00:11
Hello, Asami.
So we just finished talking about the progress, the learning progress that your mom was making in Excel sheets, which is a fantastic thing.
And while we were having this conversation, actually the trigger for us getting the microphones turned on,
was that I had another separate set of thoughts and realized, well, maybe we should, right?
Maybe we should just talk about it if we're going to do this.
One of those thoughts was in relation to the surprise you had, and reasonably so,
but the surprise nonetheless of the little things, or what seemed like little things about Excel and how it functions,
sort of not being known, which, as we then discussed, are because the interpretations or the way that the thinking happens is different, right?
It's not that perhaps more mechanical, if more sort of effective, easily correctable, easily checkable sort of way.
It's much faster, cleaner, smoother, right, to be doing it in this other way,
to be putting it down on notes and cards and putting your own charts and tables together, right?
And so this difference, this technology difference as well, not just a thinking difference, is fine, totally normal.
But it did remind me of experiences I've had with teaching and anecdotal evidence, mind you, from other teachers,
where there is a strange, at first glance, contrast between the upcoming generations,
which for a long time, and maybe still are, are known as like digital natives.
So they're people that are born into this technology is very available sort of society state of being.
Wait, I have a question.
Yeah, shoot.
Are we digital natives?
The answer is, I think, in short, no.
Because we had a childhood before internet.
Yeah, we're like just outside the cusp.
When you start rolling into like the 2000s, I think is when this starts to be applied.
We're good point though, because I think we're going to get to this idea where like those just before maybe the sort of booming of the internet,
the sudden accessibility of different types of technology, right?
03:00
Like having these personal computers, affordability of them.
And the fact that a lot of these tools were still kind of close to their like initial designs, so to speak.
They weren't many steps removed from the user.
They were a lot less user friendly.
Which is, yeah, the way I'm saying it is a lot more complicated way to say less user friendly, right?
Like they were tech oriented.
You had to understand something about the tech.
They were machine friendly, less human friendly.
Yes, exactly.
Got it.
And so this is appearing, let's say, as a consequence, that same thing that we had where it was machine friendly, not human friendly.
And in the digital native space, I'm hand waving the years, right, that this falls in.
It's user friendly.
It's mostly user friendly.
It's picking up an iPad or a tablet and tapping on the app screen and you get a thing to pop up.
So higher up in like the layers of complexity that you're so far removed from the inner workings.
But you can still use all of the things, right?
You can get the tasks done that need to get done.
But you don't have that sort of starting gap knowledge that you or I might assume is baseline foundational pieces.
And so what you have are situations in where you might ask, and this is an anecdotal one.
You might ask students to say, OK, you know, please download this file from wherever, you know, the online learning service or from the email, right, that I sent.
So whatever, right, download the file and then go open it in your downloads folder, right?
Your folder, the folder that most likely, not always, but most likely contains the thing you just downloaded.
And the questions that you might get are, what's a download folder?
And yeah, right?
I don't know how to answer that.
Right. So the observation that then we can make, you go, what's a download folder?
And well, to you and I, we're like, it's the folder labeled downloads where everything by default is.
Yeah, it's like the C dot dot slash slash user slash slash download.
It's the directory. And then you're like, wait, you don't know what folder is, so why would you know what directory is?
And you won't, right? But like this happens because, well, I mean, for example, on your phone, how often do you go to your downloads folder?
That's true. You download and it pops up right away.
Yeah, it pops up. It's just available, right? It's just there. It's open, right? Or you go to a new window.
And I don't even want to go down the rabbit hole of thinking how many times students might just download something
06:02
and they just fill it up with multiple copies on their device, right?
Right, right, right.
I'm not going to go that direction.
I mean, I do that out of sheer laziness.
But yeah, so there's that, right? You just do it. I'm not saying I'm not guilty of it, right?
So there's this, right? And there are other instances where it might be just file systems are a good example of this, I think,
because I've run into that a lot. It's like navigating these things is not readily intuitive.
And I mean, even for me, new file systems, you end up kind of bouncing around trying to figure out like what is where and all that stuff.
It can be hard, right? But it can definitely be a challenge for them if it's not just popping up because that's a very common thing.
We see this with the use of like Google Classroom a lot in this environment where it's like they look for it on the stream.
Like this little, if you've used Google Classroom, so it's like a stream of the most recent things that have been uploaded and the announcements.
This is where they look.
So if it's not in the most recent few file, then they're like, oh, we don't have that.
Yeah, they get confused, right? Maybe if I gave them like a ton more time to like pause and think through it,
but I'll help them and I'll be like, well, okay, like take a look, you know, see if you can find the folder sort of thing or like the file, right?
And they'll scroll kind of up and down this like stream and I'm like, go to the top.
There's a thing called like Classroom or I think it's just JuGyul, right? Like there's something equivalent.
Click that and you see all these? These are all the files, right? I even have them like labeled by category, right?
This is in class, this is like homework, you know, this is lecture slides, you know, like you just go to the one.
