I have seen comments about this occasionally, but am starting to experience this in a new technical course I teach. Some substantial proportion of students seem to not understand how files are organised and accessed on a computer, what a file path is or that files can be nested in folders, nested in other folders, etc. At the level of being confused by the fact that “file1.R” and “scripts/file1.R” are different files in different locations. my favourite case was a student naming a file “scripts:file1.R” because they couldn’t put a / in the file name”. Or another last year sending me a hyper link in email that read “C://User//…” pointing to a file on their computer thinking that I could open it because they could via that link.
I have seen speculations that this is driven by changing practices and that so much of student’s experiences nowadays are with Apps that store information in hidden databases and organise information not via files, but via whatever mechanisms the app has in its UI (notebooks, tags, albums, etc). I get that, but it still strikes me as strange that the folder-and-file mental model of digital data organisation has been so fundamentally supplanted by modern software that students would struggle with super basic things when they do have to work with software that still requires this model such as in programming courses (for students that are not in a computer science program).
To wrap it up, I had never given this much thought, but I would have expected that basic digital literacy involves understanding filepaths, folder structures, etc. Don’t get me wrong – these are otherwise bright students. This gap just surprised me as I thought that it’s a part of basic computer literacy. Does this reflect a real gap in knowledge? or is it just a sign that the mental models these students develop nowadays serve them just as well in most other cases and that we need to accept that and just teach them how folders and files work?
Edit: Thank you everyone for the input. It was very cathartic to see such overwhelming agreement – I now at least know that this is not an idiosyncratic issue. Which makes it easier for me to decide to teach some basics without feeling like I am belittling the students.