Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Education Operating Systems

Students Don't Know What Files And Folders Are, Professors Say (pcgamer.com) 186

University students in courses from engineering to physics are having to be taught what files and folders are, The Verge reports, because that's not how they've grown up using computers. Whenever they need a file, they just search for it. PCGamer summarizes the findings: "I tend to think an item lives in a particular folder. It lives in one place, and I have to go to that folder to find it," astrophysicist Catherine Garland said. "They see it like one bucket, and everything's in the bucket." Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up maintaining an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, thanks to powerful search functions now being the default in operating systems, as well as the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud storage, high school graduates don't see their hard drives the same way.

"Students have had these computers in my lab; they'll have a thousand files on their desktop completely unorganized," Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, told The Verge. "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." As The Verge points out, "The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s [...] While many of today's professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today's students increasingly don't remember a world without them."

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, or a reason to recoil in horror because how dare the youth of today do things differently, why the very idea. "When I was a student, I'm sure there was a professor that said, 'Oh my god, I don't understand how this person doesn't know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,'" Plavachan said. "This kind of generational issue has always been around." And Garland, the astrophysicist teaching an engineering course, has started using her PC's search function to find files in the same way her students do. "I'm like, huh ... I don't even need these subfolders," she said.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Students Don't Know What Files And Folders Are, Professors Say

Comments Filter:
  • /. editors (Score:5, Funny)

    by reanjr ( 588767 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:02PM (#61839079) Homepage

    /. editors don't know what dupes are.

  • by Morpeth ( 577066 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:09PM (#61839091)

    ... or part of it.

    Folders are still nice for organizing similar items -- various documents for a school class, photos from a trip, project files, etc. Having recently taught HS students I can tell you most of them have no idea what they called something, so searching for it is often useless.

    I was surprised how many had no idea how file / folder systems worked. It was worse with students who used a Mac (I hate the way Mac hides/organizes things), than Windows users, who were generally familiar with Explorer and tree structures.

    I've seen students and 20-somethings with the most hideous desktops, as the article mentioned, 100s or more files all over it. I think the chaos would even make Cthulhu lose his mind...

    • by Kremmy ( 793693 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:12PM (#61839097)
      it's super weird how they're acting like these things are a new phenomenon. we've had hierarchical filesystems literally my entire lifetime and people have been covering their desktops with everything as long as we've had the desktop ... which came after the hierarchical filesystems. oh no, do they think people didn't have directories before GUIs? I need an ibuprofen...
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:39PM (#61839185)

        Boomers and Gen-Xers don't understand hierarchical systems either.

        Every generation believes that their kids are dumber than they were. They are almost always wrong.

        I worked with boomers in the 1980s who had a thousand files in their home directory without a single subdirectory. When I showed one co-worker how to categorize his files into directories, he thought I had deleted the files because he couldn't see them anymore.

        • by PPH ( 736903 )

          When I showed one co-worker how to categorize his files into directories

          Could he get his work done with 1000 files in the home directory? Yes? Then leave it alone. I've met people who could work this way. I don't understand how their brain operates on that level. But it does.

          When you categorized his files, what attributes did you use to do so? File name? Date? Type? Size? Maybe that's not how he organizes things.

          I used to work for an outfit that was big on the '5 S' system (part of lean manufacturing). We used to refer to that as 'Same Shit Stashed Somewhere Sneaky'.

      • The designers of gui operating systems don't make it easier either by all those links to various actual locations. People forget to think in an organized way so stuff just ends up in a huge landfill of electronic documents and at a company it may mean that they are lost forever.

      • by RhettLivingston ( 544140 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @08:18PM (#61839509) Journal

        Hierarchical filing systems are, like most things in computers, just a reflection of real world organization. Think things like kitchen -> utensil drawer -> knives -> knife. I'm sure we were organizing things in similar fashion before we lived in caves.

        What disturbs me most about things like this is that they reduce the potential pool of people who can do some very real world jobs. I can't imagine writing programs without being able to organize like this. Designing databases would likewise be impossible.

