University students in courses from engineering to physics need to learn what files and folders are The Verge reportsbecause they didn’t grow up with computers. Whenever you need a file, just look for it. “I tend to believe that an item is stored in a specific folder. It’s in one place and I have to go to that folder to find it, ”said astrophysicist Catherine Garland. “You see it like a bucket and everything is in the bucket.”
Strange as it may seem to older generations of computer users who grew up managing an elaborate collection of nested subfolders, between powerful search capabilities that are now the default in operating systems, the way phones and tablets obfuscate their file structure, and cloud Memory, high school graduates see their hard drives differently.
“Students have had these computers in my lab; they will have a thousand files on their desktop that are completely disorganized,” Peter Plavchan, associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, told The Verge. “I’m an organizer obsessed … but they have no problem having 1,000 files in the same directory. And I think that’s largely because of how we access files.”
“My family always makes it difficult for me to see my computer screen, and it has about 50,000 icons,” said Aubrey Vogel, a journalism major at Texas A&M.
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 from the early 2000s”. […] While many of today’s professors grew up with no search capabilities on their phones and computers, today’s students increasingly remember a world without them. “
That’s not necessarily a bad thing or a reason to flinch in horror, because How dare today’s youth do things differently, why the idea?. “When I was a student there was sure to be a professor who said, ‘Oh my god, I don’t see why this person doesn’t know how to solder a chip on a motherboard,'” Plavachan said. “This kind of generational problem has always been around.”
And Garland, the engineering graduate astrophysicist, has started using the search feature on her PC to find files, just like her students do. “I think, huh … I don’t even need those sub-folders,” she said.
Of course we have to play around with our folders here in the PC game land. To demonstrate how hidden modern directory structures are, The Verge asked, “Your Steam games are all in a folder called ‘steamapps’ – when was the last time you clicked it?” For me it was the day before yesterday when I installed a Mod for NPC models with higher resolution in Pathfinder: Kingmaker. But the point is made anyway. The filing cabinet metaphor is pretty out of date, and nowadays I find that whatever I download, I leave everything I download in the Downloads directory and search for Google Docs instead of looking for the Google Drive folder they are in.
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