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• truculent 5y ago
  Subtitle: A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans
• Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I guess I just don't quite believe this. I don't think anyone is lying, exactly, but there has to be some detail I'm missing. I can believe that children who have grown up with web apps and iOS devices are not used to the concept of a directory structure. I can absolutely believe that a lot of people have messy and disorganized hard drives. But not understanding the concept of files and folders at all, even after the professor spent a class explaining? The people who bought Macintosh computers in the 90s didn't grow up with these concepts either, and they seemed to get the hang of it relatively quickly. If students have an alternate mental model which works for them, that's fine too! But it sounds like whatever they're doing isn't working, and that doesn't surprise me. You can rely on Spotlight for everything up to a point, but past a certain level of complexity it all becomes a nightmare! Perhaps the professors teaching directory structure need to rethink their lessons? This just shouldn't take more than a day.
  • anschwa 5y ago
    You better believe it. This was exactly my experience as a TA in my College's computer science department from 2014-2018. It's not incompetence though, as the article points out, we've moved beyond an intimate understanding of the filesystem being a prerequisite for using computers. Using interactive browser based environments like jupyter notebooks have made needing to deal with files even less of an issue.
    • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      So how did people learn in the 80s and 90s when no one had used a computer before?
      • LocalH 5y ago
        They learned because if they didn't, they couldn't do much other than loading games. Perspective is a hell of a drug.
        • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
          And what of these students who need to learn for their schoolwork? Again, if they have an alternate system which is working for them, that's great. But the article gave me the impression that alternate strategies weren't working, in STEM classes where the students need to deal with lots of data.
      • mtVessel 5y ago
        The file cabinet/folder/document metaphor was almost universally understood back then. How many of today's students have ever used a physical filing system?
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • Certified 5y ago
        I was taught the concept of drafting a hierchical outline [1] around 3rd or 4th grade in language arts as one of the first steps in writing a paper. Even today, this is probably the mental model I most associate with file systems. I am also fairly confident I encountered this before ever having to interact with a physical file cabinet full of manila folders. Is it still common for outlines to be taught in early grade school? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_(list) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_(list)
        • kritiko 5y ago
          By 3rd or 4th grade, wouldn't you have interacted with a library's card catalog or say, how your family's cassettes or cds were stored for retrieval? I don't think the concept of hierarchies is foreign to these kids, I think it's the concept of storage of physical media.
    • dolni 5y ago
      > It's not incompetence though Or is it? The concept of organizing things hierarchically is not unique to file systems. People were doing it long before computers even existed.
      • mtVessel 5y ago
        Yes, but it's possible this generation has never done it. They've never used a paper-dominant system, never used a file cabinet or a physical folder. The metaphor falls apart when the source is no longer well-understood.
        • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
          I doubt many have used a full filing cabinet, but I'd assume most have used physical folders. I'm actually a student teacher in an elementary school right now (very beginning of my training, so I'm mostly just observing). The third graders have brightly-colored folders for math, writing, science, etc, which they keep in their desks and/or backpack.
          • mtVessel 5y ago
            Well, bang goes that theory. Maybe it's the intangibility of computer files that is tripping them up.
        • dolni 5y ago
          You don't only do it with file cabinets and paper. That was the entire point I was making. You organize day-to-day physical items the same way. "My personal stuff" goes into my bedroom. My underwear go into an underwear drawer. My jeans go into a different one. Anything that I want free of wrinkles is hung in a closet. Geography and space are hierarchical. Earth is in the solar system. North America is in the northern hemisphere, but Australia isn't. The United States and Canada are in North America. Nevada is in the United States. You get the idea. Most organizations of people are hierarchical. Militaries, companies, volunteer organizations, the government. Whether or not you have physically organized papers is irrelvant. It's a concept that is fundamental to existence. Extending it to files on a computer should not be terribly difficult for someone seeking a college education.
