SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans
Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She'd laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn't find their files.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they'd saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. "What are you talking about?" multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn't understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations' understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. It's been an issue for four years or so, starting — for many educators — around the fall of 2017.
That's approximately when Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, told a class full of research students to pull a file out of a specific directory and was met with blank stares. It was the same semester that Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia's Universidad EAFIT, noticed that students in his classes were having trouble finding their documents. It's the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file.
While some of us may find this phenomenon strange to understand it is becoming increasingly real for many. Are there any other examples of things that we take for granted becoming incomprehensible to those younger that ourselves? I'm not thinking of 'hanging up' the telephone, or why the icon for saving a file appears to some young people to be a vending machine, but things that cause difficulty for others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 28, @11:22PM
> There is zero discoverability with search.
Alternate take -- while I understand your meaning in the context you presented, I offer Gmail as a counter example.
I have tens of thousands of emails from my small company, a wide variety of volunteer work and other friends/contacts. Trying to sort them into folders on my local hard drive, with previous email systems, was a fool's errand. Too many folders and soon, too many emails in each directory. At one point I used an MS-DOS emacs clone (Epsilon), it included a nice grep that would search whole MS-DOS directories (later, Windows folders), with regular expression pattern matching. That made saving email on the local hard drive sort of usable--often I need to find an email from several years earlier to verify something or other.
Now I just use the Gmail search for a person's name, or a project name that I remember. If I get too many hits, there's a good chance that one of the hits will remind me of another word to search for to narrow things down. I can't remember the last time this failed to find the old email I was looking for. It just works...for me.
And getting back on topic, while scanning search results I often discover old things that need attention (old friends I need to contact, old customers that might be ready to spend some more money), so there's the discovery part.