LadyButterfly she/herAnyone find this? I'm old so don't
KurtVonnegutStudents are currently arriving at the university without any basic understanding of file hierarchies (folders containing folders and files). And they have no clue what a zip file is. Nor do they know what to do with it.
JohnmannescaScary
rustydrdI used to be able to just say “please download the materials from [learning platform] and organize them so you can work with them before class” and that would be fine. Nowadays I have to give step-by-step instructions that involve things like “create a folder”, “navigate to your download folder” and “cut (ctrl-x) the files and paste (ctrl-v) them into the new folder” unless I want half the students to get lost.
Some don’t even have a concept of downloading a file. They’re so used to streaming and mobile UIs that they seem to think that a downloaded file is simply gone once you close it (and needs to be re-downloaded).
dude we have to do the same shit with people
literally step by step instructions with screenshots and they sometimes still don’t get it, and usually it’s not because the instructions were unclear, they simply did not follow what it clearly said because they fundamentally lack understanding or something I don’t fucking know
I used to think it was an unreasonable challenge just to get people to paste values and not formats in Excel. it seems like that’s going to be even more difficult going forward. I fucking hate it when I’m looking at a table with a half column of cells with a border on the bottom because my dumbass coworker doesn’t give a shit about quality and just dragged the first row cell down. like it takes no extra effort to do it cleanly, that shit pisses me off. and it’s not for lack of knowledge, they’ve been taught this and shown it explicitly and told that it’s the expectation to have cleanly formatted files. I couldn’t imagine handing in work that just had a giant shit stain on the front and thinking that’s okay.
I wonder if it is the IT magic. Recently I needed a group to fill a table with values from a test that produced a radar chart. Click on the point, get a numeric value, not too hard. The only complication was that it was “totally legally disctinct” so translated differently and truncated from the proper test. So I worked out translations and a table in order.
My instructions was that you start at 9 o’clock and fill in the table clockwise.
Cue constant question regarding translations and where whatever value should go, while I had done the work and all they needed to do was follow a simple instruction to fill it out as directed. I did that work for them, I don’t even remember, that’s why you should follow the simple instruction.
Group of all ages, most
Valmondthat’s what pisses me off about going the extra mile and making such clear instructions
like why the fuck am I doing it if you’re not going to read it
a separate issue to this is the feedback I’ve been getting from management lately
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“so and so needs more clear instructions, you need to accommodate that as a supervisor”
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“your messages are too long, they need to be more concise” — meanwhile it’s literally a flow chart in bullet point form of “if this do that, else go to next bullet”
like what the fuck do you guys want from me, I’m doing extra here to make it simple, if people are fucking stupid that’s not my problem
a guy who just quit routinely turned and work that had some shit wrong with it. just today I found something that was wrong in yet another way every time I looked a bit deeper at. the short version is: “this thing needs to be able to move in the positive x direction. here is a message that this guy sent me showing that he intends for it to move in the positive x direction. here is what this guy designed, that moves in the negative x direction.” okay I’ll go fix that, wait the way this is set up clearly shows that this was not a simple mistake and that he simply fundamentally misunderstood what this thing is supposed to do, even though he sent me a diagram of what it’s supposed to do.
/rant
Time to bring back the manuals from the 80s when students were seeing computers for the first time in university.
Crackhappy80s… pshaw. Try the 60s.
NikeluiReading? In this day and age?
It has to be YouTube videos.
Or any concept of the physical realities of what a computer actually is.
wonderingwandererIt took me years to get over the fact that I can’t simply copy and paste stuff from folder to folder anymore. Most phones these days won’t even let you do it, and some computers won’t either.
Apple and Google are the worst, but even Microsoft tries to be more like them. I just don’t use a computer anymore, haven’t in years. When I do again, I’m definitely switching to Linux…
Google Photos be like bet you certainly don’t want pictures you’ve recently taken or downloaded on the front page. Like what the hell if you don’t give me folders at least offer me the most likely things I’d want to do things with up front.
“Here’s this embarrassing photo you forgot you took of yourself a year ago instead, and we went ahead and made a slideshow of random photos you took throughout the year with the data that we appropriated from your device. Oh, and here’s a map with pinpoints of all the locations where you’ve taken a photo.
Oh, what’s that, you thought you turned off location permissions? Well, not since your last update you didn’t!”
TrackinDaKrakenI mean, they’re close to illiterate, and can’t focus on reading anything longer than two paragraphs, according to what I’ve read on /r/teachers. Phones don’t have apparent file management, so they don’t know about it.
Idiocracy indeed.
Phones are aggressively hostile to any file management. Many apps just straight up don’t give control of actual directories to end users. Manually modifying the directories of software is effectively hidden under an exploit.
So I would not blame youngsters that don’t have personal computers. Mobile OS obscure the use and neuter the potential of learning the file system, there are massive hurdles for fringe benefits, completely different from especially PC use in our time where this was fundamental knowledge and enabled doing all kinds of interesting and useful stuff.