OMG though this is a legitimate pain point in a world where people may be using many different devices each with their own obnoxious way of naming downloads and shoving them into arcane holes.
Teaching people how to handle this is teaching them a valuable life skill FWIW.
Community College is my main gig and it is where I run into it the most. I do help them. My post was just meant that the issue is much larger than file management.
I taught a course called Videogame Narrative and I quickly learned that I shouldn’t expect even in that class that they have any experience with videogames.
Cool.
Cool.
Of course that distinction between a hierarchy and tags is more than 100 years old. In libraries that is the distinction between subject headings (of which there can be several for a book) and the classification (the book can only be filed in one place). Of course the subject headings use a controlled terminology. I have spent a fair amount of time explaining to people the advantage of finding the controlled term when searching for something. It helps to make sure that you are finding ALL of the information on a topic instead of just the stuff by people that called it the same thing you did. If you search for “drone” you’re not going to find earlier information on UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) or RPVs (Remotely Piloted Vehicles). Glossaries are useful.
Well, calling it the Return Key is a vestigial remanent from the days of mechanical typewriters, a thing which no one under the age of twenty has ever seen in person, so…
ETA - rest of post deleted because it was just incorrect. I do think we need a better name for the key that describes what it actually does today though.
I doubt that, tbh. That’s still a strict hierarchy where you need to know the structure in order to query it.
And it’s not just kids. The CEO brought in his 50-ish wife who has ZERO college education and whose previous computer experience was a limited to a systems terminal. She wanted a higher salary and couldn’t progress up the corporate ladder because she lacked both education and skills, so he brought her in to replace my boss who had an MBA in accounting. 
Her desktop has shit all over it and she can’t ever find a damn thing. She spends all day doing 10x the work because she can never find what she needs.
Same with her email. At least twice a week she’ll ask me about something that was in an email and I’m able to find it in five seconds. I’ll remind her that she was cc’ed on the thread on a specific date. “Well, can you resend it?” She has no clue how to use the search bar in Gmail.
This skill is more important than ever, I think! The difference between getting the information you need and getting nothing useful on Google is often knowing the right jargon term that the people in that milieu use for that thing. Like you need to know what the dishwasher part is called that is broken, or the name of the process for attaching a buckle to a belt or whatever. Once you hit the exact right term, the world opens up with helpful information.
I often think in terms of a two-stage search now. I search for broad layperson terms around the topic I need help on, and within there I’ll usually find people using the right jargon. Then I search again on that jargon, and now I find what I really need.
All of my Mac keyboards say ‘return’, not ‘enter’.
Many online communities are set up so that one can hit the Return key to start a new line or paragraph, and then hit the Enter or Reply button to actually send the completed post.
This BBS, in fact, distinguishes between the Return/Enter key on one’s keyboard and the Reply button underneath the text box. I’m going to hit it now…
When searching for journal literature, I used to tell people how once you found one good article on the topic, you could use that to search for more by either looking at the “cited by” and “cited” searches in Web of Science or using the controlled terms in databases like Inspec.
You are right - I haven’t used a Mac in ages and forgot. All the windows PC keyboards in my house are enter keys and I did not bother to actually look beyond my bubble. Guilty!
I’m with you on this, but I think this is distinct from people not generally knowing how computers and airplanes work.
For decades, the GOP has been engaged in a strategy of undermining science and education, because facts and reality work against their goals of oil profits and controlling people with fear/religion. Horse dewormer and such are the latest fruits of that labour.
That, IMHO, is different then the usual noise floor of people not knowing how cars work. The latter is simply because most people don’t care how cars work, they just want to get to their job every day.
Distinguishing the sources of different forms of ignorance is probably our first step in combating it.
The struggle is real, but like getting students to properly comment their software, I don’t think that it is new, exactly. Getting people to realize that what they do has to be used by others that don’t necessarily think the same way they do dates back to forever.
And of course that is, itself a sign of a maturing technology. When cars were new, they required much more maintenance and knowledge of how they worked than now. I feel certain that there were people complaining about ignorant kids that didn’t know how to downshift and just mashed on the brake expecting the car to stop in the 30s. Technologies usually become more user friendly over time. And when they do, early adopters rail against the new users that don’t have to know as much about them.
See also people complaining about no longer needing to learn Morse code for a ham license, or to actually do spin recovery for a pilot’s license.
I have gotten more and more organized as I’ve gotten older. I still don’t like window’s “My Documents”, “My Videos” folders, because I hate shell extensions which do special things.
For the majority of my local machine files, I have c:\projects, which every little thing I name according to some shorthand in my head, like “bill’s powershell question about expiring accounts”, which combined with modified date is how I scan through it and find what I am looking for.
NAS device is where all the good stuff goes. I have about 12 folders topically organized, but each has a different convention based on what I am organizing.
Kids these days. Stay off my lawn and all that.
It’s a fascinating shift. I never search for files - my habits come from a time when that was slow and didn’t work well. Plus, I can never remember what I name files, so I’d never find them if I didn’t organize them.
Yeah, if you don’t understand the tree structure, that’s not a good sign for being fully computer literate - forget working with databases or programming without knowing about file structures.
Yeah, there are a lot of people whose entire experience with the internet comes from smart phones - they didn’t have a PC of any flavor in the house growing up, so their set of computing skills is totally different, and things like file management would be alien to them.
As an IT auditor a Fortune 500 company
I can assure you that getting developers who have been working for 20 years to properly comment their code is still a daily struggle
I miss Alta Vista’s full Boolean search, like:
(("term 1" OR "term 2") AND (NOT ("term 3" OR "term 4"))
and its ilk. (Also the days when a search engine would say “Nope. Didn’t find any matches.” instead of “We’re too embarrassed to tell you we didn’t find anything, so we removed the quotes that you so carefully put around your terms so that we can offer you pages of useless crap. You must have been mistaken when you wrote ‘term one’. Here’s all the matches for ‘term’ and all the matches for ‘one’.”)
While they have certainly done that in the public sphere, they also have been gutting funding for the arts and humanities in K-12 (as unnecessary for creating workers), while putting more emphasis on maths and sciences, along with teaching to the test strategies for the working classes.
I also miss the ability to to hierarchical searches in the DROLS legacy system. You could search for “aircraft” and choose to also search for all the terms that were included below that in the hierarchy. The fact that the default was “or” so you couldn’t nest "and"s within an “or” statement rarely came up.
