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

[Will Senn <will.senn@gmail.com>]

Every time I teach a course that deals with the terminal, I have to have 
a complete lecture on files, filesystems and the concept of current 
directory. It is a rare exception that I get students who know them from 
prior experience. This includes folks into their 40's.

in the spirit of what our grandkids won't have skills (or knowledge) for:

Our grandkids won't go looking for bent pins on their video cables or 
know that's why their normally colorful view of the world suddenly tints 
cyanish...
or that a crossover's a cable
or that whiz-bang programming languages of the modern era are still 
playing catch-up to ALGOL 1960 and other brilliant languages of the 20th 
century
or that there was a time when current decided 0's and 1's rather than 
voltage
they'll be endlessly frustrated by CD/DVDs even if they can find a 
player - some working and some not (writeables have significant 
calibration and/or deterioration issues) - oh wait, that last one's not 
my grandkids, it's me :).



On 6/30/22 9:08 AM, Marshall Conover wrote:
> 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@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@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@canb.auug.org.au http://members.tip.net.au/~sjenkin
>>>