This series has included many anecdotes about my clients and other seniors who have had a variety of problems on the road to computer literacy. For a change of pace, here is a story on me that shows how even the tutor can be thrown off balance.

For a mail client, I use Outlook with the file tree exposed and the preview window enabled. On the pane showing all the letters resident in the inbox are divisions showing when the letters arrived, assuming the options are set to the normal default of sorting by arrival date. The usual categories are Today, Yesterday, Last Week, etc. The other day I was working and the frog croaked (my equivalent to “You’ve got mail”), but when I glanced at my secondary monitor where I keep mail and various toolbars, nothing showed up. That’s odd. But I wasn’t concentrating on incoming mail, so I just dismissed it. Then the same thing happened again. Still no new mail. This time I decided the incoming mail had been flagged as spam and shunted off into the junk mail folder before I got to see it. Never mind that this had never happened before. That was just a quick superstitious conclusion based on nothing more serious than the fact that I was working on something else and didn’t want to be bothered.

Later in the day, I noted that I had not received email for several hours even though I had heard the frog croak several times. Not getting anything is unusual. I scrolled up and down to see if the incoming messages had been misfiled. The folder listing indicated that I had several un-viewed messages (that little number in parenthesis alongside the name of the folder), but where were they? Nothing in the inbox was bolded.

Then something must have kicked me on the side of my head because the answer was obvious. I had accidentally clicked on the little menus sign alongside the “Today” heading without noticing it. That closed up the listing and hid all messages that would have been listed under Today. They were all there, safely tucked away where I couldn’t see them. Clicking on what was now a plus sign opened up the listing and displayed my messages.

Dumb? You bet, but if an instructor can make such a simple mistake, think how easy it is for a student to get led astray. Would a newbie have wandered around and given up on finding the messages? Of course, they would have appeared the next day when they would have been shifted from the Today listing to the Yesterday listing. That would probably been even more mysterious. Hey, letters can disappear and reappear like magic!

Take note of the mistakes you make, even the ones that you correct almost without thinking. Your students will likely make similar ones. The only difference is that they might not know how to correct their mistakes.

Now having taken my public lumps for making a dumb mistake, let’s ask why the ability to close the listings for Today was built into Outlook. What purpose does it serve? I can stretch a point and imagine a reason that the other categories might be closed sometimes. I might want to keep old messages around and not visible, but why close Today?

In the grand scheme of things, this little hiccup doesn’t mean much, but it can serve as two reminders: (1) we all get caught off guard sometimes, and (2) standard interfaces for common applications are not all mature. When working with students, we work to help them minimize the mistakes they make because we have no real ability to help the developers correct the mistakes they make other than casting our comments into cyberspace with no real expectation that they will be picked up. That is, I do not expect that an internal memo will be generated at Microsoft suggesting that someone look into the closing of Today listings in Outlook as a result of posting this column, but who knows? Maybe some change will appear in a later release that incorporates some more clever way of arranging the Inbox.

This weekend I finished and submitted to Lockergnome the long-awaited update of my tutorial and tutoring seniors. Watch for it to be posted in the next few days. Compared to the first versions, this one is mammoth. In raw PDF format it is 1.5 megabytes. Also, compared to the first version, it has been scrubbed to eliminate typos. Readers interested in elementary decision theory and how to question a physician’s diagnosis (important for seniors) or anti-terrorist activities (important for everyone) might want to check out my other tutorial.

[tags]tutorial,senior learning,sherman e. deforest,senior computing,computer mistakes[/tags]