The first presentation of my course on downloading nifty things for free went extremely well. The laboratory was full, and we still had a waiting list, In fact, the next presentation is already full with a waiting list. This reflects more on the desire of my senior students to get things for free than my ability as a presenter.

A tutor is always gratified when students go out of the way to show they really want to learn, but even I was surprised when two of my new students arrived using walkers to get from the parking lot to the computer lab. They might have some physical problems, but they were not letting that interfere with their desire to keep learning! The course is primarily a hands-on exercise so some of the students had a bit of trouble with mouse control, but they were doing it. Before we got started, I asked questions to see what their background was and what they wanted. The purpose of my questions was to see if I had not anticipated something in my notes — in fact, the sites I planned met their needs quite well. Planning helps. All of them expressed concern over downloading malware. All of them said they knew there was a lot of free stuff available, but did not know how to find it. None wanted to even consider changing their mail clients.

In format I started with an overview of some applications such as OpenOffice and then worked into eye candy and fun sound clips. I showed them free font sites. We reviewed various desktop managers and sources of wallpaper. Then we downloaded and installed iconoid as an enhancement to pretty images. This was leading up to show them how to put pictures of their grandchildren on the desktop. Along the way we also talked about Spybot Search & Destroy. I showed them how to be careful when using Google to find it because the listing is preceded by commercial sites that have similar names. We looked at ways to make Caps Lock work like a typewriter does [Note: someday someone will tell me why Caps Lock became Caps Invert and still retained the same name.]

A special treat for them seemed to be showing how to find the latest traffic patterns (a feature of Caltrans in California — other States probably have similar services). But I was surprised when most of them did not know how to make that their home page. Although not strictly a download function, we experimented a bit with both IE and Firefox parameters. This went along with the goal of getting them more comfortable with the tools of effective surfing.

We spent a fair amount of time discussing where to find leads to safe things to download. Naturally I took them for a quick tour of Lockergnome. I also gave them a list of sites to explore such as PC World. They took notes. Before we left, just for kicks, I showed them some of what is available on sourceforge and a couple of Linux distributions. None of them will likely use either resource, but at least they know about them.

This was only a two-hour short course, so we did not completely survey the field, but for a first time out on a new course, it was fun for me and informative for the students. I fully expect to have some repeaters if I do it a third time — and since the second presentation is already full, there will likely be a third time.

The idea for a freebie course started informally, but now that I have seen the response of senior students, it was a good idea and one that could easily be expanded into a more comprehensive course. Since the subject changes rapidly, the emphasis of this course has to be on what is available right now and how to discover new things. Of course using good sense in selecting what to allow on your computer is critical.

If any other tutors have tried to energize students with a course like this, I would like to know what has worked and what was problematical. For instance, I shudder to think of being responsible for cluttering up some senior’s computer with useless resource-stealing parasites that get downloaded simply because they are free.

Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.

[tags]senior computing, senior learning, adult education[/tags]