7 ms·

I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a co

I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow. I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know how to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for the same reason that I don't own a printer. I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box. Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you. In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but teachers getting left behind. It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to say it.

unqueued 7y ago
> I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow. I suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the printed word. > Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you. Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting the students half way? I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff. Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text. I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info. But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized bundles makes the most sense for everyone.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  > I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text. I used to export the text of my travel itineraries, and go through several steps to get it on my phone. Now I just take a photo of the text on my screen. It's just one step :-)
  - unqueued 7y ago
    Yeah but what if you are grading papers, do you want to mark up bitmaps? People need to learn that there is more than one way to do something.
    - jacobolus 7y ago
      > if you are grading papers do you want to mark up bitmaps? Why not? Get a tablet with a stylus and draw your commentary directly on the image. That is the way teachers have always marked up student work, just now without a paper copy or a physical red pen. Trying to mark up documents using MS Word or Google Docs or whatever is a horrible experience in comparison.
      - wlesieutre 7y ago
        iPad OS’s new “full page screenshot” feature for webpages kicks out a long PDF (no page breaks, it’s one long scrollable page like the actual webpage was) and sends it straight to the markup view. You can draw on it just like marking up an image, but the text is still selectable and searchable. It’s a nice example of software recognizing how people want to work and building to support that. And one more for the people with Pencils - you can drag from the bottom corner upward to take a screenshot in any app with the same markup tools. Works on either side, so the lefties aren’t left out here.
        ryacko 7y ago
        >nice example of software recognizing the software just writes itself?
fenwick67 7y ago
> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? "Please turn in your assignments via Snapchat by 7AM tomorrow"
- greggman2 7y ago
  A friend recommended an accountant to me here in Japan. He wanted to do all correspondence via the Line App including tax forms etc. Another contract made a Facebook messenger group and shared all versions of files by pasting them in to the messenger chat. Wasn't particular happy about those but fortunately both were fairly short term things and to be honest I couldn't really think of anything better that I believe I could convince them to do. The Line accountant was definitely not going to use anything other than Line. The FB Messenger file sharing, well, what. Email? Dropbox cost $$$ per user. Github requires more training. I suppose maybe Slack would have been better than FB messenger but still requires getting the other party to install apps and get used to a different workflow, So yea, I just put up their chosen method of communication for the duration.
  - spats1990 7y ago
    Line accountant!! Same in Korea but with KakaoTalk. People use it for everything. People who are worried about the dominance of WhatsApp or Messenger should see what 90 percent+ dominance by one platform looks like. I did all the organising for a rental contract here through KakaoTalk. It also has a bank and in-app payments system. You can use it to buy someone a coffee at starbucks.They just recieve a barcode to be scanned at the counter. You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification. And despite this vast monopolistic ecosystem DaumKakao put ads in the app this year. Greedy.
    - crooked-v 7y ago
      > You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification. Dang, I wish I could do that.
nine_k 7y ago
Not using a particular workflow ≠ unable to understand a particular workflow. The "zip up your files and email me" is only hard when the concepts of files and email are alien, because everything lives in its own silos. Which is the point.
marcosdumay 7y ago
> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? They probably just don't. People are sharing images, text, and links. Mostly on non-accessible, ephemeral, and unreliable platforms. They are not used to share generic data and not used to reliable platforms at all (as even email is unreliable nowadays)... except at work, and that's where people use email.
Causality1 7y ago
I don't need to compress anything either, but zips/rars are good for getting around other types of limitations. For example, splitting a collection of files into chunks to send one by one or to increase copy speed. As an example, my archive of downloaded comics takes well over an hour to copy onto a drive as file folders, but as a single archive file it takes only a few minutes and I can unzip it on whatever device I'm putting it on.
blub 7y ago
Anyone suggesting using proprietary cloud products for something that's mandatory for participating in society hasn't thought things through: 1. The privacy policy of Google & Dropbox is a catastrophe. 2. They can ban you at any time for all sorts of silly reasons and then you can't even turn your homework in any more.
