A Technologically-Equipped Team

Mary invited me to spend some time at a "Technology for Teams" session. Once a year the staff of the national religious organization she chairs gets together in a professional development/team building session. She wanted me to help the whole group to learn about computer tools that would assist their teamwork, then help individuals with technical activities, like changing settings on their computer. I arrived at their somewhat cramped office to find the group of eight friendly staff clustered around a meeting table, most of them sitting behind a modern notebook computer.

With just three days notice of that meeting, I recycled material from my presentation on "Myths About Computers" to create a short PowerPoint presentation. We plugged my USB RAM into one of the notebooks, hooked that PC up a digital projector, and watched my presentation on a white sheet hanging on the wall. ("That's the first time we've used the projector in this office", said Mary. Well, I guess that sometimes things do work the first time!) Borrowing from the script of my longer presentation I talked about three imporant misconceptions that people have about computers:

Debunking the first of those misconceptions I told the staff that when they encountered a computer failure, when some normal action like opening a window or clicking on a hyperlink was followed by a "crash", they should remember that the failure wasn't their fault. The roots of most computer failures are far from obvious, with technical explanations intelligible only to technicians schooled in the arcane digital arts. I exposed the second and third of the above misconceptions, warning the staff that real world computers are just tools, incredibly versatile, virtual Swiss army knives that lacked the understanding ability of a two year old child.

I also mentioned the importance of protecting against "malware" (viruses, worms, spyware) by keeping virus definitions up to date ... but I really didn't have to spend much time giving the staff a lecture on computer safety. Among the head office employees was Phil, a big part of whose job was to ensure the security and integrity of the organization's computers, and to provide ongoing assistance to the staff. Phil had been involved in the acquisition and set up of the computers and software, and continued to ensure that the staff's computers were configured in a way that was both usable and safe.

Like many of us, the staff all used Microsoft Outlook for email, and they wanted to learn about the other things that Outlook could do beyond sending and receiving email, things like calendaring, work tracking, note taking, etc. I didn't have a "Using MS Outlook" guide with me, and there would have been no time for me to deliver an off-the-cuff lesson. So I gave them copies of a short introductory article on Outlook that had been published just that week in "HUB", a local free magazine about "Digital Living".

The staff's personal notebooks all used the Windows XP Pro operating system. But the office had a single "public" computer which used Windows ME, and over time people had found that system's performance to be slowing down. They had tried to follow the standard advice to speed it up by "defragmenting" its hard disk. But when the defragment process was started (by clicking Start->Programs->Accessories->SystemTools->Disk Defragmenter), it never got beyond "0% complete", restarting, and restarting, and restarting, and restarting, ... Fortunately I had heard about that particular ME problem before, and I had prepared a short list of steps (which I gave to Phil) that would allow the defragmentation to complete (typing <ctl>-<alt>-<del> and closing potentially troublesome programs).