  • mikewarot 5y ago
    >The people who bought Macintosh computers in the 90s didn't grow up with these concepts either, and they seemed to get the hang of it relatively quickly. This web based Macintosh emulator[1] says otherwise... on startup, it opens a folder, and "Macintosh HD" is sitting right there in the upper right corner. 1 - http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/
    • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
      Exactly, the Macintosh used files! Sorry, that sentence was ambiguous—what I meant was, the adults who bought Macs in the 80s and 90s hadn't used files previously, because computers by-and-large didn't exist. They still got the hang of it on their Macs. (If you meant something else with your example, and I'm still misunderstanding you, sorry!)
      • qorrect 5y ago
        No, but they did use physical files, and physical folders. Of course these students probably have also ( kids still use paper right? For notes at least ? )
        • cdirkx 5y ago
          But you (generally) don't recursively put your physical folder inside another folder.
          • Wowfunhappy 5y ago
            Did you do that with filing cabinets in the 80s?
            • mikewarot 5y ago
              Yes, you had your filing cabinet, with sections in the drawer that was like a big folder that mounted on the rails, one per customer, then you had individual files inside of that, one per project, maybe even 2 levels of that, then the actual pages of paper.
  • oceliker 5y ago
    I'm wondering if the issue is similar to having GPS and never having to learn the streets of the city you live in. If you can simply type the name of the file you need into the Start menu/Spotlight, why bother going through folders?
    • dreamcompiler 5y ago
      I think that's a good analogy. Not only do many kids today not know how to read a map or find their way around without their phone, but when their job is delivering packages and the app steers them to the wrong house they won't look at the physical address marker on the house and sometimes will even argue with the resident and suggest it's the resident who is in the wrong place. They cannot navigate without the computer, and they trust the computer more than they trust physical reality.
    • mikewarot 5y ago
      Yes, it is similar. Since kids these days aren't allowed to go outside and play, they are driven everywhere. I noticed that my child had zero sense of which way home was, so I started playing a game. Stop at a random corner (with no traffic behind me), and as "which way is home?". It took a while, but now I get good answers all the time. I myself purchased a road atlas a few years ago, for getting to unfamiliar suburbs on the other side of Chicago. The main use I have for google maps is traffic information.
  • derbOac 5y ago
    This is part of a slowly growing phenomenon. As a professor I started noticing this general trend awhile ago, when file types starting being obscured. Students had trouble opening and moving files around because they didn't understand the concept of a filetype. They just expected to click on a file and have it open in the "correct" software. So they'd try to do that, and it would open in the wrong program, and then they'd save it, in the wrong format, and then everything would get corrupted across nesting dolls of attempting different programs to open increasingly frankenstein files. It was confusing to me at first, but then I realized most OSs by default hide filetypes. This stuff with cloud software, automatic saves, tags, etc was just the next step. People complain about loss of terminal/shell UI but I do think this is all a good example of how maybe things are getting too far away from what's going on under the hood. I wouldn't believe it either except I've had to deal with it firsthand.
• keeganjw 5y ago
  I get frustrated with Google Docs because there's no good way to organize your documents into folders. Technically, there's a way to do it but Google makes it a pain in the ass and purposely hides it from you. Instead, they show a gigantic list of your most recent documents. For me, that's frustrating but I guess if you grew up with that being the default, that's just what you're used to. Like smartphones, technically the folder structure is there but it's hidden away and difficult to access, so almost no one uses it. I guess the latest generation have really just used desktops and laptops as portals to the internet rather than doing things locally on computers themselves.
  • x4yJSYXAQ7Q6Cr2 5y ago
    My solution to this is to never use Docs directly, but only through Drive
  • thamer 5y ago
    > there's no good way to organize your documents into folders But… there is? Just above this list there's a folder icon, clicking it brings a hierarchical file explorer with nested folders and a breadcrumb tracker at the top showing how deep you are with the ability to jump back to any level. You can show it as a list or a grid, sort… There's also a text field where you can type any part of a document's name and it will list the matching documents like if you were using Spotlight. Also, showing recent documents by default seems like a great idea; most people will likely go back to a document they were recently working on.
• strathmeyer 5y ago
  They're computer illiterate, they're supposed to be learning
• sss111 5y ago
  I don't believe this, there's no way students don't understand file structures.
