Report suggests many Gen Z students do not know how to use a basic file directory

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, DuckDodgers said:

The case of hierarchical nature of the file/folder structure is analogous to the segmented memory address space or stacked registers -- no system programmer is arguing that the latter is superior to the flat memory addressing. I mean, that was the whole point of the evolution of the x86 for example -- from the 32-bit protected mode to the 64-bit extensions that all expanded and "flattened" the memory address space, so we don't need to resort to complicated segmentation and translation hacks. Heck even the age old NTFS was supposed to be supplanted by a DB-like meta-data driven WinFS years ago. IBM is even taking the similar approach to their mainframe CPUs with flattened meta-driven caching structure, enabling much more efficiency.

You're missing the point. The human brain has evolved to think in abstracts. It's not a digital computer. It's biological nature to respond with reductive reasoning as the primary go-to to initiate an appropriate time sensitive response.

As I've stated before, there's a reason we live in domiciles with rooms and doors and not in an open floor plan. It's a reflection upon the nature of the human mind.

[Brooksie359]

10 hours ago, Hassan170 said:

My mum actually signed me up for this computer "tuition" as a kid, there was just me an a few others, i think was 5 or something back then. We learned how to do simple stuff like making a new folder on the desktop and changing the icon of said folder. That's all i remember. they gave us handouts with more info on basic computer stuff as well. it also helped that my family had a computer early on. so for me i got a headstart with the tuition and the rest i sort of figured it out myself. even now im still learning how to involve keyboard shortcuts like Alt+Tab and so on into my workflow. Maybe learn a few cmd prompts like finding out wifi passwords and such.

 

But i know many friends and family who never grew up with a desktop. My aunts children grew up with smartphones their whole life and now the eldest (who is also 5) now has to use a windows device to attend classes and since hes never used one, his mom has to navigate for him. So yeah to hear that the younger generations are not familiar with what we would consider basic systems is not surprising. it is time doing what it does best, making us adapt to the new normals.

Yeah I find that so weird. When I was a kid we started using the computer in grade school and at that time they also tought us how to use it so it seems strange. It seems like a super easy way to make sure kids learn how to use computers. 

[Hassan170]

12 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

Yeah I find that so weird. When I was a kid we started using the computer in grade school and at that time they also tought us how to use it so it seems strange. 

Same thing happened with me, in grade school we would have IT classes but they taught us the basic stuff mostly. Half the class was us playing video games  . (The teacher allowed us just so you know) 

These days they are straight up teaching coding to kids as part of their curriculum which is good to know. 

12 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

 It seems like a super easy way to make sure kids learn how to use computers. 

Indeed the best kind of learning is the one you do yourself. I dont know if my methods are any good but i prefer head-diving into things with no prior knowledge so i learn the hard way how it all works. its what i did with tech and i didnt turn out so bad.

[Brooksie359]

1 hour ago, Hassan170 said:

Same thing happened with me, in grade school we would have IT classes but they taught us the basic stuff mostly. Half the class was us playing video games  . (The teacher allowed us just so you know) 

These days they are straight up teaching coding to kids as part of their curriculum which is good to know. 

Indeed the best kind of learning is the one you do yourself. I dont know if my methods are any good but i prefer head-diving into things with no prior knowledge so i learn the hard way how it all works. its what i did with tech and i didnt turn out so bad.

While I agree that figuring out yourself is good I also understand that you still need some guidance. I mean I learned most of my college classes content simply by reading the book and figuring it out but without the book it would be really hard to do that. For computers there are definitely some functions that if nobody tells you they exist it's really hard to find like control f is a great example. Also even control c and control v and control z are things that while I take for granted as just being something everyone should know it's really hard to just randomly figure that out on your own. I would say now with the Google and YouTube it's alot easier to figure out solutions to problems with computer because you can look it up but that doesn't help if you don't know what you are missing out on. 

[Satisfoxy]

On 9/23/2021 at 1:59 AM, Hassan170 said:

Some people may never even use a desktop OS for a majority of their life.

*shivers in disgust*

[Hassan170]

4 hours ago, Satisfoxy said:

*shivers in disgust*

its a real thing and it pains me to know im related to those people.

[Brooksie359]

8 hours ago, Hassan170 said:

its a real thing and it pains me to know im related to those people.

