By its very nature there's no real structure to Google Drive: it's just a big pot of files. They've applied the same approach to Google Drive.ĭon't expect Drive to look tidy. Google's most famous product is, of course, a search engine. Or it's a bit like if we were all in the filing cabinet together.

It's a bit like if we were all on the one computer, only with less fighting over who gets to use the mouse. In contrast, Google Drive is a collaborative working space: it's still essentially just a computer we can all access, but it's one where we can all be editing the same documents at the same time. But the files tend to work in a very similar way in both cases: if I take a document out of a filing cabinet, only I can see it and interact with it if I open a document on a network drive, it's locked for editing and the only way anybody else can look at it at the same time is to make a copy (or come to my computer and look over my shoulder).īoth the filing cabinet and the network drive are examples of shared working spaces.

But the filing cabinets in a computer could play with space in a way that physical filing cabinets can't: on a computer you could have filing cabinets within filing cabinets! You could have a file-path of nested folders, allowing some impressively complex organisation.Ī network drive is just a computer that lots of people can access, in the same way that lots of people might be able to access a shared filing cabinet. When we started using computers, we took this model with us to create the sort of file structure you'll have on the computer you're using now: documents arranged in directories or folders. Each draw contains a number of hanging files, each of which may contain a number of documents. What makes Google Drive any different to the sort of networked drives we've been using for decades? Reflective practice: employability skills.

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