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theverge.com
theverge.com
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.
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.
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.
I don't think the concept of hierarchies is foreign to these kids, I think it's the concept of storage of physical media.
"By 3rd or 4th grade, wouldn't you have interacted with a library's card catalog"
In that school's library, they had just replaced the old card catalog with a computer terminal based dewy decimal system a few years before I started. Looking at screenshots today, I'm fairly certain it was Dynix[1]. It was the early nineties, and a pretty big deal they had a computer in the school at all. In those years, the librarian was the only one trained to use the terminal, so you simply told her what you were looking for and she helped you find it. Maybe some of the older kids were taught how to use the computer, but there was serious resistance to letting us sticky handed younger kids touch it. I'm sure I had visited the local public library as well by that age, but again, I probably got assistance from parents or librarians to find things until I got older.
"or say, how your family's cassettes or cds were stored for retrieval?"
My father might have had a few audio cassettes, but VHS tapes were all I really interacted with before grade 5. A few of my family friends had walls of VHS laden bookcases in their living room, but we were not that family. The VHS tapes were bulky, but you could record over old things you had already watched so you didn’t need a lot of them. Our system of organization was more akin to shoving them all in the largest drawer in the living room. If anything, my family’s approach to media storage would have encouraged the “all in one bucket” approach that so many of the students in the article seem to favor.
Or is it?
The concept of organizing things hierarchically is not unique to file systems. People were doing it long before computers even existed.
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.
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.
Why do you assume that educators are at fault for the lack of understanding? It seems you are willing to make any excuse for students failing to grasp a straightforward concept that is present in everyones' lives from childhood onward.
> The real problem might be that computer files are intangible, abstract entities, making it harder for students to fully grok the model.
The real problem might be that they just aren't college material.
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.
(If you meant something else with your example, and I'm still misunderstanding you, sorry!)
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.
They cannot navigate without the computer, and they trust the computer more than they trust physical reality.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
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.
"If you can't find it, you don't own it" - Mike Warot
I think the real lesson here is that there is a cost to hoarding data instead of curating it. The reason files and folders were brought into use in the first place was to store masses of data in a way that allowed rapid access, that avoided search. Huge amounts of labor was spent, in very small increments, to make this happen.
< tangent > The filing system that indexed Marriage records in my home state of Indiana for the century prior to computers was quite elegant in it's efficiency. Marriages are recorded sequentially, in sequential books. At the start of each book are a number of alphabetically organized pages with space for names starting with A, B, C, ... Z with space allocated roughly matching the frequency of the names, but twice as many listings as Marriages. The marriage was recorded in the next available entry. The record number was then placed in the index, twice... under both combinations of last names. Normally, you could find a Marriage record in a few seconds, worst case if you didn't have the date, it's sequential searching through the book indices. If there was an error in the record number, you could check the other entry as index records had both names. Worst case scenario was a sequential search. < /tangent >
Just because the computer has superhuman speed at searching for text, if you can't describe something, you no longer effectively own it, if you have a hoarding situation.
Just like all those clerks in the centuries before us, if you want quick retrieval, you have to put in a bit of effort and planning ahead of time.
I think the real lesson here is that there is a cost to hoarding data instead of curating it. Just because the computer has superhuman speed at searching for text, if you can't describe something, you no longer effectively own it, if you have a hoarding situation.
We need to better understand the trade-offs ourselves, and teach them to our successors.
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.
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.
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.
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").
The article accurately reflects my experience.
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.