I mean tbf most people's parents and grandparents lived most of their lives without using desktops. It wasn't really until much later that desktops became common use and even later when laptops became common use. I think now with phones and tablets being able to do so much it really isn't a surprise that kids growing up today use those more often than say a desktop or laptop. I mean what are they primarily doing? Most likely they are on tik tok or some other social media website on their phone or tablet and maybe watching some YouTube videos. Alternatively they could be watching stuff on a smart TV. Now what could they do on a laptop or desktop that isn't meant for gaming that they couldn't do on a phone or tablet? I honestly can't think of anything other than stuff that kids likely have no interest in doing. As for gaming I would assume most of them use consoles tbh. 

[tridy]

Maybe they know folder but not directory :).

 

Anyway, when people do not understand how something works, they loose the control. Meaning that a person who does not understands how something works will not be able to make something better than that or even search for the alternatives. Maybe this a way to fight competition, in the same way as the companies do not provide documentation for the hardware that they are producing anymore. Is people's curiosity gets killed by the glue under the screen of the phone?

 

I feel it is a tricky use of the word "many" in the title. How many? is 2 percent many?

[doubleflower]

On 9/23/2021 at 7:41 PM, LAwLz said:

I am not surprised. I don't think it's necessarily a gen Z thing either. I don't think my mom would understand a whole lot about the Windows file directory either. She might know that she can put folders inside folders and make a tree like that, on her desktop, but that's probably about it.

I feel like this is the natural evolution of computers. As we build more abstraction and easy to use tools for users to use, the less people will understand the underlying technologies that makes it work. Computer enthusiasts in the 70's were probably terrified to learn that people who programmed in BASIC didn't know how to program assembly, or punch cards or whatever.

 

 

This is a classic "wow, I can't believe someone doesn't know all the things I know. They sure are dumb for not knowing this!" circle-jerk piece.

Yup, you can simply apply this statement to things like GUIs when they became popular - I mean, you can simply put out things like 'young people struggle with command line interfaces' and you'll have lots of people claiming that CLIs are not hard to master and the cycle continues as time progresses  

 

It's not hard to see why this is a problem to many people that grew up with sandboxed, locked down computing environments with the OS mostly on autopilot sorting those things out for them. 

 

The same things about 'young people struggles with [insert old-ish stuff]' also apply to things like slide rule and others as well too.

 

I think people really need to stop being too judgmental in this case, and computers, just like many things evolve over time  

 

This issue feels more like a generational gap problem rather than anything else really.

 

 

[Mihle]

I don't think a system without file directory, but you just search for metadata, will ever work well.

 

Because if you look for something, you might not not what the files metadata actually is.

Sure, you might know it's a word document about physics, but do you know exactly what words it uses so you can search for it? Maybe, maybe not.

Or do you know what this electrical drawings document is actually named or not? Maybe, maybe not.

More likely to know if you was the one that created it, but if you weren't.

 

Sometimes the only way to find things is looking through the file directory to find it in the folder structure.

[thekingofmonks]

On 9/23/2021 at 2:56 PM, SupaKomputa said:

Wa.. wa ... wait.. It's not???

My grandfather told me he use to do a circular motion to communicate with people.

I told him he's crazy.

Grandpa: *waves hand*

Gen-Z: *confused screaming*

[Kisai]

On 9/29/2021 at 6:35 AM, StDragon said:

You're missing the point. The human brain has evolved to think in abstracts. It's not a digital computer. It's biological nature to respond with reductive reasoning as the primary go-to to initiate an appropriate time sensitive response.

As I've stated before, there's a reason we live in domiciles with rooms and doors and not in an open floor plan. It's a reflection upon the nature of the human mind.

 

I hate open floor plans, both in offices and homes. Sure it LOOKS like there is more space, but you lose all the walls and places to hang up things.

 

At any rate, I skimmed the beginning of the thread and I think the general problem is that people got trained to "google" for what they need rather than keep things organized.

 

Like even today, I keep all my kitchen cabinets open because I don't remember what's in them otherwise. If I close it, and something will expire, it's going to expire. There are frozen foods in my freezer from probably before the pandemic because the only time I remember I have them is when I open the freezer. It's just not important to know what's in there except when deciding what to buy for food. This is also why I never stockpile any food. I'll literately forget I have it.

 

This also goes for how I organize files. If it's something I need/am watching it's going to either be on the desktop, documents or the root of the "downloads", anything I'm done with goes into a folder called "done(date)" or "downloads(date)", then when I need more space I look in the oldest dated ones to see if there is any reason I'm keeping that stuff and delete those.

 

Making really deep directory hierarchies, is pointless, and the hard drives have long since made directories meaningless. They're really much closer to "really long file names" that the OS filters.