- meddlepal 7y ago
  1. Nobody besides idealogoues actually cares about that. See their huge install base as a demonstration of this fact. 2. The professor tells you to create a new account and submit it via that. Sure it probably violates the ToS but nobody cares.
- cookie_monsta 7y ago
  My kids have been to 4 schools so far (we move around a fair bit). In each one they are expected to have a Google account which is linked to their school in some sort of G Suite arrangement. I don't know if it's a coincidence or a department policy, but Google gets them early and if you think that's bad, teachers aren't to blame - maybe schools are or possibly the education dept. Honestly I was a little surprised that there was no discussion about it. I talk to my kids about the way the web and privacy is going and I don't expect schools to do everything but they should be a little more aware of the issues imo.
  - pnutjam 7y ago
    My kids user office 365, but the iPad requirement is my but beef.
    - cookie_monsta 7y ago
      > the iPad requirement is my but beef. I feel your pain. At an obligatory 500 bucks a pop I would have been much happier to buy them laptops.
      - pnutjam 7y ago
seabird 7y ago
I've worked for various companies in the engineering and manufacturing industries, and zipping and sending files over email is as far from dead as you can imagine, and has a very bright future ahead of it. Frankly, today's high school students have wildly deficient computer skills. We're talking about teenagers whose usage of a computer usually consists of browsing Facebook and listening to music on Spotify, not actually doing productive work; informing workflows based on input from such users is like asking a painter how a fireman's tools should work.
- saghm 7y ago
  Honest question: what do you do when the files you want to send are larger than the max attachment size for the email provider? If you send it through another medium, why not do that by default instead of email?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Because it is significantly more cumbersome. With email you get the file literally attached to the message talking about it, and you store that away and can always find the file and the context for it in the same place.
  - seabird 7y ago
    SMB shares or the like are pretty much universal in such a situation. I generally tend toward making something available on a file share and emailing a link, but because of permissions and access controls, email is generally easier, especially for transient files that really don't need to be permanently saved. Never once have I used Dropbox or Google Drive in such a situation, even with very small companies.
    - anderspitman 7y ago
      What hiccups do you run into in terms of permissions with sending an "anyone with link can view" link over email? Asking because I'm working on a competing technology and want to get the UX right.
Zanni 7y ago
A little of both, maybe. In defense of your position, though, I agree that zip files are an odd choice. Why not bundle everything into a single document, a Word file or a PDF?
- jimktrains2 7y ago
  How do you bundle a spreadsheet into a PDF? Even embedded into word is a lot less usable and runs the risk of linking to the document and not embedding.
  - Zanni 7y ago
    Depends on what you're planning to do with the spreadsheet. If it's display only, it's easy to bundle into a PDF or Word doc. If you need to interact with it, sure, standalone is better. But this the first case is something I deal with all the time. If I'm looking at financial statements for a board meeting, I really don't need a live spreadsheet, and it's massively more convenient to have it bundled in with the agenda, minutes, reports, etc.
    - jimktrains2 7y ago
      On the flip side, I do public transit advocacy, and having spreadsheets of the monthly data reported to the board, it would be so much better than ocr/text extraction and manual editing.
Animats 7y ago
The problem is that all the new ways of doing things involve being a slave of some ecosystem that doesn't play well with other ecosystems. If Instagram, Snapchat, Dropbox, Slack, and Google Drive all interoperated properly, this wouldn't be a big deal.
- saghm 7y ago
  I'm guessing there's a decent chance that the students are already using an email provider that ties them to an ecosystem (which may already have a service geared towards sharing files!)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  And if you wanted them to interoperate properly... you'd essentially be reinventing a file system. The problem is all these services try to control as much as they can. So interoperability becomes whatever contracts on the use of APIs they can sign with each other. You as a user have nothing to say.
ekianjo 7y ago
> I haven't needed to, Erm, you need to have an email to register for any kind of service out there, so "know how to use email" is pretty much a requirement even for everyone. And this is not going away, unless you want a future where everyone has to be reached thru uncompatible walled gardens.

unqueued 7y ago

> I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow. I suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the printed word. > Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you. Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting the students half way? I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff. Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text. I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info. But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized bundles makes the most sense for everyone.

