The professor said that students don’t know what files and folders are
Must teach college students from engineering to physics courses what are files and folders, Marginal report, Because that’s not how they grew up using computers. Whenever they need a file, they just need to search. “I tend to think that a project exists in a specific folder. It exists in a place, and I have to go to that folder to find it,” said astrophysicist Catherine Garland. “They think it’s like a bucket, everything is in the bucket.”
It seems strange for the older generation of computer users. They grow up to maintain a carefully crafted collection of nested subfolders. The powerful search function is now the default setting of the operating system, the way mobile phones and tablets confuse their file structure, and the cloud Storage, high school graduates have different views on hard drives.
“Students have these computers in my lab; there will be a thousand completely unorganized files on their desktops,” Peter Plavchan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, told The Verge. “I am an obsessive organizer… but they have no problem with 1,000 files in the same directory. I think this is mainly because of changes in the way we access files.”
“My family always makes me sad when they see my computer screen, it has about 50,000 icons,” said Aubrey Vogel, a journalist major at Texas A&M.
As The Verge pointed out, “The first Internet search engine was used around 1990, but features such as Windows search and Spotlight on macOS were products from the early 2000s. […] Although many professors today have grown up without search functions on mobile phones and computers, today’s students increasingly do not remember the world without them. “
This is not necessarily a bad thing, nor is it a reason to be afraid of shrinking, because How do young people today dare to do things in different ways and why this idea“When I was a student, I definitely had a professor who said,’Gosh, I don’t understand how this person doesn’t know how to solder chips on the motherboard,'” Pravacan said. “This generational problem has always existed.”
Garland, an astrophysicist who teaches engineering courses, has already started using the search function of her PC to find files in the same way as her students. “I think, um… I don’t even need these subfolders,” she said.
Of course, in the field of PC games, we are more likely to need to mess up our folders.To show how hidden the modern directory structure is, The Verge asked: “Your Steam games are all saved in a folder called’steamapps’-when was the last time you clicked on it?” To me, yes Installed one the day before yesterday Pathfinder: a mod for high-resolution NPC models in Kingmaker. However, the point is still established. The file cabinet analogy is outdated, and now I find that I have left everything I downloaded in the download directory, and searched for Google Docs instead of looking for any Google Drive folders where they are located.