> What has your experience been teaching inexperienced users how to use > GnuPG properly?
Varies between extremely good and extremely bad with very little in-between. When addressing people who have the motivation to learn and the ability to think analytically, it's been great. When addressing people who lack one or the other it's frustrating, and when addressing people who lack both it makes me prefer dental surgery. > What are common pitfalls on the part of the instructor? The most common one I've found is not understanding the material as well as they think. This tends to come through most in the metaphors an instructor uses. For instance, I frequently encounter instructors who tell the class to imagine a lock with two keys, one that locks it and one that unlocks it, and they proceed to use that lock metaphor to explain crypto. It's absurd. Who in the class has ever seen a lock with two keys, one that locks it and one that unlocks? The metaphor's ridiculous: the locks the students are familiar with require *no* keys to lock and only one key to unlock. When I see an instructor use inappropriate metaphors, who doesn't understand that these metaphors are inappropriate, it makes me think the instructor has a superficial and fragile understanding of the material. And frankly, there are a lot of those people out there. (One metaphor I've been playing with lately, but haven't decided yet whether it's a good one, involves magical sealing wax. This magical sealing wax can only be cut or shaped by one person -- the person who owns it. If you seal a message with this person's magical sealing wax, only that message recipient can open it. And if you see that someone has pressed a signet ring into it, you know the person who owns the wax did it, since only they could shape it. So if Alice were to affix her magical sealing wax to a message and press her signet ring into it, and then fold the letter and seal it with Bob's magical sealing wax, only Bob could cut the magical sealing wax to read the message and he would know that only Alice could have put her signet on the blob of wax at the end of the letter. Is magical sealing wax a better metaphor than a lock with two keys? Yes. Is it better *enough*? I don't know yet.) > What aspects are the most challenging for new users to understand? Anything that gets explained with a poorly chosen metaphor.
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