WalterBright 7y ago
> I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text. I used to export the text of my travel itineraries, and go through several steps to get it on my phone. Now I just take a photo of the text on my screen. It's just one step :-)
- unqueued 7y ago
  Yeah but what if you are grading papers, do you want to mark up bitmaps? People need to learn that there is more than one way to do something.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    > if you are grading papers do you want to mark up bitmaps? Why not? Get a tablet with a stylus and draw your commentary directly on the image. That is the way teachers have always marked up student work, just now without a paper copy or a physical red pen. Trying to mark up documents using MS Word or Google Docs or whatever is a horrible experience in comparison.
    - wlesieutre 7y ago
      iPad OS’s new “full page screenshot” feature for webpages kicks out a long PDF (no page breaks, it’s one long scrollable page like the actual webpage was) and sends it straight to the markup view. You can draw on it just like marking up an image, but the text is still selectable and searchable. It’s a nice example of software recognizing how people want to work and building to support that. And one more for the people with Pencils - you can drag from the bottom corner upward to take a screenshot in any app with the same markup tools. Works on either side, so the lefties aren’t left out here.
      - ryacko 7y ago
        >nice example of software recognizing the software just writes itself?

fenwick67 7y ago

> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? "Please turn in your assignments via Snapchat by 7AM tomorrow"

greggman2 7y ago
A friend recommended an accountant to me here in Japan. He wanted to do all correspondence via the Line App including tax forms etc. Another contract made a Facebook messenger group and shared all versions of files by pasting them in to the messenger chat. Wasn't particular happy about those but fortunately both were fairly short term things and to be honest I couldn't really think of anything better that I believe I could convince them to do. The Line accountant was definitely not going to use anything other than Line. The FB Messenger file sharing, well, what. Email? Dropbox cost $$$ per user. Github requires more training. I suppose maybe Slack would have been better than FB messenger but still requires getting the other party to install apps and get used to a different workflow, So yea, I just put up their chosen method of communication for the duration.
- spats1990 7y ago
  Line accountant!! Same in Korea but with KakaoTalk. People use it for everything. People who are worried about the dominance of WhatsApp or Messenger should see what 90 percent+ dominance by one platform looks like. I did all the organising for a rental contract here through KakaoTalk. It also has a bank and in-app payments system. You can use it to buy someone a coffee at starbucks.They just recieve a barcode to be scanned at the counter. You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification. And despite this vast monopolistic ecosystem DaumKakao put ads in the app this year. Greedy.
  - crooked-v 7y ago
    > You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification. Dang, I wish I could do that.

nine_k 7y ago

Not using a particular workflow ≠ unable to understand a particular workflow. The "zip up your files and email me" is only hard when the concepts of files and email are alien, because everything lives in its own silos. Which is the point.

marcosdumay 7y ago

> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? They probably just don't. People are sharing images, text, and links. Mostly on non-accessible, ephemeral, and unreliable platforms. They are not used to share generic data and not used to reliable platforms at all (as even email is unreliable nowadays)... except at work, and that's where people use email.

Causality1 7y ago

I don't need to compress anything either, but zips/rars are good for getting around other types of limitations. For example, splitting a collection of files into chunks to send one by one or to increase copy speed. As an example, my archive of downloaded comics takes well over an hour to copy onto a drive as file folders, but as a single archive file it takes only a few minutes and I can unzip it on whatever device I'm putting it on.

blub 7y ago

Anyone suggesting using proprietary cloud products for something that's mandatory for participating in society hasn't thought things through: 1. The privacy policy of Google & Dropbox is a catastrophe. 2. They can ban you at any time for all sorts of silly reasons and then you can't even turn your homework in any more.

