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Supporting use, learning, and education

Supporting use, learning, and education Commentary 19 Guzdial~; work reveals important general features of both documentation and education. Supporting Use, Learning, and Education Stephen W. Draper Department of Psychology University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ U.K. steve@psy.gla.ac.uk http://www.psy.gla.ac,uk/~steve/ Introduction Guzdial's paper reports some successful trials in supporting users in educational contexts who had to master new software simultaneously with pursuing their educational learning goals for which the software was only a means to that end. He calls this "supporting learners as users," and his main techniques involve providing large collections of examples and other help materials which to a large extent are provided by other learners in that community. The fundamental starting point for Guzdial is that users and learners typically have a big goal stack: they have high level, long range aims to do with their work domain, each subdivided many times and ultimately resting on a large number of small actions (such as moving the mouse, picking a menu command, etc.). If the small actions are automatic, fully learned ones, then the theoretical existence of the goal stack is of little consequence. However if those small actions are themselves problems requiring conscious attention and a search for information, as they may http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation Association for Computing Machinery

Supporting use, learning, and education

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by ACM Inc.
ISSN
0731-1001
DOI
10.1145/311147.311152
Publisher site
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Abstract

Commentary 19 Guzdial~; work reveals important general features of both documentation and education. Supporting Use, Learning, and Education Stephen W. Draper Department of Psychology University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ U.K. steve@psy.gla.ac.uk http://www.psy.gla.ac,uk/~steve/ Introduction Guzdial's paper reports some successful trials in supporting users in educational contexts who had to master new software simultaneously with pursuing their educational learning goals for which the software was only a means to that end. He calls this "supporting learners as users," and his main techniques involve providing large collections of examples and other help materials which to a large extent are provided by other learners in that community. The fundamental starting point for Guzdial is that users and learners typically have a big goal stack: they have high level, long range aims to do with their work domain, each subdivided many times and ultimately resting on a large number of small actions (such as moving the mouse, picking a menu command, etc.). If the small actions are automatic, fully learned ones, then the theoretical existence of the goal stack is of little consequence. However if those small actions are themselves problems requiring conscious attention and a search for information, as they may

Journal

ACM SIGDOC Asterisk Journal of Computer Documentation – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: May 1, 1999

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