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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: 5, Insightful) by bloodnok on Friday April 28, @05:38PM (11 children)
I grew up with proper filesystems. Now, as a volunteer with a non-profit, I have to use Google Docs.
After a few years I still have trouble finding things on Google Docs. Yes, it's amazingly searchable but mostly I don't want to search. It's like being offered a bloodhound to find the socks that I know I left on the bed. I shouldn't need to search. I'm standing by the bed. Where are the damn socks?
In google docs there is no obvious filesystem hierarchy, except sometimes. If I find a document and then edit it, I can't get back to the place that I opened it from. I can't get to the directory where other similar files are stored from the document that someone sends me a link to. And the place where the documents are, is not the same place as where the spreadsheets are. Except they are. Sometimes.
Every google docs page is just a baffling collection of buttons, sometime offering useful clues and sometimes not, and not organised in any way that relates to a hierarchical filesystem. I don't have a problem with replacing the hierarchical filesystem with something better, but a free-text collection of things, where the nature of the things interface (doc or spreadsheet) matters more than the relationships I want to define between them, is not the better thing. I'm not wedded to the hierarchical filesystem; I also like relational models, but what google docs does seems to be based on no model at all.
If anyone can offer me a clue as to how to understand this baffling interface I'd be grateful.
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The Major
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday April 28, @06:13PM
I guess you don't use the Google Drive desktop application that syncs your files to your desktop. Not a great solution, but a workaround is a workaround for what it's worth.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday April 28, @06:57PM
I'm glad you brought it up, though, because one thing I was NOT doing was adding keywords to the metadata. In my defense I think being able to do that from iOS is a relatively new thing. I think I'm gonna try using metadata instead of albums for a while. If anybody's further down this path than me I'd love to hear what you have to say about it.
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ilsa on Friday April 28, @06:58PM (8 children)
The whole idea of depending on search is completely psychotic to me.
How the hell are you supposed to search for something if you don't know it even exists? There is zero discoverability with search.
The whole point of all this tech is to enable people and improve self-sufficiency, and a search-first paradigm does exactly the opposite of that.
WRT Google... Google does provide a complete filesystem in the form of drive.google.com. People just refuse to use it because... they're stupid? They're batshit insane? They think organizing their files in a sensible way is for wierdos? 🤷♀️ I honestly can't wrap my head around not using something that is _literally_ right in front of you.
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday April 28, @07:02PM (4 children)
An excellent point.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 28, @07:39PM (3 children)
I would point out that this was a similar observation I had when I first saw the Apple Lisa in 1983, and later Macintosh (in late 1983 before it was officially released and was still very secret).
I suddenly realized that the command line didn't have any obvious discoverability. Of course, you could use DIR and HELP to find commands and files. But even knowing to do that was not visibly discoverable from a blinking cursor on a command line. And even if you suspected there were commands to help you, you wouldn't know what they were.
This is why I saw Lisa/Mac as a gigantic eye opening revelation. The term GUI had not yet even been coined and wouldn't be for years.
Myself and the other programmer I worked with were constantly amused at some computer publications taking sides obviously against the whole Mac way of doing things and believing that the GUI had no long term future. And here we are today. The GUI you use now draws MOST of its influence from the Mac, and some from Xerox. Apple took it further and added original ideas.
But discoverability. As soon as the system started up you could discover how to use everything.
Some things we take for granted now, like clicking a "close box" to close a window; that was a SHORTCUT on the Mac. The real command was to go to the File menu and pick Close to close the front most window. The close box was a shortcut for that. Various other mouse operations were actually shortcuts for labeled commands on the original Mac. That is something that has been lost today.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 28, @07:41PM
Oh, and double-clicking on anything was always a shortcut for some command.
Click the icon on the desktop or a window. Then go to the File menu and pick Open. Double clicking was a shortcut.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday April 29, @08:38PM (1 child)
On VMS, just type help.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday May 01, @04:09PM
Hopefully, it tells you that on screen somewhere.
While Republicans can get over Trump's sexual assaults, affairs, and vulgarity; they cannot get over Obama being black.
(Score: 2) by bloodnok on Friday April 28, @08:38PM
Yep, it's there and we use it. But finding my way to it from a document? I have no idea how to do that? Finding your way to the parent directory? None of it is obvious. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I find it baffling and I don't know why it has to be so inobvious.
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The Major
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday April 28, @08:43PM
Having an optional search is a great feature, if you've got the spare disk space and cpu cycles, but having only a search is a terrible idea.
FWIW, when I used KDE, I always disabled the search. But I have locate installed. That's a lot smaller directory and fewer background cycles.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(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.