Comments by "Jeffrey Phipps" (@jeffreyphipps1507) on "We used to write good documentation... (w/The Taylor and Amy Show)" video.

  1. Then there was the manual for the NES BASIC (Taylor/Amy)...
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  2. I think that not all things are as "intuitive" as people in IT assume. Also, older people from IT have a knack for feeling at home with the non-intuitive versus the so-called "intuitive" things of today. GUIs of today seem less intuitive than things like Veronica may remember (ever use ISPF fast tracking?). I find myself using more keyboard shortcuts than mousing into oblivion (partially due to medical reasons - tremors - that make typing easier than using the mouse).
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  3. Veronica, you don't think Man Pages measure up??? LOL!
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  4. My issue as an instructor is that students come into my programming courses not knowing how computers work and struggle learning how to program. Their attention spans are short. I need to make videos that teach them how things work, while keeping them short enough to keep their attention. I didn't have this problem 30 years ago.
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  5. You mean like the Commodore 1541 users manual? Hmm...
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  6. Eons ago, when I taught in classroom, I was in a room teaching about MS-DOS. At the back of the room, was 30 seats with IBM Selectric typewriters used for a typing class sometimes scheduled in the room. I was assuming that most of the people in my class knew what a typewriter was and how it basically worked, even if they weren't marginally proficient at using it. At the break, I let students come to me and ask questions that they didn't feel comfortable asking publicly. I had a student come to me during break who asked a simple question - "What's a typewriter?". I noticed he had an accent. I asked where he was from and he said, "Siberia" (this was just after the fall of the USSR). So I showed him one of the Selectric machines at the back. Unfortunately, he didn't get it. He left the course. However, I learned that not everybody knew about all comparative technologies. I would stumble over this only one more time - a student didn't know what the triangle for "play" meant in a media component on a programming project. I believe he was from Haiti (around the time of the earthquake we got more students from the islands). You try very hard as a teacher to find common ground to build knowledge on with students, however there are times when you are surprised to find people with no foundation.
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