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It's not that we are getting dumber. We are just changing our skill set. Remembering where to find a set of information or how to find a set of information is m

It's not that we are getting dumber. We are just changing our skill set. Remembering where to find a set of information or how to find a set of information is more effective than remebering each item in the set. Search engines have changed us so we don't have to remember trivia and can focus on larger ideas that can't be searched.

valine 10y ago
I feel like academia will be much more efficient once universities start getting on board with this idea.
- Mayzie 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you think that adoption will look like?
  - ftlio 10y ago
    Term projects. Those are what prepared me for getting paid to apply my academic knowledge more than anything. All the better when it was left up to me to create the spec. Most of the time I had to abide by some requirements, like 'Must use SPI for communication between two or more microcontrollers', but it was pretty obvious in these classes if you were actually applying what you were learning or not.
  - valine 10y ago
    Personally I'd like to see a large reduction in the emphasis on exams and repetitive homework. Today, at least to some degree, classes are designed to rank students against their classmates by who can memorize the most trivia. The primary objective of every class should be that the students know how to find info related to the subject. The final project in an algorithms course could be something like, "Using google and a programming language of your choice provide an implementation of $ALGORITHM." Where $ALGORITHM could be an algorithm that was not explicitly covered in the course material. This would show that the students have a broad enough understanding of the material that they can seek out solutions to types of problems they haven't seen before.
    - NotOscarWilde 10y ago
      It depends on what you want from an "Algorithms" course; you could even split it into levels as follows: 1. Graduates can implement algorithms given a nice and thorough description in a textbook or a website. 2. Graduates can implement algorithms given a few minute whiteboard explanation by a colleague or a short answer on a Stack Exchange site. (For a short answer example, look at some at cs.stackexchange or cstheory.stackexchange, where expertise is often assumed.) 3. Graduates can design and implement algorithms that are simple derivatives of those they have seen or implemented before, without any textual advice. 4. Graduates can design non-trivial derivatives of algorithms that they have seen before, given a problem that is not googleable (for example, it came up as a secondary question in your research). The actual goal depends on the aims of your university or class. The problem with any level besides 1 is that it seems to require an artificial test environment. You want to give the students easy exercises, say solvable within 60-90 minutes, and you want to give them as much freedom for their implementation environment -- but the reality is, any popular and "time-tested" exercise is fully solved online, most likely in full detail on Stack Overflow. (Speaking from experience, trying to "dress up" the problem in some alternate description doesn't work if the students can Google.) And, predictably, if you forbid the access to the internet you get upset students, you provide an easy and effective way to cheat, and you give ammunition to the critics who call your testing methods "distant from any actual practice". I don't know what the "right" answer is, but I am fully convinced that stopping at level 1, the only level where you can realistically allow access to the internet, is not the right way.
rimliu 10y ago
See already recommended course https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn Without small building blocks comfortably sitting in your brain there will be no larger ideas to focus on.
dozzie 10y ago
Except that without knowing those useless trivia you won't even have the chance to draw connections and associations between them, which is essential for working with these "larger ideas" of yours. No, search engines won't make up for simple lack of knowledge. You have to know what to search for in the first place.
- mbrumlow 10y ago
  I see your point, and I feel you have unfairly made my comment mean something much more than it originally was intended to be. I want to make it clear. I am not advocating not knowing things. I am advocating that some things are "trivia" and some things are not. I feel from your post that you have put more things in the "trivia" category than I would. This article opened up asking a single question; "what’s the capital of Australia?” -- in an attempt to make the reader feel dumb. The name of a capital of a country you don’t live in is just the sort of data I would classify as trivia. Knowing that there is something called an atlas, or even more precise that there is a book that organizes this sort of information, or even more recently a website that you can ask this question to and receive back reasonable answer is far more important to know than knowing Canberra is the capital of Australia. Without knowing where to find or how to find the answer you would just have to answer “I don’t know”, but knowing these other concepts would allow you to answer “I don’t know, but I am reasonably sure I can find out”. It should also pointed out that countries have capitals -- is the "larger idea" -- and the fact that Canberra is the capital of Australia is triva. A good way to look at this; things that have unique names but can be categorized in groups are often trivia and the groups they make are the knowledge. The article actually picked a excellent topic to illustrate this notion. The big ideas are countries, states, provinces, territories. Learning the unique names of these things teaching you nothing new -- other than the name. No new ideas are conveyed by learning a new name. Learning that there are states and provinces, how they work, and what their differences is far more valuable than the names of each of the individual states and provinces. So yes, not knowing the triva can still allow you to work my “larger ideas”.
  - glandium 10y ago
    Plus, "what's the capital of Australia?" is the kind of trivia that changes (not often, for capitals, but that's definitely something that happens). In the end, you're better off knowing where to find it when you need the answer rather than knowing a fact that might as well be obsolete.

valine 10y ago

I feel like academia will be much more efficient once universities start getting on board with this idea.