        Just because we can eliminate the need for a skill does not mean we should. The skills we use for simple things feed into more complex things because the people who developed those more complex things had those skills. There might be another way to accomplish it, but should we really redesign the world to eliminate the need to organize?

        A simple example that comes to mind might be a mechanic's garage. I guess we could just throw the tools all over the place and be able to find them if we put RFIDs on everything and added the ability to something like a Google Assistant to lead us to anything in the garage. But, that would have us constantly seeking tools because they wouldn't be grouped by job. It would also remove implicit reminders and negate the usefulness of muscle memory.

        A great mechanic often has multiple toolboxes or kits with duplicate tools because to allow them to grab the one customized to a job. I like to do my own maintenance and have multiple toolbelts for a similar reason - one for doing electrical wiring, one for plumbing, and one for carpentry type activities.

        My file system is similar except the use of links allows me to avoid unnecessary duplication. It otherwise reflects the real world. I can't imagine how I could handle the tens of thousands of files I have otherwise. Nobody who doesn't understand organization could take over my projects or manage to recreate them on their own.

        • by Joey Vegetables ( 686525 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @11:19AM (#61841447) Journal

          Unfortunately, in the "real world" every bit as much as the electronic one, people vary dramatically in terms of their ability, and willingness, to organize things.

          Watch Hoarders if you want to see extreme examples of people unable or unwilling to do this. (Often a little of both, and often an outgrowth of huge stresses and challenges elsewhere in their lives; I've come to look on such folks with sympathy, rather than judgment.)

          I myself have the ability, but often not the willingness, because the time it would take to be better organized competes with a hundred other things of far greater importance and urgency. I tend to be as organized and orderly as I need to be, but, generally, little if any more.

          However, if I found that large parts of my time were taken up looking for things because I don't know where I put them, or starting recipes and not finishing them because I didn't know we were out of this or that, or constantly getting sick because I didn't clean the mold off my shower tiles often enough? Precisely because my time is in demand, I'd invest a little in not wasting it through lack of sufficient organization.

    • by e3m4n ( 947977 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:24PM (#61839125)
      That cluttered desktop goes back a long way. Even in the 90s I remember seeing a lot of desktop clutter. Remember the video 'the website is down' and the dudes desktop whose files got rearranged to shape like a penis? If not check it out. https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE [youtu.be]
    • Yeah, this article makes no sense. I could definitely understand if students aren't familiar with CLI, but not knowing the basics about a desktop probably means they have a group of very non technical students who need to take a ESL equivalent for computers.
    • Windows users are probably better at organizing files because they still have to use file hierarchies because the search function is getting worse with every release.

  • by williamyf ( 227051 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:09PM (#61839093)

    a different name, like document, photo, essay, spreadsheet.

    As per folders (or, more pedantic, subdirectories):

    Why you need to know that, if there is a search engine in your OS, right at your fingertips that you can use to search for your stuff, sometmes even by voice.

    Computers of a bygone era forced many people to become OCD anal retentive types.

    Luckily a new generation of people will not need to become OCD/AR just to use a computer, unless they absolutely need to (like people going into programing, for example)...

    JM2C, YMMV

  • Oddly enough most don't know what a secretary is either.

    • And some people need one to keep them organized and produce properly formatted documents. Dyslexia is something that's preventing otherwise smart people from success.

  • The question is whether search engines are an improvement on organizing structures or just a useful solution for people without a lot of file history. After using a computer for a few decades I've accumulated many files. If I want to find something from a few decades ago it's going to be very difficult to use a search function. I have the same problem when I'm trying to google something I saw in the early 2000s - unless it has a cult following it's impossible to find because the keywords have been reused so
  • Because they have never been taught organizational skills, nor have they been taught the concepts of filing and sorting.
  • 10% rule. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gurps_npc ( 621217 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:46PM (#61839209) Homepage

    I am old. When I was a kid, 10% of the kids and adults, etc. knew what the difference between a file and a folder/directroy was. The others said things like computers are a fad.

    Now, 10% of kids, adults still know the difference between a file and a folder. But the other 10% now say "I know all about computers, I use one every day, I can use it to make myself RICH!"

