On 22/01/2008, Aldo Foot <lunixer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I think a possible explanation is that there a different learning styles. Yes, there are different ones. But what is Karl's? He doesn't appear to be the quiet self-teaching learner either. He's been crying for help on a public mailing-list, blaming the existing documentation resources because he prefers to ignore instructions completely instead of following them painstakingly. And if people enter a dialogue with him to give him specific advice, as soon as the solution to a problem is found, the subject is changed and acknowledgement is missing. There is a pattern, too. It's only a few messages later when old complaints are refreshed without recapitulating the contents of previous messages and the conclusions within. The behaviour is not unique to him. There are other people on other communication channels, who apply similar strategies (with the desire to keep a topic alive as long as possible, pretending that there is no help and that something is too difficult to use). I once met somebody who never executed any of the trivial commands pointed out to him, not even when explaining what they do. Consequently, the output of the commands was missing always. Instead, he replied with one-line responses like "didn't work either". When asked to run a command and post the output, he replied with long and confusing descriptions of strange trouble-shooting attempts, which either didn't fix his problem or made it worse. Only after weeks he pointed out that a "good friend" told him not to run any commands recommended "on the Internet", so he would not be hacked and that "he should find it very suspicious if he were asked to run 'su'". For some people it's too easy to say "still doesn't work" and be done for the next day/week, also after not trying out a fix at all. Even commercial supporters will fail in such cases, because the final acknowledgement will be missing. The problem is understood, the fix is known, but the user is not willing to confirm it or to admit own mistakes. > For instance Visual > Spatial Learners learn by visualization and not by reading. Then a mailing-list is the completely wrong medium. I would rather visit a local LUG or consult a local trainer. > Think of the student in a classroom who's watching squirrels out the window > ten minutes into lecture. But once he goes to the physics lab. he's > unstoppable. Doesn't apply here. The squirrels have taken over the lab, too.
