I should be focusing on a proposal I have to submit today and designing an innovative ethnographic approach to researching latent and future needs and expectations from automotive service, but I find myself distracted and lacking inspiration. And I find myself preoccupied with thoughts of another kind. I was in Bangalore on work and met up with a cousin who has young kids in school. We were talking about how they are being taught and how they learn. Although both parents are heavy users of the internet, she said to me she wants to keep her kids away from it for as long as possible because she’s rather have them learn, synthesize and remember, than just provide them with the access to gain the knowledge. I’m a firm believer in the ‘magic’ of the web in it’s natural ability in providing us new avenues to learn and serendipitous discovery. And in the power of communities like Twitter that really help us grow as we share and learn together.
And yet, my cousin’s comment bothered me as I found myself telling a friend just last night that there are several mashups around Twitter. His immediate question to me was, name 10 - and I found myself at a loss. But in a few seconds I could provide him with a full list from the Twitter Fan Wiki. I felt a little embarrassed about the fact that I had not bothered to remember even a few!!! Similarly with a recent statistic on the future of mobile social networking - I knew I had read it but I had not remembered the exact statistic. It took a little Googling to find it. Searched. Found. Forgot. This bothers me.
As this happened, I put the question up at Twitter last night: “what’s better - access to knowledge or having the knowledge? i find often i have access & don’t bother to remember stuff. Not good!”
Here are some responses (read bottom-up):
I love the rap on knowledge, synthesis, wisdom and learning! What bothers me most is while the web is hugely useful in helping us in “learning to learn”, how much of this, as Gautam and @weaverluke suggest is being synthesized and allowed to transform into wisdom?
Tags: access to knowledge, Knowledge, wisdom
damn, missed the tweet….your post reminds me of the old anecdote about Indian engineers in America- the one which glorified the indian’s ability to calculate without a machine’s help… buuut, on your query, i have a few perspectives - to me, the twitter mashup stuff is not knowledge, its information.. what you can do with it might qualify for knowledge.. in that sense, i prefer access, because its becoming ubiquitous… also, look at it this way, your twitter ‘information’ is useful when online, but if you have access you don’t really need to memorise it, do ya? meanwhile, what is your memory capacity? how much can you store and recall at will? so we prioritise, or try to, and really can’t remember everything… lastly, i’d rather have the net spread the process to wisdom (learning to learn) than wisdom itself… for wisdom, i think, should come from subjective experiences.. but thats just a perspective…
phew, did i mention great post.. made me think
PS. you were in Bangalore? a tweetup would’ve been abso cool
Hey thanks for the thoughtful response. I’m not knocking the value of access to info one bit - I thrive on it! It just bothered me that I could not remember anymore than that I had the access to the info :). In most cases that’s pretty cool. But for kids in school who’s reality is that they have to consign stuff to memory often for the sake of stupid exams, I am concerned.
PS - I did tweet I was in Bangalore! A tweet-up would have been cool. Next time?
Dina, above all, from first principles, one has to ask what the purpose of learning and education is. If the aim is “being able to anticipate and solve problems” - which is in essence universal shorthand for capability, whichever way you define a ‘problem’ - then a host of ‘intelligences’ are needed to structure a problem, identify key elements, recall what one knows and what one needs to obtain from elsewhere, negotiate with others to help/ donate/ give the latter bits, and synthesise all these meaningfully to answer the original question.
In all this, finding the bits essential to finding the answer is crucial. Recall and search - or Memory and memorisation tools - both have their uses. The former is largely innate and can be aided to an extent, somewhat limited extent; the latter is universally accessible.
This old post of mine may also interest you.
http://laviequotidienne.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/on-memory-and-memorisation/
PS: Although I have an elephantine memory, I argue for the process of ‘learning to learn’ and ‘learning to think’ because that makes the process more democratic, more accessible, and potentially more fruitful in the long run.