You can like probably hit one of those top columns and like reorder them to the orders of recency or something.
Probably, right? I don't even think, you don't even have to go that far. There's not even that many files there.
It's just there.
But this, it does take a bit, right, for it to sort of sink in. And even then there's some confusion.
Anyway, all of these to say the observation is without that decade of time, roughly, that like you and I might have had in that space,
and others might have had more or less, right, in that.
There is a disconnect with some what we consider fundamental ways of interacting with technology, such as a file system, which is really handy.
A file system is also pretty like rigid, you know, it's this file, this, you know, you've got to organize it into different categories, whatever.
Right, right.
So it is a pretty particular way of organizing your thoughts, right? That's not how everybody organizes their stuff.
You know, we don't want to see the desktop of some people's computers, and especially not now.
09:01
Even mine is a nightmare at times. It's like sometimes you're just putting stuff there, right?
But like, there's something there that doesn't exist, perhaps as a result in part of that separation, right?
The tools that have been put in front of them, and that they do know how to use to get to like sort of the end product of that tool, or like the apps sort of end product is perhaps higher.
But I have found that the flexibility or the transferability of how to engage with like a new category or to go one level lower, like thinking of file systems, it's kind of missing.
It takes more time, or maybe it won't even sink in because there isn't enough sort of active engagement with trying to figure them out.
Interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's just funny, because I think we land, we're both like 30, early 30s, right?
We land at this very unique period of time where these technologies were widespread enough that we each had one laptop or computer in our houses, most likely.
Yep, yep, yep, yep.
I mean, at some point, like maybe it wasn't there when we were born, but it was definitely there when we were like 10, right?
And if not, we probably all got like, our first phones in our like, our late teens or tweens.
Tweens, yeah.
And we probably had to start typing out our like, school homeworks in our high schools, maybe.
Like, I still had to write for exams.
Our English exams are like three hours of sitting and writing essays, handwrite, right?
But for bigger essays, where we have multiple weeks to complete, it was like done on Word and submitted online.
And we had that kind of mix.
And we all had to kind of, our very first memory of like IT or technology classes is probably like learning how to type, how to save, how to make new files.
Like, it was like that kind of thing.
We did not, however, had to learn Linux in our first instances.
Yeah, that wasn't like...
Right? Like, we were not that old.
But like, by the time we were introduced to technology, we didn't have to write command lines all the time.
Yeah, exactly. We weren't doing that.
In another anecdote from my own experience, what was happening is that I saw the command line from the techie friends, right?
So like, at my high school, the techie guys were playing around doing command line stuff, you know, making batch files, they could like shut down your computer, because you just had to change a notepad file to a .bat and write out like a little SSH type script.
12:11
Yeah, I would not have known how to do that in high school.
Yeah, I did take on some of it. I was like, how did you learn some of this stuff? But like, you know, there's this whole like, oh, I'm higher and mightier than you, right? So it was hard to get anybody to actually teach you anything.
So I had to just like obtain files and like get somebody to, you know, show me for it.
But like, this, yeah, this wasn't the popular thing. That was the already edge right into the specialty hobby.
Yeah, that was already niche.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But like, yeah, so like, we had, like, as a generation, we had a pretty, like, standardized education introduction into, like, a level where it's in between uber user friendly, and like, not at all user friendly, right?
So some of us went in deeper and learned how to do the less user friendly things. Some of us stayed where we were. And, but like, we all knew, like, what memories meant, or like how to check them, or like how to like, like, like, why these numbers are, like,
it's like, I actually don't know, like, I only started caring about specs of computer much later in my life. So I don't know. But like,
Yeah, continue, continue.
But like, yeah, we sit somewhere in the middle where we like, knew what it meant when we saved at a wrong place. Like we knew how to look for other potential places, right?
If it didn't save in a download, it might have been in like a sub folders of the downloads. Or like, it might have been in a user folder, like a level above that, right above the downloads. And we would know how to look for it.
Yeah, we would know how to like, maybe like, search for it in a different way. Like you can open a Windows like, you know, command line, not the button, the start button, and then like, start typing out the file names, and things like that.
And like, probably, all of us learned the hard way, maybe not to have empty spaces in your file names, because it can confuse the machine.
And don't even get started on the fact how that's not a problem in a Linux distribution, right? Like, there's like, like, there's the, you know, design philosophies here, right? But yes, you had to like, you had to like, pick up the bits of these little, little quirks.
Because like, I don't remember people explicitly teaching us.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
I do remember kind of learning how to do that, somewhat intuitively.
15:04
It definitely came through, maybe not direct teaching, but some sort of like, yeah, some sort of exploration there.
Yeah, and I think that happened because most of our IT teachers were also new to this technology. So like, they didn't really know much better than us.
Yeah, right. This is, and this is, this is part of what makes my own current research so important.
Like, yeah, the idea.
That's it for the show today. Thanks for listening and find us on X at Eigo de Science. That is E-I-G-O-D-E-S-C-I-E-N-C-E. See you next time.
