I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow.
I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know how to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for the same reason that I don't own a printer.
I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box.
Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.
In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but teachers getting left behind.
It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to say it.
> I might imply that your highschool teacher friend is instead falling out of computer literacy, and that highshool students are moving away from her form of a computer-based workflow.
I suppose, in the same way that people using crayons are moving away from the printed word.
> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.
Isn't the whole point of school to learn new skills? If students have illegible handwriting and poor grammar, should the teacher really be meeting the students half way?
I actually told her that she should continue doing what she was doing, because it was a real boon to her students. They might not ever learn this stuff.
Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text.
I could understand if what the students were doing was in some way comparable in flexibility, but it isn't. They basically only know how to click on the share button in an app, and text links for someone else to install the app. Or send them screenshots of them using an app scrolled to the relevant info.
But the biggest benefit is that having assignments in discrete organized bundles makes the most sense for everyone.
The problem I see is that tech is doing the market-savvy thing of moving from features to solutions. We had enabling technologies that people were expected to learn to use in combination, like tools in a toolbox. Files were generic containers that could hold different things and clustered into projects in "folders" and manipulated by specialty tools.
But the new way is exemplified by iOS. You buy pre-packaged "solutions" that keep your data...somewhere...safe, presumably, and away from you so you don't screw it up. If it's something you should be doing, there will be "an app for that" that you can buy, so don't worry your pretty head. If we gave you "tools", you'd just hurt yourself. Why not stop worrying and buy something nice. We have songs, we have shows...you can send a funny animoji to all of your friends. Good times. You look awesome. You're welcome.
And for market success, they seem to be right, although they're creating a situation where, if you don't have to learn to use a toolbox of specialized tools in customized combinations, you'll never learn how and really WILL need to rely entirely on pre-built "complete solutions".
> Her students objectively less able to share information with each other. I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text.
True story: while performing support for development tools, I asked a developer for a source file. They opened it in their IDE, took a screenshot, pasted the screenshot into a word document, hit page-down in the IDE, took a screenshot...
We got a several dozen page word document filled with screenshots of the text file.
In other words, OP is not suggesting that you force students to use another method, but work with them to understand what makes sense to them. In your specific anecdote, if the teacher showed the students how to share hyperlinks, or how to get text dumps and share them instead of screenshots, maybe they would respect her for that.
> I have certainly seen kids who have to go as far as taking screenshots of what an app contains and send a screenshot to someone, than actually be able to export text.
I used to export the text of my travel itineraries, and go through several steps to get it on my phone. Now I just take a photo of the text on my screen. It's just one step :-)
iPad OS’s new “full page screenshot” feature for webpages kicks out a long PDF (no page breaks, it’s one long scrollable page like the actual webpage was) and sends it straight to the markup view. You can draw on it just like marking up an image, but the text is still selectable and searchable.
It’s a nice example of software recognizing how people want to work and building to support that.
And one more for the people with Pencils - you can drag from the bottom corner upward to take a screenshot
in any app with the same markup tools. Works on either side, so the lefties aren’t left out here.
Years ago, I tried using ghostcript to set the attributes of a webpage PDF so that it is like 8k pixels tall and had no linebreaks, but Preview.app would just render it as a single page really zoomed out, and I would have to zoom all the way in. Does it function better now?
When I open in a Preview window it behaves well and fits to the width.
Switching Preview to full screen trips it up still. For some reason that view wants to fit the whole document, and it zooms very far out to do it.
And on the iPad side there appears to be a limit on how long a document the "Full Page" screenshot will make. An HN thread with 110 comments came through entirely, but another one with 160 comments was truncated. Didn't dig any deeper than that, but I wonder what's going on there.
I don't see why you could not do exactly the same thing with MS Word, or even a properly exported PDF.
And, the added benefit is that it is searchable and can be re-rendered in different formats.
But even if sending obtuse oversized bitmaps to be handled on a tablet did happen to be the best solution, that is really not the point. Her class is not about optimizing itself. Her class is about educating students. Not just about science, but about what goes into collecting data, collaborating, and submitting it in an accessible format.
I think that a high school graduate should be able to understand how to take some arbitrary files, bundle them together in a zip file, and email them to someone. I really don't think this is too much to ask of some aspiring pre-STEM students. And if she bent over backwards to use snapchat and accept assignments in the form of a bunch of screenshots, I think she would be doing them a disservice.
Making hand annotation with a digital pencil more seamlessly integrated with typed and otherwise native digital docs actually seems like a great direction to be moving in. Things are moving there to a degree but it’s still hard to shift back and forth between modes.
This would be fantastically more work than typing. Text is an effective and effecient medium.
