[ExI] quora question

[Adrian Tymes]

Depends heavily on the person.  Some nontechnical people may as well be
technical, for how fast they can pick stuff up.

Others...you have to get a sense for what the person knows and how they
think, if you want to make absolutely certain to get the concepts to them.
One size does not fit all, even if there are approaches that work for most.

You also have to define exactly what counts as "get them online".  Just
checking email is different from safe Web browsing habits, for instance.

Combine the two: find out what they are interested in - *NOT* what you are
interested in them learning, but what they are in fact already interested
in.  If you are imposing all of the desire here, it'll be tough (and you
should double-check to see if it's actually worthwhile).  If they are
interested, use that to keep their attention, and relate the things you
tell them to their interest.

Most of them don't care about the finer details of DNS, for instance, and
it suffices (especially to start) to know that names like "lists.extropy.org"
are important and specific, and most (but not all) scammers pretending to
be something legit fail if you look at the name they're actually coming
from - e.g., "lists.extropyorg.com" is not this list, no matter how similar
the name.  If you try starting them with a full technical explanation of
the Domain Name System, you'll quickly lose their interest and fail at
teaching.  Same thing otherwise: start with the basics as related to their
interests - and if you can't directly relate something to why they're going
online, it might not be worth trying to teach that aspect.

On Thu, Jul 18, 2019 at 4:29 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I have been involved in computers, software only, since 1980.   The
> question is: what is the easiest way to get a nontechnical person online?
> Some of you may have tried with your grandfather or someone like that, and
> may be able to tell me so I can answer that person's question.  I have not
> tried to do this with anyone.
>
> bill w
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
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