File Not Found

[davesaddiction]

Very interesting article.

Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, started seeing the problem in 2017. She was teaching an engineering course, and her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her over for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files.

Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.

Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

continued here:

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

[ttyymmnn]

@davesaddiction

I bought my son a nice Dell laptop to take to school. Before that, he had been using a Chromebook for school, and a desktop PC for basically just internet. He really has no idea what he is doing. As long as everything works, it's fine. If there's any sort of problem, he's on the phone to me. The other problem is that when I try to help my kids with their Chromebooks, I'm like Garland. "Whereinthehellis the desktop??"

In somewhat related news, I was working on a TDIAH post today. I swear to god, using the Hyphen editor is like looking at the Matrix.

[Just Jeepin']

@ttyymmnn There are a lot of Markdown-friendly text editors. You should shop around a bit.

[davesaddiction]

@ttyymmnn

My kids have Chromebooks at school, a PC laptop at home, and now an old iMac we were gifted. I'm glad they're getting exposure to them all, but after reading this, I'm definitely going to do some File Structure 101 with them!

[ttyymmnn]

@just-jeepin said in File Not Found:

There are a lot of Markdown-friendly text editors

[Someoneatacura]

@davesaddiction

Just don't teach them how to make a porn folder.

[MattHurting]

@someoneatacura *Pr0n

[Just Jeepin']

@ttyymmnn I regret my favorite editor for Markdown (Emacs) would make matters worse, not better, but if you search online you’ll find tools. Some will give you a live update as you type, some can export to Markdown so you can use WYSIWYG and dump it later.

On my Mac I have an app called Marked which gives me a live view on any Markdown file while I edit it in Emacs.

[ttyymmnn]

@just-jeepin

So is it something that basically works in reverse of Hyphen? I type in wysiwyg and it converts it to Hyphenese?

[Just Jeepin']

@ttyymmnn Correct. You’d have to do some work to handle uploaded images, but theoretically it should work.

I have no idea how good this list or site is, but you could start digging here.

https://www.slant.co/topics/699/~best-wysiwyg-markdown-editor

[ttyymmnn]

@just-jeepin

Thanks. I’ll check it out.

[ttyymmnn]

@just-jeepin

Oh, sweet Jesus, where has this been all my life? When I took everything from old Oppo, I copied the text into a TextEdit file. It brought all the bold, italics, and link formatting with it. Ever since Hyphen, I've been copying that into the editor, where I've had to go back and redo all the formatting. Copying the links has been especially tedious.

But this: https://stackedit.io/app# takes all of that TextEdit formatting and brings it into Hyphen magically. I still have to back and bring the photos in, and do some caption editing, but damn, this will save me shitloads of time.

THANK YOU AND MAY THE LORD BLESS YOU AND KEEP YOU ALL THE DAYS OF YOUR LIFE!!

[Just Jeepin']

@ttyymmnn That’s excellent! Glad you found something worthwhile.

[Skyfire77]

@davesaddiction It's not just educators. I've become accustomed to having to walk some of the older hands through relatively simple computer functions (setting up printers, locating files, configuring programs, etc.), but it's becoming common to have to explain things to kids fresh out of college too. I mean, some of the more esoteric stuff we do I can understand, but "How do I download this file? Ok, now where did it go?" should not be questions I need to field from 20 somethings...

[MarquetteLa]

@davesaddiction This is what comes from making everything "simple to use."

Frank Herbert was on to something with his "thinking machines dumbing down the human race" concept.

[beefchips]

@marquettela @davesaddiction there's also a big role for design here. A lot of technical programs I use at work have finnicky requirements about this or that settings file has to be in such and such folder, or they have working directories that have to be empty to start, or some other such BS. It's a pain when the program doesn't do what you intuitively expect it to do!

[davesaddiction]

@skyfire77

Right? Seems like they’re really missing some important basics in education.

[BicycleBuck]

@ttyymmnn

My favorite is Notepad++. It does markdown plus a whole bunch of different programming languages.

The best part is that it automagically saves your files, even if you don't explicitly save them. Create a new file and it will put a copy of it in your directory. Accidentally close it and the files will all be there when you open it again. Neat.

[BicycleBuck]

@davesaddiction said in File Not Found:

@skyfire77

Right? Seems like they’re really missing some important basics in education.

It's been getting worse since the invention of iPads and smartphones. The kids don't have to think about file management. The files are just there.

[BritsnSwedes was MINIGTI]

@davesaddiction meanwhile my mom refuses to understand the concept of files and folders …

[davesaddiction]

@britsnswedes-was-minigti

Well, sure. How old is she?

[ttyymmnn]

@just-jeepin

Thanks again for the tip. I just assembled an upcoming TDIAH post in about one third the time it normally would have taken me. The biggest time savings was in not having to copy hyperlinks. This is a godsend.

[BritsnSwedes was MINIGTI]

@davesaddiction 77, but she’s only been using computers for 30 years. She’s actually shockingly capable at some things…

[Just Jeepin']

@ttyymmnn

[Snuze]

@marquettela I spent a good chunk of my evening helping my aunt setup a new Mac and migrate files from her old Mac. Trying to use the Migration Assistant was making things worse, not better, and the "slick" interface makes manually moving files when the Assistant didn't work harder, not easier. This may or may not have anything to do with my post a few minutes ago about smashing my phone.

But I'm all for the Butlerian Jihad, just let me know when it's gonna start!