Abstract
With the ever-increasing development of digital technologies, understanding their acceptance or rejection is important. A great deal of research, led by the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), shows that technology acceptance is a hot and complex topic. Much of it has been quantitative and operationalized within mandatory—workplace/organizational—contexts, where instrumental aspects of technology use (e.g., efficiency and productivity) play a central role. In this chapter, we report on a qualitative case study—based on 3 in-person learning courses—of factors that can help us foster programming acceptance in the everyday lives of older and adult people with low levels of formal education. We discuss the relative relevance of technology acceptance constructs, showing that perceived ease-of-use is much less relevant than perceived usefulness, because all participants had to find the fit of programming in their lives. We show that two social aspects—the figure of the course instructor and the group—were key to introduce programming and encourage decision-making. We also discuss some methodological issues, such as the difficulties in asking validated items of TAM (e.g. “I have the knowledge necessary to use the system”) to our participants.
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Notes
- 1.
We focus on possible rather than actual acceptance because the results of the case study show that programming and our participants are two worlds apart.
- 2.
https://scratch.mit.edu/. Accessed November 10, 2018.
- 3.
http://appinventor.mit.edu/explore/. Accessed November 10, 2018.
- 4.
https://fablabbcn.org/. Accessed November 10, 2018.
- 5.
https://fab.city/. Accessed November 10, 2018.
- 6.
Programming is also important in End-User Development (Díaz et al. 2015), which, in our view, is related to making in the sense of ordinary people creating their own technologies.
- 7.
- 8.
https://processing.org/. Accessed November 10, 2018.
- 9.
This finding is more related to the authors’ own reflection on their impact on the case study than on participants’ comments and views.
- 10.
http://download.processing.org/processing-3.3.7-windows32.zip. Accessed November 10, 2018.
- 11.
Learning is an item of PEOU, e.g. “Learning to operate the system would be easy for me” (Venkatesh et al. 2003).
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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to l’Escola d’Adults de la Verneda—St. Martí, l’Associació de Participants Àgora, and to all our lovely participants, for their interest in the project and allowing us to collaborate with them, share their views and opinions in publications related to our research, and for helping us to keep learning more about the ‘older’ side of digital technologies. We also acknowledge the outstanding tasks carried out by Pau Blanco, Irene Sainz, Rosa Lloret and Mª Jesús Quesada in the 3D courses. We thank Josep Blat and Mireia Ribera for their comments on earlier versions of the chapter. We acknowledge the support from the Barcelona city council.
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Sayago, S., Bergantiños, A., Forbes, P. (2019). Working Towards Fostering Programming Acceptance in the Everyday Lives of Older and Adult People with Low Levels of Formal Education: A Qualitative Case Study. In: Sayago, S. (eds) Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction Research with Older People. Human–Computer Interaction Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06076-3_15
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