Maxime, I find the entire "Files and Directories" page to be difficult to teach from. I think it works fine as a webpage if you're just reading for yourself, but as a lesson plan it's not very helpful.
Like Emily, I just explain what root is and/or show it on my laptop, and then use the Nelle et. al. data and directories, for demonstrating navigation...but without all the pictures of file directories and whatnot. IME (A dangerous phrase, I know), even the least computer savvy people have things stored in folders and don't need all of the explanation in there, and I get complaints that all of the "lets look in this folder" is too slow and boring. Again, IME, the thing people have trouble with isn't understanding directory structures per se, it's getting used to using them without the visual cues of the GUI. So, essentially, they tend to think their in one folder, but are actually somewhere else...but it's not because they don't know what a folder *is*, it's because the path isn't constantly displayed and there's no little icons to orient to. -Amanda On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 3:43 PM Emily Davenport <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Maxime, > > I just taught the shell material a couple of weeks ago and had the same > question as you, so I'm glad you asked this and I'd be curious to hear how > other people teach this. > > I thought that saying that "/" would be the root directory for Nelle's > computer would be super confusing to the learners because if you "cd /" you > will NOT end up in the "root" of the downloadable lesson material, but on > the root of your own filesystem. I ended up not following the lesson > material for that initial part and instead demonstrated that on my own > computer "/" stands for my root directory, and then we can see the "Users" > directory on my own computer, "Applications", etc. > > Do other people treat this differently? Is it not actually as confusing as > it sounds like it would be to follow the lesson material as written? > > Thanks, > Emily > > On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 3:00 PM, Maxime Boissonneault < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Hi, >> I'm currently going through the Unix shell lesson to see how SWC teaches >> it. >> >> I am wondering, the examples are made such that "/" is actually the root >> of the dataset that you have users download initially, i.e. it is as if the >> teacher had done a chroot into the downloaded directory structure. >> >> How do you explain to attendees that if they do "ls /", they will *not* >> actually see what is given in the examples ? >> >> >> >> >> -- >> --------------------------------- >> Maxime Boissonneault >> Analyste de calcul - Calcul Québec, Université Laval >> Ph. D. en physique >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> [email protected] >> >> http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org >> > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > [email protected] > > http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
_______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
