[wcarey]

In the high school computer programming class I teach we use headless Debian on a Raspberry Pi. The idea that you can rename files, move them, and organize them is mind blowing to about a third of the students. When I ask how they organize their school files, they either use Google Docs for everything (all in one folder) or, if they use Word, they have one folder with all their documents named, "New Document", "New Document (1)", "New Document (2)", &c. When I teach them Chemistry as juniors and insist that they use a spreadsheet (or general purpose programming language) for their complex problem sets, about 90% of them have never seen a spreadsheet before. We now have the "talk" with our juniors about backups, as more than one has lost their entire junior thesis because it was stored on their laptop and nowhere else.

It's frustrating that we spent decades developing fantastic tools to help ourselves with all sorts of intellectual work, and have more or less abandoned teaching people to use them well.

As the tower of abstraction has gotten taller, there's a temptation to teach near the shiny end; ML for high school! But that leaves students with huge gaps in their understanding of how things work under the hood, which impairs their ability to connect what they learn and build on it.

[dafoex]

I had the polar opposite of this problem in my school, to the point that I joke that I got a BTEC in Excel, not ICT. All the competent teachers either left the school or didn't last, and left behind only the fresh out of uni teachers that only know how to teach, but don't know the subject they're teaching. As such they only teach you the bare minimum of how to work a desk job because they are incapable of climbing higher for themselves.

The most advanced thing I learned in my sixth form was designing an e-commerce website - not coding it, just using MS Paint and Word to make a first mockup. This was sixth form, the level just below going to university and I was being taught Microsoft fucking Paint.

[g_p]

> When I ask how they organize their school files, they either use Google Docs for everything (all in one folder) or, if they use Word, they have one folder with all their documents named, "New Document", "New Document (1)", "New Document (2)", &c.

1000x this - even on Mac, the rise in the "recents" view seems to be intended to avoid the user needing to know where their files are stored. This means users can't find them to back them up, as they don't understand the file has a path and location, belonging to a structural hierarchy. It's a document, so my junior thesis should be backed up if I back up "documents", right? (Not if it's stored in Downloads.....)

> We now have the "talk" with our juniors about backups, as more than one has lost their entire junior thesis because it was stored on their laptop and nowhere else.

Still see this problem with honours year degree students - must happen at least a couple of times per year, even with access to more on-prem and cloud storage than they can shake a stick at! Tolerance for this kind of situation is now so limited that it's likely a student in that situation may end up failing.

> As the tower of abstraction has gotten taller, there's a temptation to teach near the shiny end

The sheer height of the tower is now such that chunks of it seem to be forgotten about, and crumbling away. And the foundations are near collapse - it's incredibly exhausting trying to explain concepts to someone that has no basic understanding of the operation of a computer, yet is trying to be learn new things.

I've seen boot camps trying to teach people git, where the instructors themselves don't properly understand how the command line works, and wouldn't be able to explain that the files a student "sees" in Finder are the same files as in the Terminal...

[jfengel]

It's not necessarily a bad thing. We have folders and file names because we lacked a search feature. Now if you want "the file where I said X..." you search for X, and there it is. No need to remember where you put it; no need to remember the precise name of it. GMail trained them not to need folders, and I assure you I don't miss them.

If people need folders and file names, they're there. People will rediscover them and reinvent all the techniques we did. But they're also inventing new techniques that fit their workflows. Workflows that are more efficient because they're built around their toolkit, not our toolkit.

Like the toolkit of just doing everything online. I've got Google backing up almost everything I do, faster, cheaper, and better than I can. And available anywhere. Not only is it there if I lose my laptop, it's there if I left it at home and want to use my phone, or somebody else's computer.

Different times call for different mechanisms. They'll take time to shake out, see what survives and what doesn't. But things they don't learn aren't necessarily signs of weakness. They may be signs of new strengths.