Xref: utzoo comp.edu:2467 sci.edu:646 comp.cog-eng:1320 Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!sunfs3!kent From: kent@sunfs3.camex.uucp (Kent Borg) Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,comp.cog-eng Subject: Re: What to know Message-ID: <496@sunfs3.camex.uucp> Date: 2 Sep 89 19:49:17 GMT References: <5266@tank.uchicago.edu> Reply-To: kent@sunfs3.UUCP (Kent Borg) Organization: Camex, Inc., Boston, Mass USA Lines: 90 In article <56543@aerospace.AERO.ORG>, abbott@aerospace.aero.org (Russell J. Abbott) writes: > In this world of instantly accessible information that we are > constructing I'm beginning to wonder what one should actually bother to > learn. That is, why know something when one can look it up using an > information locator service? I also wonder what the difference is > between knowing something and knowing where to find out about something. [I have been reading the comp.cog-eng thread, so I might be redundant with the two .edu groups. If I get myself in trouble, sorry.] A key here is the fuzzy word "Information". "...why know something [use] an information locator service" Don't confuse learning with accumulating facts. They are *not* the same. Databases collect facts. The powerful aspect of learning, however, is understanding. It is tempting to look at a computer being fed data at an extreme rate and equate that with what a person does when "learning" the same material. Why does it take a person years to learn what a computer can absorb in a few seconds? Why are people so terribly inefficient? Why can't people do as well as a computer when it comes to learning? The answer is that people are doing something entirely different from just collecting data. Once a person has learned something she can put it to marvelous use. But the computer which as sucked up the same facts, can mostly just sit there and inertly repeat them. It is a red herring that many so-called teachers substitute the drilling of facts for teaching. Rote learning is a largely distructive teaching technique which only works by a side effect: People are very bad at memorizing facts (compare them to computers to see how easy it is to out-memorize a person). Rote learning only works when the poor student attempts to cope with a volume of facts by trying to understand them. Very often, though, the reaction is the reverse. Students will be so overwhelmed with the facts that they don't dare try to *understand* them. "That would take too much time, I have an *exam* to pass!" "I'm beginning to wonder what one should actually bother to learn." I say: everything. You can't use any information without having it in your head first. Certainly having good reference works available can help, but they themselves can do nothing. Owning a dictionary is different from knowing a language, and reading a dictionary is different from learning a language. Facts are only good to the extent they can be plugged together, and that plugging requires understanding and broad knowlege. All a reference really does is lessen the need for rote learning and doing a lot of rote learning has never been as powerful as a little understanding. Spending much effort on memorizing has always been a waste, the availability of enormous online databases makes that even more true. Related point: Many people like fun-facts about how much more information is being produced these days and say that it is no longer to possible to be a "renaissance" person. Well, the renaissance is over, but I say that it is now *easier* to be multifaceted. Two reasons: =One, the infrastructure is so much better, there are reasonable libraries nearly everywhere in the developed world, these libraries are full of explanations of how the universe works. (And National Public Radio is available in nearly all the US...) =Two, many of these explanations are much simpler and more powerful than were their counterparts during the renaissance. Sure, there are people who have the time to study more minutiae than does anybody other than their fellow specialists. There is no way you can keep up them unless you are one of them, but I say that that has always been true and that that minutiae is only of real value if you are in the speciality. The rest of us should be more interested in their explanations than in their lab notes, and good explanations have the wonderful quality that they make sense without requiring reading all the cited references. Do we live in a more complicated world now? Only in that it is bigger in some ways. Can one person master it all? No, but that has never been possible. Is it easier these days to learn a lot about a lot of subjects? I say, yes. Is it easier to be best in a field now? No, the world has lots of smart people who have the time to compete with you. Does that mean you can't still do better than that poor Renaissance Man? No, learning is easier now. -- Kent Borg "You know me, bright ideas kent@lloyd.uucp just pop into my head!" or -Mrs Lovett ...!husc6!lloyd!kent (from Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeny Todd")