Teenaged Internet tutors’ level of interactivity - by sharing tacit and explicit knowledge with older learners

Abstract

Younger people, i.e. teenagers without any pedagogical training and work experience play an important role in teaching computer skills to older adults. The present study is based on 14 cases in which a teenager teaches an older adult to use a computer on a topic of the latter’s own choice. Both interactive as well as non-interactive techniques used by the teenagers will be analysed, as well as their dependence on the whether the tutor is a user of the chosen website, whether he/she has made preparations for the tutoring session, and the combination of these two attributes. As a result, we saw that any kind of previous experience the tutor had with the content taught (as an everyday user or by independent exploration prior to the tutoring session) decreased interactivity of tutoring process. At the same time, the risk of over-demonstration emerged in such cases. For further research, some hypotheses to test the idea of a reciprocal learning model in which an older learner would be a resource person for the young tutor on interactive tutoring techniques are proposed.