This post was originally written for the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching’s Monday Musings. It has been edited and adapted for this blog.

When the iPhone was released in 2007 an app called ‘iPod’ came pre-installed, referencing the company’s most popular product at the time, one that would be killed by the device that was now emulating it. The YouTube app was designed to look like a vintage television set. The app icons were shiny, almost bubbly, with exaggerated features and cutesy design quirks (the notes app used to only use a font that was reminiscent of handwriting!). The original iconography for Apple’s iOS sought to take on a challenge that today, 14 years later, might seem trite — that many users had little to no experience with touch screen interfaces. The design language heralded by Steve Jobs and others — known as skeuomorphism — sought to emulate real-life objects in order to bridge this gap. Evidently, by 2013, users had adjusted — Apple moved away from skeuomorphic design in favor of the flatter, more minimalist language that populates its screens today. We no longer need an icon to appear 3D to know to click on it, or a picture of a television to watch videos; our plastic brains changed and adapted to the tool.  

We have changed and adapted to many technological tools. I think often of this article from The Verge which details how professors have noticed that students don’t know where to locate files they’ve saved on their computers, and how that has caused frustrations in the classroom. The article cites the development of search engines— and the ability to search for files within an app like Google Drive or OneDrive as the driver of this shift. Before these technologies existed, it was necessary to have a clear file management system — not unlike the namesake for a file, an actual filing cabinet with, you know, paper and stuff — in order to locate anything on a computer. Now, any document is a quick search bar entry away from being located (if it’s even stored on the computer itself, that is!).  

Computers rely on metaphors in order to make sense of an inherently abstract experience.

Computers rely on metaphors in order to make sense of an inherently abstract experience. Think of any number of ‘computer’ terms — the desktop, files, folders, a browser, a window — that all rely on an analog object to make sense. But, as in literature, metaphors die. The save icon on Microsoft Word is a floppy disk — how many of our students have ever actually used one? Apparently, too, files, and folders are no longer a metaphor that works for describing how computers store information.  

I think the reason this is frustrating for professors in the above article is because something that used to be self-evident, the file system, relies on a metaphor that is out of reach for many younger people. The shared vernacular and common experiences that made something like submitting an assignment so easy in the past is now broken. This, in many ways, encapsulates what may be going on more broadly in education, and why so much of the classroom (for experienced teachers) feels more uncanny than familiar. Our plastic brains may have changed and adapted in the wake of COVID-19 — class schedules, being in person, wearing masks, addressing gaps in student  knowledge, rebuilding school and classroom culture, all feel a bit like we’re grasping for metaphors to translate our experience from then to now. Add in the new realities brought about by technology like advanced generative AI, and it becomes even more complex. It’s hard work! At a time where most of our students have no real memory of what high school was supposed to be like pre-pandemic, what are we to do?  

The same thing we always do.  

Teach them how.