 

"Files" and "Directories" were analogies for papers in a file folder, and file folders in a filing cabinet. Your cabinets would be labeled things like "A-B" or "1991" or something. Once you've made something more than two directories deep, you're no longer making human-level sense.

 

Likewise "ask google" to do things is how everyone does things now. Even your start menu. Do you really know what you have installed on your pc? Probably not. But don't worry, Microsoft will recommend you things that are spelled the same as programs you probably already have on your PC.

 

It's this "search for thing" rather than "know where thing" problem that makes people get used to the convenience of context-related searches. If I'm looking for "person" on my pc, do I want the photos? The videos? the music by an artist? If everything was labeled it would find all of those, but generally it's not the case and you've not labeled things that way, instead you probably have "nephew's wedding" and have to know something about the photo or video to find it.

 

[StDragon]

6 hours ago, Kisai said:

At any rate, I skimmed the beginning of the thread and I think the general problem is that people got trained to "google" for what they need rather than keep things organized.

 

Like even today, I keep all my kitchen cabinets open because I don't remember what's in them otherwise. If I close it, and something will expire, it's going to expire. There are frozen foods in my freezer from probably before the pandemic because the only time I remember I have them is when I open the freezer. It's just not important to know what's in there except when deciding what to buy for food. This is also why I never stockpile any food. I'll literately forget I have it.

 

This also goes for how I organize files. If it's something I need/am watching it's going to either be on the desktop, documents or the root of the "downloads", anything I'm done with goes into a folder called "done(date)" or "downloads(date)", then when I need more space I look in the oldest dated ones to see if there is any reason I'm keeping that stuff and delete those.

 

Making really deep directory hierarchies, is pointless, and the hard drives have long since made directories meaningless. They're really much closer to "really long file names" that the OS filters.

Let me get this straight...

You @Kisai personally have a shortcoming with organizational skills, so have decided to augment that with a computer? That will work to a certain extent, but your giving up a core human ability to a computer that will provide for you in niche circumstances (at best). Worse, you've grown more dependent on this augmentation that will only lead to further atrophy of this core ability beneficial to yourself.

I'm terrified by this! I'm still haunted by what I once overheard a group of teenagers in the store say "I don't know, who needs to anyways?? I just Google whatever" Yikes!!! 

That right there is the future of humanity. One day, those machines might not be available. Something to ponder while you're still able to.

[Kisai]

57 minutes ago, StDragon said:

That right there is the future of humanity. One day, those machines might not be available. Something to ponder while you're still able to.

Well organizing stuff has always been a problem. Out of sight, out of mind.

 

Using the search function ends up being the go-to in most cases rather than organizing things into infinitely smaller boxes. This kind of frustration I find creeps up in programming where, seeing programs written with 1-file-per-class is extremely hard to find anything, and is an example of "over-organized" nonsense.

 

And before you say anything about that. Back in the 90's you were not permitted to use a calculator in class unless it was quadratic equations.

 

[Sauron]

8 minutes ago, Kisai said:

And before you say anything about that. Back in the 90's you were not permitted to use a calculator in class unless it was quadratic equations.

Yeah, "you won't always have a calculator with you"... right  that carried on through the 00s too

[Avocado Diaboli]

8 hours ago, StDragon said:

I'm terrified by this! I'm still haunted by what I once overheard a group of teenagers in the store say "I don't know, who needs to anyways?? I just Google whatever" Yikes!!! 

That right there is the future of humanity. One day, those machines might not be available. Something to ponder while you're still able to.

So libraries and the written word itself haven't existed for millennia to aggregate and pass on knowledge from generation to generation without everyone having to know and memorize everything all the time instead of only knowing where to look it up? This sounds eerily like the doom-saying of the monks when the printing press was invented and people started learning how to read and write.

[crakddx]

On 9/29/2021 at 11:52 PM, valdyrgramr said:

So, you're not human?

[doubleflower]

On 9/24/2021 at 2:28 AM, Sauron said:

Obviously if you're taking a programming course you'll need to learn at least the very basics of computer science, there are plenty of things people new to this don't know that are just as important as system file structures. People take courses so they can learn, don't they?

Yup, I think people here are a bit too judgmental or elitist IMHO - that's why a lot of people found out they cannot get into certain interests like computers or PC gaming due to the fact there's so much elitism around there with people expecting newbies to do many things that they are unfamiliar with.  There's nothing wrong for young people to struggle with things that we found them trivial so that's why we have courses and instructional activity for that so that they can familiarize themselves with those things

[StDragon]

On 10/4/2021 at 4:36 PM, Avocado Diaboli said:

So libraries and the written word itself haven't existed for millennia to aggregate and pass on knowledge from generation to generation without everyone having to know and memorize everything all the time instead of only knowing where to look it up? This sounds eerily like the doom-saying of the monks when the printing press was invented and people started learning how to read and write.