    The same percent of people have the knowledge, it's just that the ones that don't want the knowledge.

    As for the professors.... IT'S THEIR JOB TO TEACH THEM.
    When one of the 90% comes along, you have to give them a beginner course, rather than expect them to know the things the smart people already know.

    • As for the professors.... IT'S THEIR JOB TO TEACH THEM.

      Only if the course is a computer science course about operating systems. It's not the job of a physics professor to teach students what a file is and what a directory is.

      • It's not the job of a physics professor to teach students what a file is and what a directory is.

        If not knowing this is a detriment to learning, then yes, yes it is.

        • It's not the job of a physics professor to teach students what a file is and what a directory is.

          If not knowing this is a detriment to learning, then yes, yes it is.

          So is it the physics professor's job to teach getting up in the morning, coming to class, reading, arithmetic, notetaking, algebra, test-taking, and calculus?

    • > Now, 10% of kids, adults still know the difference between a file and a folder. But the other 10%

      There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count and those who can't.

  • by Kevin108 ( 760520 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @06:52PM (#61839223) Homepage

    NOW being the default? Shit, everyone who's bothered to register an account here almost certainly knows how to locate any file from the command line in at least two operating systems.

    • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @07:09PM (#61839275)

      What's a command line?

    • by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @07:24PM (#61839321)

      The operative word being 'default'.

      From the CLI, search is always at hand, but it is a separate command. Your current working directory is baked into it so navigating the CLI always is path oriented, even as you have find/locate/etc at hand easily. However this isn't the situation that is relevant.

      For GUIs, the paradigm used to be always click to 'navigate' hierarchies, whether files in a hierarchy in explorer or menu entries in application menus. You were directed to navigate these to find what you want and the prominent 'fast' thing to do was pull your favorites to the desktop as 'shortcuts'. Whenever you saved a file, again you were placed into a dialog to specifically direct where to save and what file to call it, prominently highlighting the directory tree to have you organize. Sure, there was a 'search' option, somewhere under the menu but the user was clearly steered toward navigating the menu and resorting to search only when they couldn't figure it out.

      For modern Windows desktop and application ecosystem, that isn't true. You hit the start key and start typing whatever application or file you want and it shows it to you. When you hit save in firefox/chrome it doesn't ask anymore, it just crams it in ~/Downloads/, and you use the download menu to open the file and then maybe never think about that file again, or if you do it's back to 'search'. When an application does need user input to at *least* name a file, it still drops you in a default directory and greatly de-emphasizes navigating directories. That's when an application even bothers to save any data locally, generally applications love to keep the data on your server, eliminating the 'save' concept completely while they are at it. Your 'files' are just living states of the application you access from a browser or mobile 'app'. To the extent your local storage is used is fully abstracted from the user at the site/app developer discretion. An iOS, Android, or ChromeOS user is likely to never see or otherwise interact with the filesystem paradigm at all. The K-12 education system now lives in a 'SaaS' world and all their schoolwork just lives in Google Docs, some education centered coursework sites, or in very rare instances, Office365.

      The traditional use of filesystem hierarchy in higher ed may be analogous to TeX in things that were intended to be general use, but ultimately reserved for the tier of users like you would find at University.

      I however find it difficult to believe that this represents any significant portion of professor effort. Back in college there was a mandatory computer literacy course that would cover this that you had to take unless you could test out of it. This was only really necessary to ease engineering students into the Unix systems that were the standard, but it makes sense to continue this for whatever tools may be relevant.

  • by ljw1004 ( 764174 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @07:26PM (#61839325)

    We all think that a "thesaurus" is a dictionary where you look up a word and find synonyms for it. But the original Roget's Thesaurus was instead a hierarchical classification of every word in the language. He started with top six-level directories "Abstract relations, Intellect, Material world, Volution, Sentient powers" and divided those into subdirectories and so on. For each word he figured out which leaf folder made best sense. Its use as a dictionary of synonyms was just a consequence of its directory structure.

    Back in 1988 at age 14 I decided to use Roget's classification for my directory structure. That way it'd be logical where each file should go. Unfortunately on the BBC computer network file system, each directory took 1k, and we only had 32k storage space per user, so I didn't get far.

