Usability failures created the digital native/immigrant divide

I've been working on an idea for a while now, that today's "digital immigrants" are really just badly-burned early adopters from the 80's.

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"Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" is a 2001 article by Marc Prensky that tried to explain part of the awkward relationship between schools and computers. The main idea is that the K-12 students of the time (born 1984~1996) had always known a world with tons of personal technology. They had computers at home, learned to use them at a young age, and got increasingly comfortable with using them as they grew older. Those are the natives.

The immigrants, then are everyone else. Anyone who grew up without being surrounded by computers sees them as a new thing to be learned. The fast-moving cultural shifts probably passed them by, unless they're pretty techie.

There was a fair amount of discussion about the idea online in the mid-to-late-zeros, as teacher blogs exploded in popularity. Most of the talk was pointing out the exceptions: it's not impossible to find students who can't cut/paste and teachers who write PHP from scratch. As a whole, I'd say bloggers know not to treat it as a hard rule, but begrudgingly admit that native/immigrant is a rather appealing concept that we can't help but keep bringing up.

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My spin, then, is that native/immigrant gives a bad rap to people who actually deserve to be recognized as the early adopters. "Digital immigrants" born before 1980 were there when PCs were being rolled out to schools and businesses in droves. They were gradually introduced to computers, they had training, and they were assigned tasks, which they accomplished. They did it before anyone else, before it was cool, and they deserve recognition for that.

The problem is that early computers were sometimes horrible to use; a small error could easily cause a catastrophic, unrecoverable failure. It was harder to make backups, because there weren't hard drives, and you couldn't upload to the cloud/network drive or email yourself a copy. So, when you saved over your only copy of your report, or kicked the powerstrip under your desk, your work was gone. If you dropped or broke a piece of equipment, the replacement cost was high. Even as things advanced, it was still possible for one simple mistake to infect your computer with a virus that would cause any kind of problems it wanted.

Young digital natives, on the other hand, benefit from years of usability and technology improvements: space is plentiful, backing up files is easy and cheap. Parts are cheap and standardized. Firewalls, email virus scanners, and countless built-in protections in web browsers do a lot to mitigate viruses and worms. Google Docs saves your work every few seconds -- you'll never lose a report when the lightning takes out your power. (If you're connected via cell network, you might even be able to keep working.)

First impressions are everything. Many digital immigrants never got comfortable with computers because they couldn't see past the risks associated with them. They kept their distance, but that kept them from appreciating that computers have become much safer and easier to use.

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Now, when I'm helping a textbook "digital immigrant" setup a website, I always focus on building the idea that it's safe. They won't delete everything in a way that we can't undo it; they won't ruin someone else's website. I set them loose to experiment and check back with them later. So far, it feels like it's helping people take a big step past the mental barrier that's kept them from becoming a "native".

Being a good gatekeeper

One day, I came home and found that my carport had been mangled by someone who wasn't used to driving a tall U-Haul. My apartment complex removed the debris and put out some sad-looking cones:

Hail season was just about to start, and I had been hoping to keep my car dent-free for another year. When I asked for a different space to park in until the carport was fixed, I was outright denied and told to park in the half-covered space. I had lived in that building for months, so I knew there were many covered spaces that no one ever parked in. One person decided they were going to stand between me and a covered parking space.

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In a school district, fixing a problem usually boils down to one person who has total power to make a difference, whether that means solving the problem themselves or escalating to their boss. It is a customer service disaster when the gatekeeper refuses to help. An employee who blindly follows processes while people who depend on him suffer is like a saboteur, destroying your school's reputation from the inside. There really isn't any great damage control method for when parents (or other employees!) are rightfully upset about a bad situation that was obviously solvable.

You have to prevent upset people by being a good gatekeeper. Respect each person enough to consider their situation as unique. Look beyond the process and align your goals with their goals, so that you're working with them against the constraints of the situation.

It's awkward to give personal examples, because being a good gatekeeper usually means you're creatively bending the rules, even though it's for good reason. Instead, I'll point you to a spectactular set of stories on Reddit. All of them are about people who went out of their way to fix a problem that only they could fix. Often, they put their jobs at risk, even though every story ends with the customer becoming a life-long fan of their employer. Read these, and realize that every phone call or email you answer is an opportunity to win a life-long fan.