Not the same thing.

 

Books provided a means for someone to educate themselves; that means retaining knowledge in their own head.

Google offloads the need to retain knowledge. All google does is allow an individual to store index values (searches) to later look up that knowledge again. But the worst part about it is link rot

 

Learn to organize and retain data. Don't always assume the knowledge online will be there at your beck and call.

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

Not the same thing.

 

Books provided a means for someone to educate themselves; that means retaining knowledge in their own head.

Google offloads the need to retain knowledge. All google does is allow an individual to store index values (searches) to later look up that knowledge again. But the worst part about it is link rot

 

Learn to organize and retain data. Don't always assume the knowledge online will be there at your beck and call.

Sermons and other public orations like lectures provided a means for someone to educate themselves by listening to them; that means retaining knowledge in their own head.

 

Books offload the need to retain knowledge. All books and libraries do is allow an individual to store index values to later look up that knowledge again. But the worst part about it is fires like the one that burned part of the Library of Alexandria.

 

Learn to organize and retain data. Don't always assume knowledge in books will be there at your beck and call.

 

I hope you see what I did there and why I very much think it's the same thing and you're just trying to make an arbitrary distinction where there isn't one.

[StDragon]

7 minutes ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

Books offload the need to retain knowledge. All books and libraries do is allow an individual to store index values to later look up that knowledge again. But the worst part about it is fires like the one that burned part of the Library of Alexandria.

That predates the printing press. Scrolls and books were hand-written and the copies that were made were never exact. Today, if a modern public library burns down, very little if any knowledge would have ever been lost. You could probably replace everything with an exact copy from Amazon.com and hpb.com

There's only one "living breathing" Internet. It's up to YOU to make copies and retain knowledge. Don't relegate yourself to being just an index node.

[CerealExperimentsLain]

15 minutes ago, StDragon said:

That predates the printing press. Scrolls and books were hand-written and the copies that were made were never exact. Today, if a modern public library burns down, very little if any knowledge would have ever been lost. You could probably replace everything with an exact copy from Amazon.com and hpb.com

There's only one "living breathing" Internet. It's up to YOU to make copies and retain knowledge. Don't relegate yourself to being just an index node.

Let's go over a few things...

Firstly, there's plenty of books or editions in a library which, decades after being aquired, are out of print.

Secondly, libraries also archive local newspapers and such.  They also archive a great amount of other useful local information that is specific to the municipality/region.

A library is not just 'A Barns and Noble, but it's free'

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 hour ago, StDragon said:

That predates the printing press. Scrolls and books were hand-written and the copies that were made were never exact. Today, if a modern public library burns down, very little if any knowledge would have ever been lost. You could probably replace everything with an exact copy from Amazon.com and hpb.com

There's only one "living breathing" Internet. It's up to YOU to make copies and retain knowledge. Don't relegate yourself to being just an index node.

That stance only makes sense if you assume that information on the web is never backed up anywhere else. The existence of something like the Internet Archive easily proves this assumption wrong and I'm sure there are plenty of other repositories for information that mirror important stuff. Besides, the vast majority of content on the internet isn't worth preserving and all the important information is always accessible through some other means. You also really contradict yourself here quite a bit by trying to explain how books and libraries have come a long way from being vulnerable to information loss while conveniently ignoring that the internet is already doing the same thing and extrapolating from that flawed assumption that the internet will never implement redundancy.

 

Never mind that this whole reasoning has nothing to do with your mantra that you must retain knowledge itself and not just methods of acquiring knowledge when needed. That's what my example of writing pointed towards, that writing itself is just an extension of your memory so you can offload storage space and either look up new information you don't know yet or old information you've worked out previously. "Googling something" today is the same thing as looking something up by using reference cards in a library. 

[HolyGuacamoly]

Hi guys,

 

I am writing an essay about this topic and found this interesting thread here.

 

Do you have any science papers about this topic?

I'm struggling to find a lot.

 

Cheers.

[Elijah Kamski]

On 9/23/2021 at 4:01 PM, Spotty said:

It's because everyone just watches porn in their web browser these days. They never learned to navigate elaborate folder structures to hide their porn stash.

If they ever learnt about the file structures, it would be to hide their porn stash XD