meddlepal 7y ago
1. Nobody besides idealogoues actually cares about that. See their huge install base as a demonstration of this fact. 2. The professor tells you to create a new account and submit it via that. Sure it probably violates the ToS but nobody cares.
cookie_monsta 7y ago
My kids have been to 4 schools so far (we move around a fair bit). In each one they are expected to have a Google account which is linked to their school in some sort of G Suite arrangement. I don't know if it's a coincidence or a department policy, but Google gets them early and if you think that's bad, teachers aren't to blame - maybe schools are or possibly the education dept. Honestly I was a little surprised that there was no discussion about it. I talk to my kids about the way the web and privacy is going and I don't expect schools to do everything but they should be a little more aware of the issues imo.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  My kids user office 365, but the iPad requirement is my but beef.
  - cookie_monsta 7y ago
    > the iPad requirement is my but beef. I feel your pain. At an obligatory 500 bucks a pop I would have been much happier to buy them laptops.
    - pnutjam 7y ago

seabird 7y ago

I've worked for various companies in the engineering and manufacturing industries, and zipping and sending files over email is as far from dead as you can imagine, and has a very bright future ahead of it. Frankly, today's high school students have wildly deficient computer skills. We're talking about teenagers whose usage of a computer usually consists of browsing Facebook and listening to music on Spotify, not actually doing productive work; informing workflows based on input from such users is like asking a painter how a fireman's tools should work.

saghm 7y ago
Honest question: what do you do when the files you want to send are larger than the max attachment size for the email provider? If you send it through another medium, why not do that by default instead of email?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Because it is significantly more cumbersome. With email you get the file literally attached to the message talking about it, and you store that away and can always find the file and the context for it in the same place.
- seabird 7y ago
  SMB shares or the like are pretty much universal in such a situation. I generally tend toward making something available on a file share and emailing a link, but because of permissions and access controls, email is generally easier, especially for transient files that really don't need to be permanently saved. Never once have I used Dropbox or Google Drive in such a situation, even with very small companies.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    What hiccups do you run into in terms of permissions with sending an "anyone with link can view" link over email? Asking because I'm working on a competing technology and want to get the UX right.

Zanni 7y ago

A little of both, maybe. In defense of your position, though, I agree that zip files are an odd choice. Why not bundle everything into a single document, a Word file or a PDF?

jimktrains2 7y ago
How do you bundle a spreadsheet into a PDF? Even embedded into word is a lot less usable and runs the risk of linking to the document and not embedding.
- Zanni 7y ago
  Depends on what you're planning to do with the spreadsheet. If it's display only, it's easy to bundle into a PDF or Word doc. If you need to interact with it, sure, standalone is better. But this the first case is something I deal with all the time. If I'm looking at financial statements for a board meeting, I really don't need a live spreadsheet, and it's massively more convenient to have it bundled in with the agenda, minutes, reports, etc.
  - jimktrains2 7y ago
    On the flip side, I do public transit advocacy, and having spreadsheets of the monthly data reported to the board, it would be so much better than ocr/text extraction and manual editing.

Animats 7y ago

The problem is that all the new ways of doing things involve being a slave of some ecosystem that doesn't play well with other ecosystems. If Instagram, Snapchat, Dropbox, Slack, and Google Drive all interoperated properly, this wouldn't be a big deal.

saghm 7y ago
I'm guessing there's a decent chance that the students are already using an email provider that ties them to an ecosystem (which may already have a service geared towards sharing files!)
TeMPOraL 7y ago
And if you wanted them to interoperate properly... you'd essentially be reinventing a file system. The problem is all these services try to control as much as they can. So interoperability becomes whatever contracts on the use of APIs they can sign with each other. You as a user have nothing to say.

ekianjo 7y ago

> I haven't needed to, Erm, you need to have an email to register for any kind of service out there, so "know how to use email" is pretty much a requirement even for everyone. And this is not going away, unless you want a future where everyone has to be reached thru uncompatible walled gardens.