But roughly speaking, we can track an evolutionary movement in documentation away from three characteristics (social, oral, and physical) and toward three opposing poles (individual, literate, invisible). The somewhat inconsistent bottom category, "Wizards, Guides, and Bob," refers to current articulations of "intelligent agents" by, respectively, Microsoft, Apple, and Microsoft. These agents are actually a return to the social, oral, physical, but as I'll discuss below the type of apprenticeship enacted in this category is far removed from the type of pedagogy we currently work toward.
We can see the ways in which assistance moves from outside of the machine toward the inside, and from outside specific applications and into them. Help is now presented to users as a part of the workspace itself. Not only has hypertext conquered the tedium of walking to a bookshelf and manually finding pages, but now context-sensitive forms of help and iconic cues about possible actions act to remove even the act of navigation from using online help-it's just there when you need it. This is hard to argue with: If I had a choice between a five-word, on-screen prompt about the function of a tool and the alternate task of finding a print manual, locating the relevant information through the use of a table of contents or index, and then navigating to the information (and reading it), I'd probably try the five-word description.
Perhaps more alarming, though, are the cases where the machine does attempt to function in contexts where simple adjustments and binary choices will not do. Style-analysis programs are one example. Newer forms of help attempt to automate teaching and learning to the point that the activity disappears. In Microsoft's interestingly named "wizards," for example, users construct documents based on a series of basic questions and standard templates. Word ships with standard wizards for memos, press releases, resumes, agendas, and even one for a legal pleading letter.
The resume wizard, for example, walks users through the layout of standard resumes, letting them select among four resume classes and eighteen stock categories (which can be customized). A checkered flag signals the finish of the race (it's not clear if the wizard is racing the user, or if the user is racing other unseen users).
There are certainly benefits to this arrangement, but I'm concerned about the fact that wizards don't attempt to offer much in the way of advice about why one would choose some headings over others, for example. And the only response I can articulate toward the resume wizard is that, like the style-analysis program, it may provide the context for a useful class discussion about why computer programs fail at some tasks. (I try not to think about the fact that millions of people will use these forms of online help in the absence of any other instruction, even the use of a good books on layout and business or technical writing.
Another Wizard in Word walks users through formatting a Legal Pleading document (but does not discuss what it is or how to write it). I'm all for people learning the types of knowledge that is too frequently held only by the elite, but I don't see where this Wizard helps the type of learning that actually let a person write a legal pleading. It all seems more than a little legally dangerous to begin writing these things without background knowledge and, furthermore, no attempt by the system to help the user gain that background knowledge. The same holds true for the other wizards. It would not be surprising to see versions of this for the five-paragraph theme, the research paper, or the twenty-minute conference presentation. (I called Microsoft about the presentation wizard, but after a half-hour on hold I hung up. At this time of the year, they're probably inundated.)
