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So a few months ago I was posting here about teach...
# thinking-together
n
So a few months ago I was posting here about teaching coding in the same university art dept. ten years apart, and finding that the institutional memory of how we did it vanished in the interim. Now I've put together a new intro course and I've encountered a fascinating new curveball from the Class of ~2024: profound lack of familiarity with desktop UI conventions. https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
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l
What if everything came with batteries included? (eg. in a course, each word/term/concept/technique/obvious prerequisite, was clickable to show a similar explainer, thus limiting total prerequisites to the foundations of the english language?) (+ eg. docker/vm's for software)?
Interesting how almost everything fades/data-rot. Longevity requires continuous upkeep?
If the "batteries"/dependencies were built on a common foundation, the upkeep would be a collective effort that would benefit all. Eg. files: One org creates mapping from new dir-less/search-full system, to old directory structures, and the explainer becomes available for all?
Though that merely ensures a continuous thread to the current environment, but doesn't translate the course natively into the new age. Though better old and rusty than unresurrect-ably dead?
----- Re UI/data-shift: "who uses computer os:es nowadays, when you can do everything on your phone/browser?", "files is a concept of the past"; data should be where and when you need it; data doesn't belong to one specific file, to one specific directory - it may have multiple equally important places of relevance.
c
I struggle to believe this article isn't exaggerating the issue. I can accept that they might not have encountered the concept of a hierarchical filesystem on a computer but I don't accept that it's difficult to understand once explained. It's a highly skeuomorphic design that is basically exactly analogous to boxes within boxes. Are you saying that people genuinely struggled with that Nick?
n
They're getting used to it fairly quickly, but also I polled the class and most of them have still encountered a desktop UI before a phone UI. I don't think they're quite young enough to be the students in this article, where phone UI is the default and desktop UI a deviation from it
Also we're still in a situation where writing code pretty much still requires a desktop UI, with the important exception of JS livecoding sites a la Glitch
I feel like the pieces of the new paradigm are out there--maybe you write some JS in a browser tab over your low-latency 5G connection, publish it permanently for a one-time fee on IPFS, it runs brilliantly on a super-optimized ARM CPU and WebGPU
But that's going to take a while to gel
e
The phone / non-hierarchical UI and systems are designed for a world of constant connection. Maybe they are just better suited to that world, not sure
However, given what we know about the state of the world, do we expect an environment of constant connection to be the norm in the future?
If you want to use computing for something, and you have been acclimated to systems that assume constant connection, you are going to be totally screwed if the internet goes out
n
This is just amateur speculation about telecom vs. energy infrastructure, but...I imagine that if we got to widespread decentralized renewable power generation, the rosier edge-computing scenarios can basically free-ride on top of that
And if we don't get to that, then long term we're not gonna be doing much local computing anyway, outside of possibly a few fortress city-states far above sea level. (I've heard a convincing fan theory that the Capital of the Hunger Games is canonically Denver: a city high in the mountains defended by an airbase and ICBMs.)
c
It's borderline humorous/parody. Though in my life, 90% of computers I've seen had disaster zone desktops. Files were probably too successful for everyone's good. I play with the notion of "good riddance" – yes, files are as easy to teach as "see all those different photos in your photo app?" And, for me, files are little miracles. But what if it's just better and sufficient to teach the skill of getting something onto your clipboard... Find the thing you want to work on, do what it takes to make it paste-able (or whatever), then open the place where you'd like to work on it. Maybe work contexts shouldn't be file based.
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e
@n1ckfg There are many possible scenarios, I guess, but we seem to still be on track for the worst of them as of this writing
It's kind of hard to imagine The Internet balkanizing, or being widely unavailable
But then again in the 1950s it was probably hard to imagine not getting clean drinking water in the Greater Detroit area
Anyway what's needed are better computing metaphors. Files and folders were pretty good, but are perhaps insufficient at the volumes we deal with today
Of course the "Google" paradigm is to have no metaphors at all, which I think it a mistake. It does not lead to sophisticated end users
n
I mean I'm a pessimist, and I agree that North America specifically seems to be taking the Tokugawa Japan route of effectively banning new technology that threatens to alter the balance of power in local politics, at the cost of losing their advantage vs. external rivals
@Chris G Yeah I think when iOS pioneered this approach, they demonstrated that most people are fine with a handful of silo'd databases for emails, pictures, and songs.
a
What I've learned from r/talesfromtechsupport is that there exist people who fundamentally cannot grok file hierarchies. Maybe it's an upbringing thing but some people apparently just can't do abstraction at all. I also learned that there are people who store things in the Recycle Bin and are confused and dismayed when it disappears. So I find it easy to believe students are having trouble with it. File hierarchies are fundamentally a recursive concept, and those have a long track record of being tricky. I bet hands-on experience is the only way to really learn.
n
I do kind of like the sheer John Henry badassery of storing files in the Recycle Bin. Why design around a user story when you can have a user tall tale
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