (which would be cool – kind of like a delicious bookmark feed, except with contacts). Actually, I’m not even sure why her nephew set her up multiple email accounts in the first place.

By: Anne

Anne — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 19:47:00 +0000

We do computer one-on-one’s, and most of the time they are fine. I tend to dread them though. We have a couple of disabled patrons who constantly forget their email information, so we sign them up for a class and they don’t show up (I think we’ve taken care of that problem though, for now).

I had one very interesting class with two women who needed to set up email accounts. We got through it, but it was a bit painful because their computer experience was limited. The reason they needed emails? They were planning to attend a class on running an ebay business. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that they were going to need a whole lot more computer experience for that…

Cheers!

By: Coral

Coral — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 18:26:22 +0000

Chris is right that Gmail will import a .csv file (it will also export), and I just checked: Yahoo will also export/import a .csv file. So, it is 100% doable to move contacts from one place to the other.

I really like the one-on-one computer class idea; that makes me incredibly happy. If I ever end up working in a public library, or in an academic library with a large commuter/continuing education population, I think I may borrow this idea. Thanks!

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 17:34:28 +0000

Both Yahoo and GMail allow for address books to be imported by CSV. Not sure if either have an EXPORT feaure, but a quick copy/paste into Excel from GMail should handle that as long as she doesn’t have a million contacts.

But meh, Yahoo’s SPAM filters are so awful, I’d rather move from Yahoo to GMail. Never mind the less obtrusive ads and more useful features when comparing GMail to Yahoo. GMail wins hands down.