Computers The Way Your Kids Use Them: Introduction
I made this short series of lessons for my mother, who I think is a decent benchmark for a fairly average computer user: Before this, she knew how to use all the basics of the computer, browse the web, normal uses of Office, etc. But if anything broke, she didn't know how to fix it. And she didn't know where to turn to in order to get better at it. So she turned to me, her techy daughter- not the way she's been turning to my siblings and me for years, with "can you fix this?". Instead, she asked me for lessons- an assignment every week, until computers made more sense.
This set of lessons isn't complete. It's hodgepodge because I tailored it to my mom's interests, and short because our lessons only lasted about a month. But I centered the lessons around what's different between the way my siblings and I use computers, and the way she did it- hence "Computers The Way Your Kids Use Them". Basically, it boiled down to figuring out how to drive home the point made in http://xkcd.com/627/. These are the points: (1) Click on things. (2) Ask the internet for help. After that, the actual assignments were trivial, as long as they made her practice 1 and 2 above.
The best part about this? It actually worked. At first, the assignments came back with "I coudn't figure this part out" or "I asked your sister for help on this". But by the end of just a few assignments, it was more on the order of "I didn't get this, so I looked it up". She even fixed her own printer!
I'd love to see people fork, revise, and add to the lessons. My hope is that you can pass them along to anyone else who might find them useful.
Note: My mom uses Microsoft Office, so that's how the lessons are written.