Gross generalisation. But, hey —I'm a lot nearer to 55 than I am to 25. So what the hell! Older people "learn" stuff. Younger people "access" information SOU

Gross generalisation. But, hey —I'm a lot nearer to 55 than I am to 25. So what the hell! Older people "learn" stuff. Younger people "access" information SOURCE: Nearly two decades in university teaching. When I started out, you'd explain something and students would make notes. You'd rarely be asked to explain that "thing" again. Latterly, I found it almost impossible to convince students to take notes and they'd often ask to be shown how to do the same thing on multiple occasions —often on the same day. My theory is that; with smartphones, Google, Wikipedia, etc. the youth of today are conditioned to being able to access any information, any time, at the tap of a screen. There is no incentive or need to make the effort to retain that information, as it's always there. And they expect their college lecturers to perform a similar 'on-tap' role. Conversely, for us oldies, we might have learned stuff from a book which we'd borrowed from the library and had to return, or a TV programme which had dissipated into the aether. Sources which were not permanently with us. So we had to make the effort to retain that knowledge, because accessing it again was more hassle than remembering it. I sometimes think it ironic that the classic SciFi utopian vision of a future where everyone in the human race has access to the combined knowledge of all mankind is almost upon us —and yet seems to have resulted in a population where the average individual knows less and less.