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I don't understand why he decided to do his experiment after the students told him it was because they didn't understand the words in the book. But anyway, I t

by jon889 7y ago

I don't understand why he decided to do his experiment after the students told him it was because they didn't understand the words in the book. But anyway, I think some of this is true that things like social media have gone to far in attracting our attention. But also a lot of blame is with the structure of education. Listening to one person for at least an hour with sometimes a hundred other people in the room is not a good way of learning, at least not for everyone. Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. One of the good things about phones is that almost any information can be found almost instantly almost anywhere. No need to remember formulas or dates. Instead how to find information, verify it, and use it is far more important.

gcthomas 7y ago
> Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. Looking up stuff is no good if you can't integrate it with a pre-existing scaffolding of concepts and knowledge. That pre-existing knowledge is essential to being able to make use of the search results.
ForHackernews 7y ago
> learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. Unless you need to pass a whiteboard job interview that depends on remembering some obscure algorithm. ;)
- capableweb 7y ago
  > Unless you need to pass a whiteboard job interview No one _needs_ to pass those kind of interviews. There are plenty of jobs that doesn't require that at all. But if you want to, it is sure handy to be able to remember obscure algorithms.
chinesempire 7y ago
> One of the good things about phones is that almost any information can be found almost instantly almost anywhere. If you need to constantly look up informations, it means you have no long term knowledge of anything. Hence you can't verify that piece of information. > Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore The long term knowledge, AKA "your expertise" kindly disagree. You can't look up informations when you are at a meeting with the client. You should already know what you're talking about and know the answer to the most probable questions. Prior knowledge gives you confidence, without building a "memory only" information storage you can't be sure of anything. What do you do if you disagree? Engage in a google battle? Or, even worse, use Wikipedia as a baseline for the truth?
- aledalgrande 7y ago
  Also you can't Google what you don't know you don't know.
- learnstats2 7y ago
  > You can't look up informations when you are at a meeting with the client. This sounds like an uncomfortable kind of meeting. I often find myself saying "we can easily look that up". Knowing where and how to effectively look things up is a critical aspect of knowledge.
  - chinesempire 7y ago
    > I often find myself saying "we can easily look that up". Maybe I need to clarify, with "you can't lookup informations" I meant a meeting (or an exam) it's not the place and moment where you verify if a piece of information is valid or to learn something completely new, it's the place and moment where you put what you already know about something at work. Knowledge is mainly about recognising patterns, if you know something can be solved with a certain formula you can look it up, it's not easy to keep everything in mind, but you have to already know what to lookup (at least the general domain of the problem) In my experience if I attend a meeting about (for example) implementing the new company SSO component, I go there assuming we all know what an SSO component is, what it does and that each participant understands the problem for their angle (business, technical, legal etc. etc.)
  - MrGilbert 7y ago
    > Knowing where and how to effectively look things up is a critical aspect of knowledge. It depends on what you need to look up: I don't need to know that the Eiffel Tower is hold together by 2.5 million nuts, bolts and rivets (I looked this one up), but as a western european, I should know that the Eiffel Tower is made from some kind of iron. OTH though, if I'm the company in charge of maintaining the Tower, I should probably know more about it. So it really depends.
    - CaptArmchair 7y ago
Spooky23 7y ago
That’s like saying that calculators eliminate the need to learn arithmetic — the reality is that fluency enables you to do more. Knowing things is more important than ever. Googling crap on your phone is also too slow and too failure prone.
- behringer 7y ago
  Hey I can just look up a simplex noise generator on Google! Oh you need me to develop a noise generating algorithm from scratch to meet a certain set of requirements? You better hire someone with a proper education then.
wyldfire 7y ago
> I don't understand why he decided to do his experiment after the students told him it was because they didn't understand the words in the book. I assumed that the student said this because they were blind to the fact that their poor performance was due to inattention.
klodolph 7y ago
> Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. The exam is going to cover some well-tread parts of whatever subject you are studying. For most reasonable exam questions, especially at undergraduate level, you can find some answer online without having to do the reasoning yourself as long as you understand the terms. However, I would like to see undergraduates prepared to answer questions which are more obscure or unusual, and being able to reason through these questions with your knowledge of the field is a critical skill to make this possible. Additionally, you should be spending some of your time memorizing things. This is just necessary to have some kind of fluent conversation with other people studying the same subject. My personal preference for most subjects is a combination of open-book and closed-book. It’s hard to design the closed-book portion so that it doesn’t come down to a memorization game. The solution I usually prefer is to create a larger test, and allow students to a subset of the test to answer, but this creates a larger burden on the graders and the instructor creating the curriculum.
collyw 7y ago
It worked fine 20 years ago.

by jon889 7y ago

gcthomas 7y ago

> Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. Looking up stuff is no good if you can't integrate it with a pre-existing scaffolding of concepts and knowledge. That pre-existing knowledge is essential to being able to make use of the search results.

