Perhaps this isn't the best forum for this question. If so, would one of the other child sites be more suitable?
I am wondering how to overcome the learning curve of convincing a non-technical bunch of users how and what open id is. how do you convince users that it is a good thing and that they want to use it?
By offering a service that they want to use and requiring they register with openid to do so.
The same way you 'make' anyone do anything: find out what they want and give it to them.
The fact that you need to "convince" people means that maybe openid hasn't got it quite right yet.
Of course, you have to be willing to give up some percentage of your potential users by doing this. I'm not sure if it's 5% or 50%, but some number of users wont be willing to go to the extra effort of setting up & using OpenID just to use your service.
I suggest just making it easy for them to use OpenID, with icons that link to Facebook / Google / Yahoo / other big-name providers, and then to the side, another box that allows them to create an account directly on your site without OpenID (so you don't lose the users that don't want OpenID for whatever reason).
There is lots of effort being put into how to make OpenID work (or at least non-Facebook-based Identity 2.0 in general) by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al.
One of the more interesting recent projects is called XAuth. Lots of the players got together and built a really cool preview of what could be done to make this stuff all work better: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/18/spearheaded-by-meebo-xauth-looks-to-make-social-sites-smarter/
One way to do this is to just make all logins for your site use OpenID, and if users don't have one already, register them for one as part of the sign-up flow. The myOpenID Affiliate Program is one way to do this.
A potential disadvantage is if you sign them up with a 3rd-party provider, it's quite possible they won't fully understand that they just got an OpenID from this other site (in this case, myOpenID), and they'll forget (or not be aware in the first place) of what their OpenID is. If they choose to provide their email address, myOpenID will send them the welcome/confirmation email explaining it, but then you're trusting your users will read that.
Are your users likely to have an OpenID already? In the US, it seems like most users already have an account with one of Google, Yahoo, or AOL, but I know that's not true of all demographics.