TAO/Persona Marianne

Persona description of Marianne, a volunteer instructor for new media courses for older people.

Personal characteristics
Marianne is a woman of 62 years old, who lives in a village close to Bern. Marianne has worked part-time in the administration of a company in Bern, but is retired since two years. She is married and has four adult children. At her former job, she has gained basic computer skills. However, it was only after her retirement that she got really interested in using the computer to process pictures. By reading books and internet-manuals, she taught herself how to use the program Photoshop and started showing her processed pictures via mail and online photography communities. After some time, friends and family members turned to her with their picture questions.

Marianne’s goals
Realizing how much she enjoyed not only processing her pictures, but also explaining others how to go about it, Marianne would like to help other older persons to get started with Photoshop and sharing pictures. She also misses the social contacts that she had when she still worked, so she would like to be involved with other people more.

Barriers regarding these goals
Marianne has never received any didactic training, so she does not know much about how to teach a group of people in an efficient yet pleasant way. Also, she finds it important to take good care of the household and to spend time with her husband, so she does not have much time to invest in the creation of courses. Above all, she does not want to have too many obligations towards the courses, as this reminds her of her working life. Now she wants to be in charge of her agenda.

Possible solutions to overcome these barriers
Marianne would like to get information about the didactic part of the courses. Also, she rather imagines herself giving courses developed by someone else, than having to create courses from scratch herself. A flexible working plan is a must for her.

Difficulties to expect
Marianne could be so absorbed be her own experiences with Photoshop, that it could be hard for her to distract the main lessons learned and to transfer these on an abstracted level to her course participants. Also, almost to prove that she knows enough about Photoshop (as an autodidact), she might be tempted to spend too much time on the ex-cathedra teaching, and not provide enough time for practicing. She never had any didactic courses herself, so maybe she does not know how to handle signs of boredom or questions from the participants.