ForHackernews 7y ago

> learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. Unless you need to pass a whiteboard job interview that depends on remembering some obscure algorithm. ;)

capableweb 7y ago
> Unless you need to pass a whiteboard job interview No one _needs_ to pass those kind of interviews. There are plenty of jobs that doesn't require that at all. But if you want to, it is sure handy to be able to remember obscure algorithms.

chinesempire 7y ago

> One of the good things about phones is that almost any information can be found almost instantly almost anywhere. If you need to constantly look up informations, it means you have no long term knowledge of anything. Hence you can't verify that piece of information. > Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore The long term knowledge, AKA "your expertise" kindly disagree. You can't look up informations when you are at a meeting with the client. You should already know what you're talking about and know the answer to the most probable questions. Prior knowledge gives you confidence, without building a "memory only" information storage you can't be sure of anything. What do you do if you disagree? Engage in a google battle? Or, even worse, use Wikipedia as a baseline for the truth?

aledalgrande 7y ago
Also you can't Google what you don't know you don't know.
learnstats2 7y ago
> You can't look up informations when you are at a meeting with the client. This sounds like an uncomfortable kind of meeting. I often find myself saying "we can easily look that up". Knowing where and how to effectively look things up is a critical aspect of knowledge.
- chinesempire 7y ago
  > I often find myself saying "we can easily look that up". Maybe I need to clarify, with "you can't lookup informations" I meant a meeting (or an exam) it's not the place and moment where you verify if a piece of information is valid or to learn something completely new, it's the place and moment where you put what you already know about something at work. Knowledge is mainly about recognising patterns, if you know something can be solved with a certain formula you can look it up, it's not easy to keep everything in mind, but you have to already know what to lookup (at least the general domain of the problem) In my experience if I attend a meeting about (for example) implementing the new company SSO component, I go there assuming we all know what an SSO component is, what it does and that each participant understands the problem for their angle (business, technical, legal etc. etc.)
- MrGilbert 7y ago
  > Knowing where and how to effectively look things up is a critical aspect of knowledge. It depends on what you need to look up: I don't need to know that the Eiffel Tower is hold together by 2.5 million nuts, bolts and rivets (I looked this one up), but as a western european, I should know that the Eiffel Tower is made from some kind of iron. OTH though, if I'm the company in charge of maintaining the Tower, I should probably know more about it. So it really depends.
  - CaptArmchair 7y ago

Spooky23 7y ago

That’s like saying that calculators eliminate the need to learn arithmetic — the reality is that fluency enables you to do more. Knowing things is more important than ever. Googling crap on your phone is also too slow and too failure prone.

behringer 7y ago
Hey I can just look up a simplex noise generator on Google! Oh you need me to develop a noise generating algorithm from scratch to meet a certain set of requirements? You better hire someone with a proper education then.

wyldfire 7y ago

> I don't understand why he decided to do his experiment after the students told him it was because they didn't understand the words in the book. I assumed that the student said this because they were blind to the fact that their poor performance was due to inattention.

klodolph 7y ago

> Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. The exam is going to cover some well-tread parts of whatever subject you are studying. For most reasonable exam questions, especially at undergraduate level, you can find some answer online without having to do the reasoning yourself as long as you understand the terms. However, I would like to see undergraduates prepared to answer questions which are more obscure or unusual, and being able to reason through these questions with your knowledge of the field is a critical skill to make this possible. Additionally, you should be spending some of your time memorizing things. This is just necessary to have some kind of fluent conversation with other people studying the same subject. My personal preference for most subjects is a combination of open-book and closed-book. It’s hard to design the closed-book portion so that it doesn’t come down to a memorization game. The solution I usually prefer is to create a larger test, and allow students to a subset of the test to answer, but this creates a larger burden on the graders and the instructor creating the curriculum.

collyw 7y ago

It worked fine 20 years ago.