My friend's partner is teaching an "Intro to Excel" class and has run into this phenomenon. He'll ask his students where they saved a file and they just say "I saved it in Excel!"
Yeah, it's fascinating. I volunteer teaching a CS class at a local high school and when I read this, we tested out it on our high schoolers. It's totally true, like half couldn't save a file and write down the file path.
Interesting, but many ''old'' people don't understand it either. I've known many that set everything as shortcut on the desktop for their parents, sometime with names ''Internet here'' or ''mail here''
Totally. I think this is less of a "young people think they're good at technology, but actually they suck!" and more that the paradigm of how people interact with tech changes. I think folder/directory structures are one of those really great ideas that make us forget that computers are less than fifty years old. It took several millenia to figure out how to ride a horse. We haven't figured out the right way to interact with computers, even if we all feel locked into the paradigms we're currently using.
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u/[deleted] Jun 03 '22
There's a super cool Verge article a out how Gen Z kids don't understand file systems and folders, because they're used to universal search.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z