If the student can't figure out a slightly different way to accomplish a goal then they are incompetent with computers and only proficient insofar as memorizing one workflow.
What? Have you ever graded written papers? Have you ever seen a paper graded by a good teacher?
We’re not talking about pages of written commentary here. The most “effective and efficient” approach involves circling words or phrases, underlining sentences, writing arrows from one part to another, scribbling some wavy lines in the margin, writing a few words here or there, ...
There is a very limited amount of time available to work through each student’s work. The point is not to entirely rewrite the paper for the student, or explain every problem with the paper in detail. The point is to highlight what the student did well, highlight the parts that make no sense, and give the student a few pieces of quick feedback so they can revise their paper or do a better job next time.
A colored pen on a black-on-white printed copy is much more “effective and efficient” (and “fantastically less work”) than electronic tools prominently involving a keyboard.
Achieving the goal with less effort so that you can spend more effort on other aspects of the job or on other endeavors is effecient.
Wanting each of your teachers to learn how to use a constantly changing array of 20 different social image sharing services in order to receive work in a format that is more work to process is lazy.
They have custom HTTP JSON RPC protocol, it uses POST and GET verbs. Their web site calls that one. They also have more performant TCP binary endpoints for use by native clients, with the same payload packed into custom binary format.
For users, it's a web app with download and upload links.
Just a page with a form you can upload files through. You can setup something like that e.g. with Owncloud/Nextcloud. And dedicated education tools also often have it.
For normal document-sized files, email is fine though too IMHO, for university stuff I never really cared which way was used.
Sure, if you just install it for that. But it's a reasonably common service (e.g. around here, many universities have it for their employees and students) with that feature.
I've worked for various companies in the engineering and manufacturing industries, and zipping and sending files over email is as far from dead as you can imagine, and has a very bright future ahead of it. Frankly, today's high school students have wildly deficient computer skills. We're talking about teenagers whose usage of a computer usually consists of browsing Facebook and listening to music on Spotify, not actually doing productive work; informing workflows based on input from such users is like asking a painter how a fireman's tools should work.
Honest question: what do you do when the files you want to send are larger than the max attachment size for the email provider? If you send it through another medium, why not do that by default instead of email?
Because it is significantly more cumbersome. With email you get the file literally attached to the message talking about it, and you store that away and can always find the file and the context for it in the same place.
SMB shares or the like are pretty much universal in such a situation. I generally tend toward making something available on a file share and emailing a link, but because of permissions and access controls, email is generally easier, especially for transient files that really don't need to be permanently saved. Never once have I used Dropbox or Google Drive in such a situation, even with very small companies.
What hiccups do you run into in terms of permissions with sending an "anyone with link can view" link over email? Asking because I'm working on a competing technology and want to get the UX right.
What I'm doing is not "anyone with link can view", it's uploading the file in question to an SMB (or equivalent) share and sending the location of that. If the user in question doesn't have permissions for my department's share, they can't access it.
Sorry I was on mobile and wasn't very clear. I meant in terms of services like Google Drive or Dropbox, what about the sharing functionality doesn't work for you?
From a legal standpoint, there is way more to cover with those services. All sorts of hoops (NDA, compliance, etc.) would have to be jumped through. At my current employer, those services not being on our property under our complete control makes our lawyers nervous; counterfeits of our product are an existential threat to us, and keeping tight control over the software and electrical implementation details is paramount. Any idea involving a third-party service hosting sensitive engineering data goes straight into the shitcan.
If you managed to address the legal and security concerns, you'd have to fight against decades of momentum and user entrenchment. Drive and Dropbox are rare; any customers or vendors that you're working with will probably have the headache of figuring out how to interface with these services instead of just applying their ~25 years of experience administering massively powerful Windows services. Power users have assimilated those 25 years of workflow into their very being, and all the added complexity of SMB/Windows shares and other related services are extremely powerful tools that help them ensure that the right people have access to what they need and no access to what they don't. In-house tools are written to integrate with the existing infrastructure, and nobody has enough knowledge or balls to attempt replacing them. Internal data sharing services are generally based on software which has been continuously improving for decades, and has best-in-class feature sets and support.
The points above are themes that I've encountered pretty much universally in every engineering firm that I've worked for or interfaced with.
Not using a particular workflow ≠ unable to understand a particular workflow.
The "zip up your files and email me" is only hard when the concepts of files and email are alien, because everything lives in its own silos. Which is the point.
My kids have been to 4 schools so far (we move around a fair bit). In each one they are expected to have a Google account which is linked to their school in some sort of G Suite arrangement.
I don't know if it's a coincidence or a department policy, but Google gets them early and if you think that's bad, teachers aren't to blame - maybe schools are or possibly the education dept.
