Posted In: Weekly reflective blog
“Did my student really just go off the charts and go watch a Crash Course video on files and filing formats,” you may ask. I am sorry to disappoint you if you just asked yourself this question Professor Pilsch, because yes, I did in fact go to youtube and see if there was a Crash Course video on computer files. I must say, though, that I was deeply surprised and somewhat thrown into the fire of computer science after watching this video. That does not mean that I have learned absolutely nothing from watching this video; there was one main connection that I made and maybe some insight into what we may discuss later on in the course.
To start, this video sprung by talking about different file types with text files, wav files and bitmaps being at the forefront. I do not think much of this will relate to this class specifically, however, it was nice to get somewhat of a holistic enclosure on file types that exist outside of our classroom bubble.
Next, the video goes on to discuss storage, which is not a wordI had thought of yet in this course. Then I realized that this is what we just talked about this week for a short amount of time. The lady in the video referenced the larger storage type to carry other files, referencing it as the directory file when for us you have basically called it the parent file. Even the lady in the video mentions how whenever a change is made to the file itself, we need to make sure that the same thing is reflected in the parent file for that child file.
After about that part of the video I start to get lost as fragmentation and how it works in a flat file system. I am not exactly sure I understand the concept or if it will be addressed in this course. Luckily the next type of file system to be discussed is the hierarchy system. This one seemed a bit more easy to grasp, possibly because it is the standard filing system on mine and most people’s computers .
I did learn in the video the introduction to metadata; which is data, about data more or less. Some parts of metadata were touched on, but overall gave the idea that to easily read a file, you should be able to understand the metadata. The data for the file comes after the metadata in a list of numbers. This all brings me back to the first lesson about data and let’s me hope and believe that I have some kind of preparedness for next week’s lesson about metadata.
Nonetheless my biggest realization was understanding how important it is to be able to read the data given because it can in fact help differentiate between file types and locations among other things. I am sure that I will continue building on these concepts as the course progresses.