Soft in the Head
I think students need to be taught to access information the hard way. Somehow, teaching them to access information through easy ways like hitting the internet doesn't seem to work well.
Perhaps, the journey is indeed more important than the destination. Hunting for information through a nearly impenetrable thicket of bookshelves and librarians, without easy cheats and aids, trains the mind to the questing paradigm.
In the questing paradigm, the quester knows that a number of trials (three is common, but the number may be as high as twelve) must be completed successfully before the objective is achieved. Then the quester gets to access the next level of the game, whatever the game is.
The problem with students these days is that hugely superior access to information makes most information-finding problems too easy-looking. Students think that information is as easy to obtain as dirt, and hence don't bother.
If you confront modern students with this, they will raise all kinds of examples to prove this isn't so. Two main possibilities then emerge.
The first is that they are indeed self-aware and it is true that they are able to work through the quest paradigm, finding value in what they find, keeping useful stuff for later use, and so on. They use this paradigm all the time.
The second is that they don't know what they're talking about. They can't tell you how to evaluate information yield from data, or information value. But they are good at telling stories about information which may or may not be true.
Sometimes, the old practices of index card searching, manual note-taking, and document collection through physical curation, are more useful than this. Physical arrangements challenge the brain better than purely abstract formulations; hard copy is better than soft, as far as the mind is concerned.
Perhaps, people need to be more hard-headed about information processing.
Perhaps, the journey is indeed more important than the destination. Hunting for information through a nearly impenetrable thicket of bookshelves and librarians, without easy cheats and aids, trains the mind to the questing paradigm.
In the questing paradigm, the quester knows that a number of trials (three is common, but the number may be as high as twelve) must be completed successfully before the objective is achieved. Then the quester gets to access the next level of the game, whatever the game is.
The problem with students these days is that hugely superior access to information makes most information-finding problems too easy-looking. Students think that information is as easy to obtain as dirt, and hence don't bother.
If you confront modern students with this, they will raise all kinds of examples to prove this isn't so. Two main possibilities then emerge.
The first is that they are indeed self-aware and it is true that they are able to work through the quest paradigm, finding value in what they find, keeping useful stuff for later use, and so on. They use this paradigm all the time.
The second is that they don't know what they're talking about. They can't tell you how to evaluate information yield from data, or information value. But they are good at telling stories about information which may or may not be true.
Sometimes, the old practices of index card searching, manual note-taking, and document collection through physical curation, are more useful than this. Physical arrangements challenge the brain better than purely abstract formulations; hard copy is better than soft, as far as the mind is concerned.
Perhaps, people need to be more hard-headed about information processing.
Labels: Cognition, Information Technology
etched with acid at 9:18:00 am
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