    At college six years later a few of us worked on a "set-based filesystem" for our group project. Our idea is that it'd make more sense for most files to be seen as members of different sets, and many of the sets weren't proper subsets, so hierarchical directories didn't make sense; symlinks and hard links are just papering over the ugly gcracks. We implemented it badly, but I think that (say) gmail message tags embody kind of the same sentiment well.

    All of which to say -- I think there's nothing particularly fundamental about hierarchical directory structures. They don't properly represent the way our files should be categorized by users much of the time, nor the way they should be retrieved by users, nor indeed the way they should be stored by the OS or app. They weren't with us in lots of file systems of the past, and they're being eclipsed for many user-facing areas now. I think we'll look back at them as a transient historical curiosity, used only by some internals of some systems.

    (I say this as someone who obsessively uses directories for all of my files. I even use directories my music archive, despite iTunes fighting me all the way, and I wrote simple shellscripts to copy the directory structure into the "genre" tag of the music files so at least iTunes would let me sort by directory structure.)

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      hard links are just papering over the ugly cracks

      Actually hard links aren't really papering over the ugly cracks, they are a natural feature of the filesystem which is inherently more 'set-based' than people tend to realize. The only 'one true' identifier in a *nix filesystem is an inode number, and no one ever uses that. Instead a hierarchy-friendly set of 'labels' are used, and 'hard link' is merely when there happens to be more than one reference to the same inode. It's not like 'the original' is different than other links, you aren't linking to the

    • I even use directories my music archive, despite iTunes fighting me all the way [...]

      A guy in college had one of those massive MP3 collections. Back when hard drives were about 20GB, he had 15GB of music. All beautifully sorted by hand. He could find you an obscure live version of a song, or a cover version, or Wierd Al's parody of it, all right there on his local storage. That music library was a work of art. For some reason, a few years later he tried installing itunes instead of Winamp. The next time I saw his MP3 folder, there were a handful of artist and genre folders, and about 13GB o

  • by ledow ( 319597 )

    Files and folders are a crap idea.

    Labels and tags.

    And those are inherently searchable, and require a search function to operate.

    Why?

    Say you have a file relevant to 2016 Accounts.

    Do you put that in Accounts\2016 ? Or 2016\Accounts?

    What about 2017 Sales? Now where? Sales\2017? Or 2017\Sales?

    Now how do you collate all the Sales info for each year? How do you collate all the 2016 financial info? One way or another, you're stuffed.

    But if you LABEL them, 2016 and Accounts, it really doesn't matter. You ca

    • by Junta ( 36770 )

      Of course, labels/tags are just alternative words for directories/folders/filenames. Generally filesystems have long recognized that the human namespace (the directory tree) and the machine namespace (inodes) are distinct and have supported the flexibility you speak of to have arbitrary numbers of names in arbitrary number of directories pointing to the same data. People erroneously conceptualize additional names as 'links' to the 'original' name, but at least for hardlinks, even the first name given is m

    • > Say you have a file relevant to 2016 Accounts.
      > Do you put that in Accounts\2016 ? Or 2016\Accounts?

      And the answer is (surprise!) Accounts\2016.

      You keep books together in a bookshelf, and knives together in a kitchen drawer.

      You don't keep a knife and a book next to each other just because you bought them on the same day.

  • by DeplorableCodeMonkey ( 4828467 ) on Monday September 27, 2021 @07:45PM (#61839401)

    One of the reasons we basically stopped allowing new projects in Python where I work is that we found that so many of the junior Python developers were borderline useless at ANYTHING beyond slinging some code. Basically no UNIX-related schools, couldn't even package their code for deployment, stuff like that. Stuff that when I was getting out of college was considered basic competence whether your school taught C++ or Java.

    I mean the level of lack of knowledge is jaw-dropping from some of these punks like one sent our devops team a ticket that amounts to this: "please check elasticsearch because I think something broke when you upgraded postgres" in terms of "I would love to hook up your brain to a debugger and figure out what triggered this neural connection."

