Ask YC: what would you show a newcomer to the internet?
My granny will get a new PC next week, that will be capable of doing all the fancy stuff, movies, music,... So far she has only been emailing and doing some surfing and online banking (her old computer had 32MB of RAM - ouch!).
Any advice for other nice things to show her? Google Earth is a nobrainer, and I will show her YouTube. Other than that? I myself only visit three sites regularly in my daily surfing: news.yc, a friend's community page and a "normal" news page, so I don't have that many ideas for getting entertained on the internet.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 51.8 ms ] threadA newbie. You and I already know what's good and bad on hotsheet. But she doesn't. Let her find out for herself.
Also, a lot of newbies have no idea what's possible on-line outside of email. Hotsheet has a lot of variety on one page that Granny might find easy to use. Things will probably be different for her in a month or two.
Edit: I just realized that I'm replying to the OP. Tichy, one of the surest ways to reduce responses to your questions is to say that they suck.
Enjoy orientation with Granny. Let us know what you decided and how it went.
- The American Fact Finder: http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en
- The national debt clock: http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock
Just curious: anyone know of any good equivalents for other countries?
After that, I'd send her straight to PGs tutorial on arc, I mean, it's a logical next step ;)
1) Find out what she already does with her spare time. Her hobbies and interests in particular.
2) See in what areas she wants to grow. One thing older people tend to do is become set in their ways. You need to show her how the internet will bring value to her current interests instead of turning her on to things that younger people find cool. It MIGHT alienate her from the internet if she sees too many 2girls1cup reaction videos (sorry, I couldn't resist!!) on YouTube.
3) Show her some sites that are small enough that she doesn't get overwhelmed with information. I think the overwhelming factor is something that turns seniors off.
Depending on your granny's sensitivities, I would recommend putting a "safe browsing" application on your computer. You tend to forget how easy it was to stumble onto a site with flashing banner advertisements for Viagra during the late 90s.
I think as a first application, Google Earth (as you said a no-brainer) would be the place to start. The level of control over her own experience she would have as far as how much information she would access depends on her level of comfort; and hopefully over the course of a few days this should increase such that she is more comfortable absorbing new information. The metaphor of exploring the world in a virtual sense might help ease the transition to exploring the internet directly through a browser. Also, the gliding effect is calming in the sense that it's not a sudden jump: there are nice transitions between flying from one place to another and zooming in and out. The one problem you might face, however, is convincing her to use Google Earth over and over again; one way to do this is to provide her with a "travel itinerary" such that she can visit famous places to which she has never been.
I would recommend familiarizing her with one application per month.
This can be dangerous, but try walking your grandma through one-click shopping. I say it's dangerous because it can lead to impulsive buying, but Amazon introduces new users to search, user comments/reviews, and ecommerce. I think it is a good starting point to being introduced to the web.
side question - My mom is getting better and better using the internet/computer, but I can't figure out how to explain the concept of iTunes/big music library to her. Does anyone have any advice?