  • cjcampbell 5y ago
    I resonate with the article, though there are probably more precise ways to frame the phenomenon. It's not that students don't/can't understand the filesystem, but that it's not a central part of their mental model for working with a computing device. After all, it doesn't really need to be when I have an app-centric view of computing. I teach an intro to networks once or twice a year with a heavy emphasis on Linux networking, and for the last three or four years, I've started the class with a brief primer on file system organization, home directories, and a few other topics that were never an issue for previous groups of students. I don't think the main obstacle is conceptual as much as helping them understand that folder hierarchies, path variables, and related concepts are important details of the work so that they'll take the time to learn to use and navigate them effectively.
    • CodeyWhizzBang 5y ago
      That sounds like it's almost a case of the students not trusting that the ideas the teachers are explaining will be important. Maybe this is extrapolating too far, but I wonder if something has happened in technology that has led to a new generation rejecting the knowledge of the previous generation because they're so often out of date on other trends or habits.
  • notRobot 5y ago
    My brother is a HS student. I once listened in on an online class of his where students were asking the teacher their doubts. Indeed, many of his classmates don't understand directory structures. Multiple kids also didn't understand the concept of a "zip" file because on windows explorer it opens like a normal folder, and windows hides file extentions by default, so it appears almost identical to a normal folder, but contained files (obviously) can't access other files in the zip file (which the kids mistook as a "folder").
  • ColinWright 5y ago
• jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  Do we need to have a moral panic every time we ascend a level of abstraction? Hierarchical folder structures are mostly for the benefit of human organization, and over the last decade we have found different ways to present information such that the average user of newer tech doesn’t encounter it. Recently I’ve be de-foldering a lot of my digital life and getting by with tags or more powerful search tools. I wonder if it would be more worthwhile if we started teaching basic querying methodologies rather than worry about underlying file systems. The next generation will grow up with far more data than can be easily traversed in folders.
  • danso 5y ago
    As someone who's been in this kind of position, I don't see it as a "moral panic" as much as it being a major obstacle when trying to teach more real-world programming and data science — e.g. how to write and manage code (and its dependencies) outside of a prepackaged CoLab environment. You really think there's no concern if data scientists of the next generation have little care for the difference between a data file read from a local path vs. a cloud path? I mean, the "reproducibility crisis" was already full blown based on old-fashioned concepts of data files...
    • jdgoesmarching 5y ago
      The average user doesn’t understand the basics of an operating system, we teach that to people pursuing IT careers. If technology has changed such that what we consider “the fundamentals” have shifted, then we should be incorporating that into our education of IT professionals rather than assuming society has an obligation to make these ideas known. Yes computer are a huge part of our life. So is plumbing, and I know very few people who are comfortable doing their own toilet installations.
      • CodeyWhizzBang 5y ago
        But isn't the issue that it is people going into computer programming who are struggling with the concept - not just casual users, for whom it really doesn't matter that much if they don't know how to navigate a folder structure. To extend the plumbing metaphor: it's as if no one on the plumbing course got the concept that taps had to be attached to water pipes and then wondered why they didn't work.
• rootsudo 5y ago
  "File not found A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans" I believe it 100%, due to proliferation of iphone, flat file system people don't know there are actual file directories where files are stored and can be touched, or that even a shell or an interpreter exists. It's ironic, and truly laughable but I've been hearing it over and over again from education sysadmins and even have run into this issue myself sometimes while explaining things to people under 20.
• pmags 5y ago
  I've taught a scientific computing course aimed at first year grad students in the biomedical sciences for about 15 years. This article absolutely mirrors my experience. When I started out teaching this course I could assume that students had a mental model of how the file system on their computers worked, but over time I've seen more and more students lacking what I had always assumed was basic knowledge. It's more acute among the undergrads I teach than grad students, but it's increasingly becoming the norm. I now devote a portion of a class session to reviewing this, and force them to use both the command line and the finder/file explorer in parallel so they see the correspondence. Part of the blame lies with the OS -- both Window and Mac OS do their best to obfuscate/hide the basic directory structure from the user with shortcuts. I'll add that my experience is at an R1/Top 10 (in the US) institution so this is NOT due to a lack of prior education or academic promise...