Honestly I was a little surprised that there was no discussion about it. I talk to my kids about the way the web and privacy is going and I don't expect schools to do everything but they should be a little more aware of the issues imo.
We somehow dodged the iPads for kindergarteners bullet but that would have made my blood boil. I guess the FingerPaint app is less messy than actual fingers and actual paint.
In my less charitable moments I think teachers are getting lazier, but when I go to those parent conferences and see the teaching staff looking like rabbits in the spotlight as parents of 3rd graders grill them on the latest academic theories I realise that really they're caught in the middle of a whole set of weird expectations.
> Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way?
They probably just don't. People are sharing images, text, and links. Mostly on non-accessible, ephemeral, and unreliable platforms. They are not used to share generic data and not used to reliable platforms at all (as even email is unreliable nowadays)... except at work, and that's where people use email.
The problem is that all the new ways of doing things involve being a slave of some ecosystem that doesn't play well with other ecosystems. If Instagram, Snapchat, Dropbox, Slack, and Google Drive all interoperated properly, this wouldn't be a big deal.
And if you wanted them to interoperate properly... you'd essentially be reinventing a file system.
The problem is all these services try to control as much as they can. So interoperability becomes whatever contracts on the use of APIs they can sign with each other. You as a user have nothing to say.
I'm guessing there's a decent chance that the students are already using an email provider that ties them to an ecosystem (which may already have a service geared towards sharing files!)
A friend recommended an accountant to me here in Japan. He wanted to do all correspondence via the Line App including tax forms etc.
Another contract made a Facebook messenger group and shared all versions of files by pasting them in to the messenger chat.
Wasn't particular happy about those but fortunately both were fairly short term things and to be honest I couldn't really think of anything better that I believe I could convince them to do. The Line accountant was definitely not going to use anything other than Line.
The FB Messenger file sharing, well, what. Email? Dropbox cost $$$ per user. Github requires more training. I suppose maybe Slack would have been better than FB messenger but still requires getting the other party to install apps and get used to a different workflow, So yea, I just put up their chosen method of communication for the duration.
Line accountant!! Same in Korea but with KakaoTalk. People use it for everything. People who are worried about the dominance of WhatsApp or Messenger should see what 90 percent+ dominance by one platform looks like. I did all the organising for a rental contract here through KakaoTalk. It also has a bank and in-app payments system. You can use it to buy someone a coffee at starbucks.They just recieve a barcode to be scanned at the counter. You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification.
And despite this vast monopolistic ecosystem DaumKakao put ads in the app this year. Greedy.
> You can buy gifts for people and have them shipped without knowing the address, because the recipient just inputs it after recieving the notification.
I don't need to compress anything either, but zips/rars are good for getting around other types of limitations. For example, splitting a collection of files into chunks to send one by one or to increase copy speed. As an example, my archive of downloaded comics takes well over an hour to copy onto a drive as file folders, but as a single archive file it takes only a few minutes and I can unzip it on whatever device I'm putting it on.
Erm, you need to have an email to register for any kind of service out there, so "know how to use email" is pretty much a requirement even for everyone. And this is not going away, unless you want a future where everyone has to be reached thru uncompatible walled gardens.
A little of both, maybe. In defense of your position, though, I agree that zip files are an odd choice. Why not bundle everything into a single document, a Word file or a PDF?
How do you bundle a spreadsheet into a PDF? Even embedded into word is a lot less usable and runs the risk of linking to the document and not embedding.
Depends on what you're planning to do with the spreadsheet. If it's display only, it's easy to bundle into a PDF or Word doc. If you need to interact with it, sure, standalone is better. But this the first case is something I deal with all the time. If I'm looking at financial statements for a board meeting, I really don't need a live spreadsheet, and it's massively more convenient to have it bundled in with the agenda, minutes, reports, etc.
On the flip side, I do public transit advocacy, and having spreadsheets of the monthly data reported to the board, it would be so much better than ocr/text extraction and manual editing.
I very rarely send emails at all outside of work. Maybe one or two support emails. I also fairly rarely create zip files either. Of course, I know how to do these things, but I don't really do it anymore. I haven't needed to, for the same reason that I don't own a printer.
I haven't needed to "compress" anything since Google Drive and Dropbox meant that all I needed to do to get someone a file is type their email into a box.
Perhaps instead of email, you teacher friend could find out how her students send things to each other and meet them half way? Make up a google drive or dropbox or whatever microsoft or apple are doing instead of insisting on whatever's most comfortable for you.
In short, I don't think this is an example of students falling behind, but teachers getting left behind.
It's a little rudde to say it that way, but I really don't know how else to say it.