File? Folder? Ma’am, what is it? Students in the US have a problem with the basics

The Verge website has prepared an extensive article on how students in American schools and universities have turned out to be ignorant of an issue with which every computer-conscious user is familiar. For them, the concept of file and folder is something completely incomprehensible, although technology is not alien to them and you know what? I am not surprised at this.

By advancing technology and bringing everything online, now students in the US don’t know what a file or folder is

When I first read the title and content of the said article, I was a bit struck by the examples of teachers and faculty who were flooded with questions about file and folder issues. They did not come from people of old age who had barely read the secrets of computers, but from those who grew up around technology. This creates a bizarre dissonance between one group that only a few decades ago learned the concept and importance of a folder and proper file management, and one that, using technology, does not understand these concepts at all.

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There are several reasons for this and, contrary to appearances, it is difficult for us to notice them. Every user of his own laptop or computer with physical disks certainly understands to some extent the concept of storing files on media. Even those who rely on NAS or environments built around Active Directory probably know it. So where is the problem?

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In Poland, our everyday relationship with technology is simply not as developed as in the USA. There, Netflix, YouTube, OneDrive, Google Drive, i.e. services that provide us with access to content via the network, became our everyday life much earlier and they are used more often. An example of this are Chromebooks that allow you to work or learn mainly using network resources. Are you creating a document? No problem – it lands on one of the disks in a remote data center that you don’t even think about. Do you want to listen to music? Here’s a player with access to music from all over the world. Do you want to watch a movie? Please, here’s the player, click play. Files? What files. You only need to click.

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Who needs physical files when everything is at your fingertips thanks to the network and server storage? In such an environment, many students from the USA simply grew up with everything at their fingertips on many platforms and from anywhere on earth. This is probably where the “folder-file lack of grasp” comes from among them. Some teachers, of course, try to teach them to do it from scratch, but this raises another question … is it even necessary? Maybe soon disks in computers will be obsolete, like floppy disks now, when we move all resources and files “to the cloud”.