6 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

> 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?
      - unqueued 7y ago
        Years ago, I tried using ghostcript to set the attributes of a webpage PDF so that it is like 8k pixels tall and had no linebreaks, but Preview.app would just render it as a single page really zoomed out, and I would have to zoom all the way in. Does it function better now?
        wlesieutre 7y ago
        When I open in a Preview window it behaves well and fits to the width. Switching Preview to full screen trips it up still. For some reason that view wants to fit the whole document, and it zooms very far out to do it. And on the iPad side there appears to be a limit on how long a document the "Full Page" screenshot will make. An HN thread with 110 comments came through entirely, but another one with 160 comments was truncated. Didn't dig any deeper than that, but I wonder what's going on there.
pm90 7y ago
I think its important to stress on this part: > and meet them half way? In other words, OP is not suggesting that you force students to use another method, but work with them to understand what makes sense to them. In your specific anecdote, if the teacher showed the students how to share hyperlinks, or how to get text dumps and share them instead of screenshots, maybe they would respect her for that.
pnutjam 7y ago
Email is actually pretty crappy for files. She should setup an https drop and get a way better experience.
- anderspitman 7y ago
  How would that look for assignment submissions? Something like WebDAV?
  - detaro 7y ago
    Just a page with a form you can upload files through. You can setup something like that e.g. with Owncloud/Nextcloud. And dedicated education tools also often have it. For normal document-sized files, email is fine though too IMHO, for university stuff I never really cared which way was used.
    - anderspitman 7y ago
      NextCloud is quite a dependency for a simple file upload.
      - detaro 7y ago
        Sure, if you just install it for that. But it's a reasonably common service (e.g. around here, many universities have it for their employees and students) with that feature.
- Const-me 7y ago
  I use pcloud.com for a similar problem. They have custom HTTP JSON RPC protocol, it uses POST and GET verbs. Their web site calls that one. They also have more performant TCP binary endpoints for use by native clients, with the same payload packed into custom binary format. For users, it's a web app with download and upload links.
SiVal 7y ago
The problem I see is that tech is doing the market-savvy thing of moving from features to solutions. We had enabling technologies that people were expected to learn to use in combination, like tools in a toolbox. Files were generic containers that could hold different things and clustered into projects in "folders" and manipulated by specialty tools. But the new way is exemplified by iOS. You buy pre-packaged "solutions" that keep your data...somewhere...safe, presumably, and away from you so you don't screw it up. If it's something you should be doing, there will be "an app for that" that you can buy, so don't worry your pretty head. If we gave you "tools", you'd just hurt yourself. Why not stop worrying and buy something nice. We have songs, we have shows...you can send a funny animoji to all of your friends. Good times. You look awesome. You're welcome. And for market success, they seem to be right, although they're creating a situation where, if you don't have to learn to use a toolbox of specialized tools in customized combinations, you'll never learn how and really WILL need to rely entirely on pre-built "complete solutions".
aidenn0 7y ago
> 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. True story: while performing support for development tools, I asked a developer for a source file. They opened it in their IDE, took a screenshot, pasted the screenshot into a word document, hit page-down in the IDE, took a screenshot... We got a several dozen page word document filled with screenshots of the text file.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Honestly, that's a fireable offense. Who knows what untold damage that kind of ignorant mentality has caused to the company codebase.

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?
    - unqueued 7y ago
      Years ago, I tried using ghostcript to set the attributes of a webpage PDF so that it is like 8k pixels tall and had no linebreaks, but Preview.app would just render it as a single page really zoomed out, and I would have to zoom all the way in. Does it function better now?
      - wlesieutre 7y ago
        When I open in a Preview window it behaves well and fits to the width. Switching Preview to full screen trips it up still. For some reason that view wants to fit the whole document, and it zooms very far out to do it. And on the iPad side there appears to be a limit on how long a document the "Full Page" screenshot will make. An HN thread with 110 comments came through entirely, but another one with 160 comments was truncated. Didn't dig any deeper than that, but I wonder what's going on there.

pm90 7y ago

I think its important to stress on this part: > and meet them half way? In other words, OP is not suggesting that you force students to use another method, but work with them to understand what makes sense to them. In your specific anecdote, if the teacher showed the students how to share hyperlinks, or how to get text dumps and share them instead of screenshots, maybe they would respect her for that.

pnutjam 7y ago

Email is actually pretty crappy for files. She should setup an https drop and get a way better experience.

anderspitman 7y ago
How would that look for assignment submissions? Something like WebDAV?
- detaro 7y ago
  Just a page with a form you can upload files through. You can setup something like that e.g. with Owncloud/Nextcloud. And dedicated education tools also often have it. For normal document-sized files, email is fine though too IMHO, for university stuff I never really cared which way was used.
  - anderspitman 7y ago
    NextCloud is quite a dependency for a simple file upload.
    - detaro 7y ago
      Sure, if you just install it for that. But it's a reasonably common service (e.g. around here, many universities have it for their employees and students) with that feature.
Const-me 7y ago
I use pcloud.com for a similar problem. They have custom HTTP JSON RPC protocol, it uses POST and GET verbs. Their web site calls that one. They also have more performant TCP binary endpoints for use by native clients, with the same payload packed into custom binary format. For users, it's a web app with download and upload links.

SiVal 7y ago

The problem I see is that tech is doing the market-savvy thing of moving from features to solutions. We had enabling technologies that people were expected to learn to use in combination, like tools in a toolbox. Files were generic containers that could hold different things and clustered into projects in "folders" and manipulated by specialty tools. But the new way is exemplified by iOS. You buy pre-packaged "solutions" that keep your data...somewhere...safe, presumably, and away from you so you don't screw it up. If it's something you should be doing, there will be "an app for that" that you can buy, so don't worry your pretty head. If we gave you "tools", you'd just hurt yourself. Why not stop worrying and buy something nice. We have songs, we have shows...you can send a funny animoji to all of your friends. Good times. You look awesome. You're welcome. And for market success, they seem to be right, although they're creating a situation where, if you don't have to learn to use a toolbox of specialized tools in customized combinations, you'll never learn how and really WILL need to rely entirely on pre-built "complete solutions".

aidenn0 7y ago

> 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. True story: while performing support for development tools, I asked a developer for a source file. They opened it in their IDE, took a screenshot, pasted the screenshot into a word document, hit page-down in the IDE, took a screenshot... We got a several dozen page word document filled with screenshots of the text file.

soulofmischief 7y ago
Honestly, that's a fireable offense. Who knows what untold damage that kind of ignorant mentality has caused to the company codebase.