What's a Folder?

By Not the Territory · May 6, 2023 · 794 · 1

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There are complaints from college teachers that young students either don't use or can't even grasp the concept of file directories. I didn't believe this at first, given that the terms file and folder are sort of there to help understand the slightly abstract notion of directories, and that operating systems are mostly visual (GUI) anyway.

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
https://pcgamer.com/students-dont-know-what-files-and-folders-are-professors-say/
Favourite anecdote is from Reddit, r/teachers, "They're Not 'Digital Natives,' They're 'Click Natives'":
College TA here - it's even more apparent in college.

Here's a list of things I've had to teach 18 and 19 year old students who were in a STEM college program at a prestigious university:

How folders work. No one in my class knew that the downloads and documents folder were different places. I had to make a prop made of physical folders because nothing else worked to make them understand.

Control-Z. They just didn't know they could undo things.

Related: Copy-Paste. It was a less common discovery but many still had a surprised look when I told them about it.

Emailing something to yourself. I had students borrow my laptop a few times to do some work and had to walk them through emailing the file to themselves. Some didn't even know you could attach files to an email.

Installing a program. Most just had the stock apps on their MacBooks and used Google docs/slides/etc. for classes. Most had never added a program of any kind onto their computer.

And that's not even mentioning the severe lack of coding background even asking students who took AP Comp Sci. Variables, arrays, pretty much everything. I was teaching a science course and had to spend well over 70% of my time teaching and reteaching coding techniques because they just didn't understand.

True story about the folder thing: even after I made a prop, explained it to the class multiple times (that they had to move the code file and data file to the same folder and what that looked like on different computers), and went around to each student to ask if they had any questions about the process and verify that they're onto the next step, I had a student who lied to me about understanding and sat staring at her computer on step one of a very long project for 3 weeks, never asking for help or seeking help from the people around her.
Click to expand...
Whose fault is it? It's not Apple, Microsoft, cellphones, nor Tiktok. It's people. People of all ages.

You grow up in a world dominated by computers and don't stop to think that learning how to type or use operating systems could be a marketable skill. Coasting along will always screw you. Everyone has that inclination, it's just keeps getting easier to coast. There has to be a part of you that pauses, hand halfway to the cellphone, and thinks: maybe I shouldn't use a tool to tell me what 7 x 16 is, maybe I should take the less expedient or more challenging path for literacy's sake.
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Storysmith, ps102, Iain Aschendale and 1 other person like this.

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My students are learning English as a Foreign Language, but at the university level I'm still struggling with teaching them things like "in a paragraph, each sentence follows the one before it. Don't hit 'enter' every time" and "in English, there is one space after each comma or period, but no spaces before."

One would think that English (EFL) majors would have learned this before entering uni, but the Japanese education system doesn't seem to teach that sort of thing.

Iain Aschendale, May 10, 2023

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