He has an intricate hierarchy of file folders on his computer, and he sorts the photos on his smartphone by category. It’s the same year that posts began to pop up on STEM-educator forums asking for help explaining the concept of a file. It was the same semester that Nicolás Guarín-Zapata, an applied physicist and lecturer at Colombia’s Universidad EAFIT, noticed that students in his classes were having trouble finding their documents. That’s approximately when Lincoln Colling, a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Sussex, told a class full of research students to pull a file out of a specific directory and was met with blank stares. It’s been an issue for four years or so, starting - for many educators - around the fall of 2017. But their estimates (even the most tentative ones) are surprisingly similar. Professors have varied recollections of when they first saw the disconnect.

“I open a drawer, and inside that drawer, I have another cabinet with more drawers.”

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