Why 10 hours for a newbie and 30 days for a "programmer"

[Richard Gaskin]

Judy Perry wrote:
> Still, I think that the educators on this list aught to band up and figure
> out ways to evangelize the product.

Agreed wholeheartedly.

While there has been much talk of abstractions like "the inventive 
user", sooner or later with functional goods like software it comes down 
to specific tasks, and the question of whether a software will help 
address a task better than another solution.  For the design phase of a 
product, WHO a customer is is less important than WHAT that customer does.

For all the talk of capturing some of the HyperCard feel-good, even a 
cursory critical task analysis would push a vendor toward edu:  in my 
experience teaching HyperTalk from 1987 to 1994 I found that while the 
tool was indeed used for a very broad range of tasks, the majority of 
usages were related to education in one form or another.

If one were inclined to pursue a form of consumer-level scripting tool 
(personally I think the most substantial window for that sort of thing 
closed a long time ago, but we needn't get into that), it would be risky 
to ignore the primary lesson HyperCard offered us all: looking at 
specific tasks performed with it we find education stood about above 
most, if not all, others.

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
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  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev