Comment by kennyadam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kennyadam | Hacker News Reader

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For example, some students use their personal laptops in the sixth form. To access the student intranet, they need to enter the URL (and you ain't finding it on Google) and that's a huge struggle for many of them.

Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters. If you understand URLs, you can hover over a link, see that it's pointing to bankcom.fzzaa.net and see that it's obviously not something you should click on.

Quite a few students have asked me how to access the online resources that come with the revision guides they have purchased. Somewhere in the book will be a URL to whatever they need and they just don't recognise what a URL is. They see something beginngin with https:// and it's meaningless to them. Visit this link? How? What is it?

This isn't an exhaustive list of reasons, it's not even close. I don't think it makes sense to argue that being completely oblivious to the very basics of something so fundamental to all our lives is something to be dismissed as irrelevant. I also thinking it's bad that Google is the only way so many people know how to access a website. Remember when some blog was ranked #1 for 'facebook login' for a day or so? People were filling the comments section with stuff like "ugh this new facebook is so bad". I think that highlights a serious problem that we're lucky enough to have mostly avoided... so far.

> To access the student intranet, they need to enter the URL (and you ain't finding it on Google) and that's a huge struggle for many of them.

Sorry, copy and paste or clicking on a link they were emailed is a huge struggle? How are they receiving these URLs that they aren't immediately usable?

>Not understanding URLs also affects their ability to see through any bad emails that make it through the spam filters.

I've seen too many people who ostensibly understand URLs get phished to think it much matters.

You're being downvoted, which I think is because you've clearly decided nothing I can say will make any difference to you and your replies seem a bit cranky, but I'm not downvoting you.

Here's another example for you, that just happened today:

On a shared iPad, the iPad was returned with a note saying 'no safari'. I worked out that one student had changed the default Safari search engine to DuckDuckGo. For reasons, the school's ISP blocks DuckDuckGo and visiting it on an iPad just results in a 'connection was lost' message.

The next student needed to visit a website called Kahoot and the URL for this site is kahoot.com. Looking at the history I could see the student had just been typing 'kahoot' in to the URL/search bar over and over again. They also tried typing 'google'. At no point did they try entering the URL nor does it seem they even know how to do anything beyond type search keywords.

It doesn't seem to me the failure modes you're describing are ameliorated at all by making it easier to edit the URL, since the students in question have a fundamental lack of understanding of what URLs are. In that case, making understanding URLs a prerequesite to using the web simply bars access to users.

Better to have typing "Kahoot" into the topbar bring up a Google search that navigates to Kahoot.com than the user experience I had at that age, which was a DNS resolution failure because no TLD was specified. That was an era where none but the most technical users could go where they wanted.

I didn't make a case for easier editing of URLs. I agree, I don't see how that would help at all. All I've ever said is that I have observed many students lacking knowledge of what a URL is and that's a shame and gave some examples of when it would have helped them to know.

Regarding your second paragraph, sure it would be better for search results to be displayed if there's no TLD specified. However, when it's the ONLY way you know how to access a website and when that fails, as it did today, knowing how to manually enter a URL would be useful.

I agree that things are much more user friendly today, but because things are so easy people get really stuck when those ways fail and they have no way of troubleshooting anything.

I won't get in to how many students (and teachers) I see stumped because the ethernet cable has come out of their laptop or they can't open a file because they've copied the shortcut to a folder to a USB rather than the folder itself.

Which grade is this?

That's quite a shock if students don't know about urls. Can someone confirm if this is a secluded case or this is what most people end up with now a days.

I don't find this unbelievable but even here, I would expect 40% people to know about urls and 5% or so know about the technical details surrounding it.

This is all throughout the school, so ages 11 - 18.

If you haven't interacted with kids who don't have any tech-fluent influences in their life, you would be shocked at how much isn't understood. Just mobile phones and apps for the 'internet' has meant that it's so easy to access what you need (and also so limiting in what you can access) that most kids just haven't got a clue how the internet actually works.

I suppose most of the time they don't NEED to know, but I think it's a bit problematic that unless something has an app, they probably aren't going to know it exists. Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, etc. is the entirety of what they access on the internet.

There are, of course, exceptions to this, but the majority are absolutely clueless. Ironic when everyone is expecting them to be so tech savvy because they've grown up around it. Problem is, it's too abstracted and too corporate.

I‘m not surprised at all. I remember countless discussions on Hacker News about the disappearance of the file system and how younger generations simply don‘t understand the concepts of files, folders and their hierarchy. I’d put URLs in the very same category of slowly fading and disappearing concepts, which is unfortunate and worrying in my opinion.

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