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As I began to explain that it was hail season and that half a carport wouldn't protect my car very well, another person who worked in the apartment office ran out from a back room, grabbed the binder containing their parking records, and interrupted us while smiling. "We've got lots of open spots! The closest open covered space to you is... #92. You can park there until we fix the carport, and I'll mark it here so we don't try to give it to someone else."

Take on complexity so teachers don't have to

For the first few years at my job, after I had learned the ropes, I didn't make any major changes to the status quo: Teachers were expected to do all editing on their classroom websites. We could talk them through it on the phone, but we wanted them to do all the actual button-pushing themselves. The idea seemed to be that the teachers would gradually learn how to do all these neat, complex web editing techniques.

I started to notice that some teachers would ask me the same question about once a year. Something like "how do I change the title of one of my web pages?" At first, I thought that maybe they just weren't techno-savvy, but that didn't sit well for long. I didn't like the idea of noticing this pattern of once-a-year calls, calling it an unsolvable problem, and ignoring the situation altogether.

At around the same time, I started to feel really weird about teachers calling me during their conference time to fix little bits of their website. I mean, they could call at any time, but that's the only time they realistically had in their day for talking with me on the phone. I had learned from the Fed Up With Lunch blog that each minute a teacher has with no students in their room is infinitely precious planning, decompressing, eating, and restrooming time.

Eventually, I realized that I could split the changes that teachers made on their website into two categories:

• easy changes teachers did often enough to learn
• trickier changes that teachers did not do often enough to learn

And then, I took a really radical step, never before attempted in any school district ever. I lightened the load of teachers.  I started to do the second category of changes for them.

It didn't make sense for teachers to make the changes in the second category. For example, it wasn't vitally important that each and every teacher see how to change the name of their webpages, because most of them only ever do it once. It also felt really, really right to let teachers report the problem, get back to their work, and read my "Problem Solved!" email at their own convenience.

The cost, though, was more effort from me. I had to spend more time thinking about the solutions, looking at teachers' websites, and guessing at the best one. It took more of my time to write the email back, because I also included instructions of what I had done, in case they wanted to know.

Was it worth my extra effort? Gerry McGovern absolutely nailed this topic a few weeks ago:

"The Web dictates that you put the customer first. That means taking on more complexity yourself." from The price of doing business on the web (March 14, 2011)

That's the whole point, isn't it? My job is to find the situations where a little extra effort on my part will let teachers do more of the real work: education.

The Passion of the Support Staff

We know that teachers have to be passionate. The pay is low, the work load is great, the responsibility is high. Read any honest teacher's blog and you'll find stories of being treated like a second-class citizen. There are people who understand teachers (warning: some profanity), but teachers still have to have passion to survive amongst the people who don't understand.


But teachers aren't the only ones.


I couldn't be the member of a school district's support staff if I didn't have passion. I believe in the power of education. It's not just baby-sitting, and it's not even just society's best chance to break the cycle of poverty; it's a gift that all children deserve every year.


That's why I work hard.  I lighten the load on teachers. Your webpage is broken? I'm going to do the legwork to solve that problem, you go teach, and I'll email you when I'm done so you can call me because if I call you it would interrupt your class.  I spread the word about every success, so teachers and students can value themselves. Three kids in kindergarten recited the alphabet backwards? There's a 12th grader who always holds the door open? Send me a picture, it's going on the website. I make everyday events into magical experiences. You forgot your camera? Let me take four special pictures of you on stage with your kid and his award and I email the best one to the parents, after I remove the red eye and fix the colors, and in the email I tell them that their kid did great and that they should be proud and that parent involvement makes the difference.


I'm passionate about supporting education, and I want to infuse all my work with that passion.


And sometimes that passion has to carry me. When I'm meeting my friend's friends and they have PhD's or corporate salaries and I say I do web work for a school district....and their eyes say "so not only can you not do, you can't teach either?"


Or when the state cuts the budget and there are going to be layoffs and the only thing that every comment on every online news story seems to agree on is "we have to protect the teachers, and we have to protect my money from taxes, so they should fire all the support staff!" (Even though the reality is that "Texas could fire ... all 329,574 non-teacher jobs - and still not save the $11.6 billion in public education cuts...")


That's when my passion for education has to carry me.