  • Old guy perspective: folders and directory structures aren't an end in themselves. The goal is to be able to find what you're looking for. Absent good search capability, that usually means organizing things so you can narrow down what you need to look at to a small enough set to feasibly scan it for what you need. The whole folder tree idiom was just a natural extension of the way we organized physical documents, that's all. Given a good search capability, you don't need to organize documents to be able to

  • There has been a trend for software developers to encourage us to NOT use constructs like directories and files to organize our work and as a result, our digital lives. Should we become dependent on applications for every bit of structure, access or even awareness? Dont worry where your pictures are, dont worry where temp files go ( hint: deep dark places well out of sight), We'll tell let you use recent files (the ones we want).... As a CLI guy, it's difficult to work with a GUI when things like One-Driv
  • I made this article 17 years ago. I knew which way things were headed:

    Towards A Single Folder Filesystem: https://www.skytopia.com/proje... [skytopia.com]

    Keywords and metadata are the way.
  • Why isn't this thread on the same page as CNN articles, eBay listings for fishing lures,
    Zillow homes in Omaha?

  • Plavachan said. "This kind of generational issue has always been around." And Garland, the astrophysicist teaching an engineering course, has started using her PC's search function to find files in the same way her students do. "I'm like, huh ... I don't even need these subfolders," she said.
  • Actually they are called directories not "folders" this goes to show if you say anything incorrectly for long enough people will think it's the truth. sigh!

    *gets bag, and walks out on society*
    • by JustNiz ( 692889 )

      If you wanna get technical, and assuming you're probably not just dumping everything in the root directory of your drive, they are actually called subdirectories.

  • This reminds me of the somewhat similar issues around navigation in the physical world, where search engines replace maps - this time, the search engines show you all (only) what you need to know to reach your destination.

    Whatâ(TM)s missing? Context, sense of place, understanding of how a set of files relate to each other (same directory) and the ability to think of a route from one place to another without using the mobile map.

    Like a search engine that is excellent at answering the (right) question y

  • But I'm not aware of a better scheme - yet. The standard hierarchical system works for projects that are tree structured, but many projects have cross links that form a much more complex system. Search helps. but its far from perfect, since different people may use different sets of key words - or a single person may forget their own key words from work many years ago

    Maybe rather than try to force students to learn about standard file systems, we need more efficient ways to organize information.
  • On music file indexing vs. directories, I'll take directories every day of the week and twice on the weekend. Music file indexing might make sense when you just want to play some Justin Bieber, but not when you have an eclectic taste that doesn't span popular pop and rap. The indexing of the files would get too complicated and cumbersome to look for something very specific, for instance, playing Glenn Gould's Bach Klavier Concerto #1, recorded with Bernstein in 1955, because not only do I have that one, b

  • I've done tech support, systems and network administration since the early 1980s and one of the things that has remained constant over all that time is that the vast majority of people just dump all their files - hundreds or thousands of them - into either one directory or onto their Desktop. Usually with meaningless filenames that do nothing to identify what's in it, or what it's for.

    Tags aren't going to help them because they have no fucking concept of organisation to begin with. if they did, they'd be

  • Who's gonna hire someone who doesn't know what a file/folder is?
    • Who's gonna hire someone who doesn't know what a file/folder is?

      I hear there is a high demand for grave diggers right now.

  • Seriously. No mobile app exposes a file tree. It's just a sea of documents. Yes, there's a file system under there but all you see is a list of texts, photos, videos, What Up messages, or whatever.

    If you grew up on a phone, you'll never have been exposed to file trees so naturally you won't know what they are.

    Plus, the whole concept of a folder containing other folders: what filing system allows that? I've talked to people who couldn't get it because they took the "file folder" model just a little too liter

  • The way I have organized files since the days of DOS is to create a directory for a particular job I need to work on, then have subdirectories off that for things like PCB CAD, firmware, datasheets, and so on. One big advantage of this is that I can archive all the files related to the job with one simple command. I can't imagine how anybody could do that reliably by searching for each file. You are sure to miss something.

    Another habit is manual versioning, where I have subdirectories called "v1", "v2", etc

panic: can't find /

Working...