Apreliminary phenomenographic study concerning student experiences of UNIX

This preliminary report is based upon the experiences of six students who had recently completed their first semester of studying Unix. A phenomenographic analysis of the interview transcripts identified four categones of how students experienced Unix. One of the categories is Unix as a resource, in which the student focuses on characteristics of Unix such as its cost, vulnerability to attack, robustness, and load capacity. The other three categories focus on the direct user experience of Unix. These three categories form an outcome space that is linear and hierarchical. Those three categories are, from lowest to highest: Unix as a set of commands, Unix as a tool for solving certain problems, and Unix as a professional computing environment. For this outcome space, there are indications of a direct relationship between the category most prominently manifested in each student's interview transcript and the student's final mark in the Unix course. There are also indications of a similar relationship between the outcome space and the student's performance on the R-SPQ-2F test for deep and surface learning.