[TUHS] "9 skills our grandkids won't have" - Is this a TUHS topic?

[Marshall Conover]

A fun one: Using folders.

People in their early 20s and younger - mostly those who grew up with
iPhones, Androids and Ipads - didn't interact with filesystems.
Instead, they grew up using apps that handled storage for them. When
they wanted a video, they were looking for it in a streaming app, and
they used the app's search function. If they were looking at photos,
it was much the same. Because of this, as hard as it is to believe,
they don't really grok the concept - and this keeps popping up, to my
delight.

It initially popped into my field of view last year, when an astro
professor was running into trouble with undergrad students. The
professor was asking the students to put certain data into certain
folders, but the students fundamentally didn't understand what
"putting certain data in certain folders" meant:
https://twitter.com/saavikford/status/1425235201047908359

I love this quote from the professor, though unfortunately the tweet
prompting it was deleted. The professor was asked something like "do
the students not understand how drawers work?" Her response was, "They
fail to grasp that the idea of drawers themselves might exist. Because
they have a perfectly valid system of a laundry basket and a robot
that retrieves exactly the sock they want when they want it (as I'm
finally figuring out). Or something like that, anyway."

And this continues to pop up - I saw a reddit thread the other day
that brought up entry-level computer science students who are coming
in not understanding folders at all. It's being added to the list of
abstractions that most people don't interact with day-to-day anymore,
and which must be explained.

With that said, I have a friend my age (30s) who enjoys bringing up
their conviction that the Zoomers are correct, and hierarchical
filesystems should go the way of the dinosaur - with
searchability/tagging being the correct way to handle storage. That
could also be a fun discussion for the ML.

One other fun note for the prompt. Someone noted that, working at an
apple store, they kept seeing young people use the caps lock key even
when just typing the first letter of the sentence; it then clicked
that this is closest to how phone keyboards work, and is likely where
they got the muscle memory from.

Hope you're all having a nice morning,

Marshall

On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 9:40 AM Marc Donner <marc.donner at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Programming an 026 skip card.  Inserting the skip card.
> Using ed in kernel safe mode to fix a broken config file.
> Threading a half-inch tape in a tape drive.  Remembering to insert or remove the write ring.
> Cleaning floppy disk heads.
> Manually keying a boot program into an SDS-930.
> =====
> nygeek.net
> mindthegapdialogs.com/home
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 30, 2022 at 9:14 AM steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> wrote:
>>
>> What are the 1970’s & 1980’s Computing / IT skills “our grandkids won’t have”?
>>
>> Whistling into a telephone while the modem is attached, because your keyboard has a stuck key
>>          - something I absolutely don’t miss.
>>
>> Having a computer in a grimy wharehouse with 400 days of uptime & wondering how a reboot might go?
>>
>> steve j
>>
>> =========
>>
>> 9 Skills Our Grandkids Will Never Have
>>         <https://blog.myheritage.com/2022/06/9-skills-our-grandkids-will-never-have/>
>>
>>         1: Using record players, audio cassettes, and VCRs
>>         2: Using analog phones                                                  [ or an Analog Clock ]
>>         3. Writing letters by hand and mailing them
>>         4. Reading and writing in cursive
>>         5. Using manual research methods                                [ this is a Genealogy site ]
>>         6. Preparing food the old-fashioned way
>>         7. Creating and mending clothing
>>         8. Building furniture from scratch
>>         9. Speaking the languages of their ancestors
>>
>> --
>> Steve Jenkin, IT Systems and Design
>> 0412 786 915 (+61 412 786 915)
>> PO Box 38, Kippax ACT 2615, AUSTRALIA
>>
>> mailto:sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
>>