I doubt this is an epidemic of computer illiteracy, but I do think it points to how software interface design in the major user OSes has come to obscure the structure of the system as much as it can.
Google Drive has also pushed people to just search a mess of files, and it might be to train people to use Google Search
Idk if it's just Google though, this is the exact tactic i use for my work emails in Outlook. I'm lazy as fuck and I hate organizing and deleting that shit, just leave it in a pile and I'll summon it when I need it. It's messy but it's easy and that's about as much effort as I want to put into work emails
wtf based
no but for real did anyone feel like this article was poorly written. Literally just anecdotes.
their "omg look at all these posts that keep cropping up" literally only had 11 upvotes on 2-4 years in stack overflow. Super common problem obviously.
https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/3535/introducing-file-systems-to-students-who-really-dont-understand?noredirect=1&lq=1
https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/5551/what-is-a-file?rq=1
Just clicking on the cseducators stack exchange, i don't see anyone on the homepage talking about this, more just normal issues, with stuff like "analagy for recursion" getting 40 votes.
Feels like we're entering the "bully genZ" phase of lazy article writing, just as we had the "millenials bad" phase.
next time i feel bad about my skills as a writer i'm gonna remember this drivel got published based off 2 year old stackoverflow posts with 11 upbears
I think it's true though. Other people on here have mentioned the same. People's earliest computer experience now is just using apps on a mobile device. It isn't using a desktop or laptop anymore. And often all people need to use is a mobile device, which are not designed around file systems (which is kind of nice most of the time). Although mobile operating systems do also have a problem with not really being designed for utility. File systems can also be really unintuitive.
Windows Explorer is both kinda nice and kinda garbage, but it makes it confusing to determine where files and things are stored in the actual file system (C:). I was already doing computer programming before I understood how file extensions worked (they're just a file name convention), partially because Windows by default hides file extensions :agony:. And Windows does a garbage job at teaching you how the actual architecture of the system works: the boot process, the root file system, device drivers, the registry, environment variables, etc. GUIs were created to basically hide all of that, the problem is it's all still there and affects everything else. I think desktop OSs are just a confusing Frankenstein's monster since their architecture wasn't even designed for personal layman use (it was for mainframes and academia and stuff like that), in the way that smartphones OSs are.
People are also dumb and lazy and should use file systems more. Older people used file systems more because older operating systems made them more front and center (any UNIX OS or other terminal based OS). I'm (not older but) lucky to have used my mom's clunky desktop computer a bunch.
The article has a really good point, "(Your Steam games all live in a folder called “steamapps” — when was the last time you clicked on that?)"
I read this and didn't want to put on my old man eyes so I shared it to a work slack to ask about folks experiences, particularly to younger interns.
One person's elementary/highschool didn't have managed networks and had to learn how to use directory structure as they entered college.
A handful have taught at the university level and said they saw somewhat similar things, but also the same people were guilty for just using "find" or "grep" in the terminal
Some peoples brains just can’t wrap their minds around a computer
I really do think that a lot of it comes down to the really shit state of computer education. It really should be something that pretty much everyone has knowledge of and it should be possible but yeah.
I get what you're saying and there's definitely some truth to that. I think most of the issues with education in totally are kinda summed by the computer issues. This is just a symptom of a big problem. Most of the issues in education, for the most part and in my experience, come down to education education being nearly completely hearsay and there isn't nearly the amount of rigorous scientific research done in teaching to actually take us from the classical passing on of knowledge to a genuine education system. That's where, in this theory, the idea of "it depends on the teacher" gets explained. Personally, I see it less as the teacher and more about their mannerisms and care for education. The best teachers I have tend to be the ones who are the most invested in being educators first and their love of the content comes second. Most of those teachers will go out of their way to learn about new instruction methods and will actively do comparisons of methodologies. Some teachers aren't great teachers, but you remember what they say in class. I think a lot of this comes down to how the teacher acts. eg my math teacher will make dumb jokes and things, but they will be repetitive jokes which call back to earlier content, thereby increasing your retention of the content.
tl:dr education really needs a lot more money and rigor in its theories and studies so that actual knowledge can be built instead of passing around of rumors.
A lot of the anti-computer thing imo is a result of 1) computers being ever-present in our lives and 2) the evil that's been enacted using computers.
I've seen the place before and can certainly say cleaning isn't necessary. They keep a disturbingly clean house. I'm sure she'd appreciate the meal tho
I refuse to believe this is true when the windows search function is still fucking broken in the year 2021, no way there's a single human being that relies on it, it's just not true.
People treat Millenials and GenZ as "digital natives" and they think it gives them permission to not teach them about computers, file management, repositories, etc. It's really frustrating.
if I put my cynical glasses on, then this is article is a retread of the "digital native" thing, just the other way around, gen z kids are actually attuned to how modern cloud computing works, it's just that the traditional tree structure is an atavistic, archaic way to organize files so zoomers can't into it
File hierarchies are still the backbone of how the cloud works. It's very much not archaic.
There's experiment filesystems that don't really use folders, maybe u wanna get into that
Is it just me or is that website's font impossible to read? It's like half of every letter is missing.
I work in education. This is a problem. Many gen z do have problems navigating file systems, but they learn pretty quick if you take the time to show them.
Actually low key interesting article, just has some shitty analysis done by a journalist instead of someone that's actually done some research.
“Students have had these computers in my lab; they’ll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized,” he told The Verge, somewhat incredulously. “I’m kind of an obsessive organizer ... but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that is fundamentally because of a shift in how we access files.”
People who think this is a youth issue are just focusing on that demographic when I think it's a lot more common than people think. My dad is in his 50s and his desktops always end up like this. My mom's too. I have to beg them to let me organize it. Because it's so frustrating to see.
Also what exactly are we comparing these kids to? The vast majority of people with little to no concrete knowledge of how a computer works? They mention a study on how 2% of 8th graders have "digital native" computer literacy. Well what's the average? What're the criteria?
yes I know they link the study I'm ranting okI think ultimately it's both that people won't learn more about systems they interact with unless they're interested in them, and that computers and the like are increasingly integrated in schools. So people were never really learning about organization that much anyway, and now it's a lot more visible in those darn youngsters because of there's more opportunities to show it.
I feel like the purpose of the article is to make me feel like a boomer and it's working :stalin-stressed:
Noooo! You can't just put everything in one folder! It'll take so long to load that it could crash your device when you try to open it!!! :wojak-nooo:
Haha, search function goes brrrrr :sicko-zoomer:
I expected this to be an eye-rolling article, and it was at first, but it correctly identified the cause and implications, I think. It's not that a directory structure is intuitive or naturally, but simply that it was the interface that was taught by the tools used at the time, and isn't by mobile devices.
What makes directory structures interesting is that they are essentially recursive (a directory is a collection of files and other directories), and to understand them is to understand a recursive structure (a linked list being another such example) — I would guess this is where the barrier is.
This is a noteworthy phenomenon, though I wouldn't worry too much. It's just that a formerly grade-school level skill is now a college level skill. If you're in STEM, you're probably also going through the arduous task of learning LaTeX at the same time. If eight year olds typeset their book reports, you could imagine an professor equally incredulous that their students didn't know it.
One interesting takeaway comes from the invocation of search. There are filesystems (none in production use that I know of) that identify files as an unordered collection of (searchable) tags rather than a path: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3263550. There are a lot of interesting implications that come from this, such as tag-based ACLs, or transparent version control, but it's pretty underesearched.
for certain situations, i think a descriptive tag-based system is more useful.
