Experience can go a long way- or it can get stuck in the mud

Not all skills translate over from one job to another, some fields are very specific and so are some skills.  I feel bad for some of my adult learners because it is not always possible to draw a personal or direct analogy to the technology they are facing to give them a frame of reference for understanding. Today, for instance, I spent a long period of time with one teacher and we were not speaking the same language.  She wanted to save some links and some documents she had saved on a jump drive to her own computer.  I was teaching her how to update her website and her jogtheweb.com sites. (That was the objective) Couple the lack of communication with internet troubles and we had a fun time trying to unstick ourselves from the mud.   She understands favorites, she thought they would also exist on her google site.   I was trying to show her how not to lose her data, and was uploading her documents to her google docs and linking them to her site pages.   She does not understand documents in a cloud, so we had to go back and save them on her computer.  Funny thing, her computer was hating us all day long. It would not stay connected to the internet, and we were all a little frustrated with it. She kept trying to use another person's computer to achieve her ends.  She understands favorites, but doesn't understand where they live.  She was trying to save favorites and documents to my computer and her friend's computer,  not understanding that they would not be accessible on her own laptop.

How did all this happen?  When a workshop is planned for  a specific topic, such as google sites, that does not mean that all learners are ready to learn that topic, they may have questions and goals that are important to them that are PART of the objective, but are really not the focus of the day.  It is hard to unstick oneself if there are other concerns dragging one down. She was not ready to move past her own goal to the class goal even though it was related.  She was also trying to transfer her knowledge of favorites to another function, documents - not everything will translate over that easily.  I could have shown her diigo or delicious, but that would have been like me speaking Martian to her.    She needs bookmarks in the cloud, and we will get there, today she did learn that bookmarks are the same as favorites. Baby steps and lots of laughter saved the day...