@futurebird I really wish there was a “tool” for exchanging mental models between people.

I really struggled to explain why and how both perspectives were displaying the same “object” in such different ways. That was a recipe for confusion.

(Note: I’ve been using computers since MS-DOS 3.0, have used Windows, MacOS and Linux for decades)

@dahukanna

It could be that the people you were working with didn't have a great understanding of the GUI file navigator to begin with. By the time I do this lesson I've been hammering my students on how they need to organize their projects into folder for half a semester. They often have not thought much about files or folders or the difference between a program and a file... or any of that.

You can't learn to do something in a new context if you don't "get" the old one?

@futurebird

That’s a great tip and I did not think to “validate” my assumption that the explanation/understanding/mental model gap was GUI vs CLI.

I observed that they only interacted with the /Documents folder and were confused why “c:/Users/(user name)/Documents” was the “place/location” on their hard disk.

@dahukanna

Modern applications make it much harder to understand file structures. I sometimes think this is intentional to keep people from really using their computers in powerful ways, but it's probably just that many people can get by without really knowing where anything is and hardly even knowing WHAT it is.

*sigh*

@futurebird

I call that: “home delivery” mode. Someone has created, followed a recipe and cooked the meal. You only need to pick from a list, have it delivered & pay for their service+effort+tip.

If you want to cook the meal yourself, you are going to have to learn “developer mode”.
1. Set up your kitchen, pots, pans, utensils, measuring spoons and cups, food processor, etc.
2. Find or make the recipe + instructions + ingredients for the meal.
3. Spend the time and effort making the meal.

@futurebird do you have any Andragogy suggestions for teaching people, who are not developers, about computer file system?
I work with someone who was essentially setting up a developer environment for Javascript on their windows laptop from GitHub repository. It was a challenge to explain what a terminal is & how directory structure listed using “due” command relates to the file explorer “folders” as the views are completely different.
Any links/refs to beginner resources would be appreciated.

@dahukanna

I have a lesson I wrote for my students who can program but never used the command line before. Here are the exercises I do with them. You'd need to adapt it to that command line but I think it's basically similar?

Here is the rest of the lesson. I haven't worked it up for "general use" but maybe it's a start?

Moved Temporarily

(drive.google.com)

Also here is a "how to" for teachers on file types.

Our school uses macs so it's all written with macs in mind.

Moved Temporarily

(drive.google.com)

@futurebird @dahukanna Did you ever come across the ‘traceroute hack’. Someone created a poem that would come across your screen when you ran traceroute on a specific address.

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/t

Not for beginners, but at least a fun demo of command line shenanigans.

@melis @dahukanna

"This blog post cannot be found, Please check your URL"

@futurebird @dahukanna Odd. I dropped it in the Wayback Machine to make sure now…

Traceroute Haiku’s

(web.archive.org)

@melis @futurebird @dahukanna appears to just be a case of the first url somehow having been truncated.
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/traceroute-haikus

@btuftin
The author is on fedi!
@/benjojo@benjojo.co.uk
And now I want to expand one of their silly things to take multiple TOTP keys to get into SSH.
https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/ssh-port-fluxing-with-totp
@melis @futurebird @dahukanna

@c0dec0dec0de @btuftin @futurebird @dahukanna Combined with port knocking?