Mayzie 10y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you think that adoption will look like?
- ftlio 10y ago
  Term projects. Those are what prepared me for getting paid to apply my academic knowledge more than anything. All the better when it was left up to me to create the spec. Most of the time I had to abide by some requirements, like 'Must use SPI for communication between two or more microcontrollers', but it was pretty obvious in these classes if you were actually applying what you were learning or not.
- valine 10y ago
  Personally I'd like to see a large reduction in the emphasis on exams and repetitive homework. Today, at least to some degree, classes are designed to rank students against their classmates by who can memorize the most trivia. The primary objective of every class should be that the students know how to find info related to the subject. The final project in an algorithms course could be something like, "Using google and a programming language of your choice provide an implementation of $ALGORITHM." Where $ALGORITHM could be an algorithm that was not explicitly covered in the course material. This would show that the students have a broad enough understanding of the material that they can seek out solutions to types of problems they haven't seen before.
  - NotOscarWilde 10y ago
    It depends on what you want from an "Algorithms" course; you could even split it into levels as follows: 1. Graduates can implement algorithms given a nice and thorough description in a textbook or a website. 2. Graduates can implement algorithms given a few minute whiteboard explanation by a colleague or a short answer on a Stack Exchange site. (For a short answer example, look at some at cs.stackexchange or cstheory.stackexchange, where expertise is often assumed.) 3. Graduates can design and implement algorithms that are simple derivatives of those they have seen or implemented before, without any textual advice. 4. Graduates can design non-trivial derivatives of algorithms that they have seen before, given a problem that is not googleable (for example, it came up as a secondary question in your research). The actual goal depends on the aims of your university or class. The problem with any level besides 1 is that it seems to require an artificial test environment. You want to give the students easy exercises, say solvable within 60-90 minutes, and you want to give them as much freedom for their implementation environment -- but the reality is, any popular and "time-tested" exercise is fully solved online, most likely in full detail on Stack Overflow. (Speaking from experience, trying to "dress up" the problem in some alternate description doesn't work if the students can Google.) And, predictably, if you forbid the access to the internet you get upset students, you provide an easy and effective way to cheat, and you give ammunition to the critics who call your testing methods "distant from any actual practice". I don't know what the "right" answer is, but I am fully convinced that stopping at level 1, the only level where you can realistically allow access to the internet, is not the right way.

rimliu 10y ago

See already recommended course https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn Without small building blocks comfortably sitting in your brain there will be no larger ideas to focus on.

dozzie 10y ago

Except that without knowing those useless trivia you won't even have the chance to draw connections and associations between them, which is essential for working with these "larger ideas" of yours. No, search engines won't make up for simple lack of knowledge. You have to know what to search for in the first place.

mbrumlow 10y ago
I see your point, and I feel you have unfairly made my comment mean something much more than it originally was intended to be. I want to make it clear. I am not advocating not knowing things. I am advocating that some things are "trivia" and some things are not. I feel from your post that you have put more things in the "trivia" category than I would. This article opened up asking a single question; "what’s the capital of Australia?” -- in an attempt to make the reader feel dumb. The name of a capital of a country you don’t live in is just the sort of data I would classify as trivia. Knowing that there is something called an atlas, or even more precise that there is a book that organizes this sort of information, or even more recently a website that you can ask this question to and receive back reasonable answer is far more important to know than knowing Canberra is the capital of Australia. Without knowing where to find or how to find the answer you would just have to answer “I don’t know”, but knowing these other concepts would allow you to answer “I don’t know, but I am reasonably sure I can find out”. It should also pointed out that countries have capitals -- is the "larger idea" -- and the fact that Canberra is the capital of Australia is triva. A good way to look at this; things that have unique names but can be categorized in groups are often trivia and the groups they make are the knowledge. The article actually picked a excellent topic to illustrate this notion. The big ideas are countries, states, provinces, territories. Learning the unique names of these things teaching you nothing new -- other than the name. No new ideas are conveyed by learning a new name. Learning that there are states and provinces, how they work, and what their differences is far more valuable than the names of each of the individual states and provinces. So yes, not knowing the triva can still allow you to work my “larger ideas”.
- glandium 10y ago
  Plus, "what's the capital of Australia?" is the kind of trivia that changes (not often, for capitals, but that's definitely something that happens). In the end, you're better off knowing where to find it when you need the answer rather than knowing a fact that might as well be obsolete.