Reply to: Is Google destroying our general knowledge

[original PM]

Interesting Question

Given that schooling is supposed to prepare a child for kleading a productive life and also making an assumption that the 'majority' or kids will go on to work as a perm employee.

I will therefore pose this question

Do the industrial leaders want people who will question what they are told or do industrial leaders want people who will do what they are told without question?

[dang65]

If you can now get the answer from the web, that doesn't mean that the learning is now unnecessary, rather it means that the old style of homework is no longer working. Learning and knowledge are not just google searches and wiki answers: those are great tools, but they do mean that learning has to proceed a different way.

The future does have to get with it and change learning - not just get by without it.

They've already adapted, to be honest. My children are getting a very good education, as far as I can tell. Very little of it involves a basic search for facts. It's almost always a more abstract challenge, like "interview one of the soldiers at the Battle of Hastings" or whatever. It's true that they are losing out on old style fact cramming (my 7 year old is horrendously weak on his times tables), but that's got nothing to do with the web or Wiki.

[bogeyman]

Close.

Joni must have been raised on the same set of encyclopedias!

[dang65]

Where-else could you see eight chaps in pith helmets holding a stretched-out anaconda?

Close.

[expat]

....
Honestly, the future just wants to get on with it, not trawl around ancient libraries full of out-of-date books just because that's what old people had to do. Wiki may well be laced with inaccuracies, but for the vast majority of the time it is a superb resource which we could only have dreamed of when we were at school ourselves. In fact, we had Douglas Adams to dream it up for us.

It's completely absurd to try to stop children from using Wiki or the web. I don't understand this stance at all.

It is absurd to do that, but it is necessary to change learning and testing methods, not to throw them out. Questions in homework were always designed to guide and test learning, not just to get an answer. The important thing was not to get the answer, but to do the learning that was (at that time) needed to get the answer.

If you can now get the answer from the web, that doesn't mean that the learning is now unnecessary, rather it means that the old style of homework is no longer working. Learning and knowledge are not just google searches and wiki answers: those are great tools, but they do mean that learning has to proceed a different way.

The future does have to get with it and change learning - not just get by without it.

[bogeyman]

I had a good set of Encyclopedias when I was a child (about 30 books), so that was my Google before the Internet arrived.

Oh way better than Google. Google doesn't have the lovely smell those old encyclopedias had.

My set (or rather my Dad's set) was printed in the mid 1930s and most of the information was obsolete and irrelevant by the 1960s when I was reading them.

Bloody fantastic though. Where-else could you see eight chaps in pith helmets holding a stretched-out anaconda?

[expat]

A bit like IBM manuals years ago used to state that someone has probably already written something close enough to what you need so just take a copy and modify it which was why there were bugger all examples

That was a fib, there were bugger all examples because IBM didn't actually run a hell of a lot of applications themselves so they didn't have any examples.

[Amiga500]

And this differs from previous generations of school children in what way exactly? How did you find out about the Corn Laws or Wilfred Owen or ox-bow lakes or photosynthesis when you were a kid? Did you hungrily track down every book on the subject from the local library and from all your friends and relatives? Did you cross reference them and phone Oxford university to clarify any contradictions? Or... did you just scrawl down a swiftly reworded paragraph from the textbook the school gave you?

You must have been a kid once?

I had a good set of Encyclopedias when I was a child (about 30 books), so that was my Google before the Internet arrived.

[snaw]

And this differs from previous generations of school children in what way exactly? How did you find out about the Corn Laws or Wilfred Owen or ox-bow lakes or photosynthesis when you were a kid? Did you hungrily track down every book on the subject from the local library and from all your friends and relatives? Did you cross reference them and phone Oxford university to clarify any contradictions? Or... did you just scrawl down a swiftly reworded paragraph from the textbook the school gave you?

You must have been a kid once?

Actually, most students I know at uni did pretty much the same a lot of the time ... the more obscure the book the better.

Of course I never indulged in such behaviour ...

[dang65]

I think the mother's issue was that the child would use wikipedia to answer the homework questions almost verbatim, without checking other sources to get a balanced and accurate viewpoint.

In other words, the child was not bothered with the veracity of the information, just the ease in which it could be obtained. The child was not applying rigourous research of the data obtained.

Don't you think, in that specific context, there is cause for concern ?

And this differs from previous generations of school children in what way exactly? How did you find out about the Corn Laws or Wilfred Owen or ox-bow lakes or photosynthesis when you were a kid? Did you hungrily track down every book on the subject from the local library and from all your friends and relatives? Did you cross reference them and phone Oxford university to clarify any contradictions? Or... did you just scrawl down a swiftly reworded paragraph from the textbook the school gave you?

You must have been a kid once?

[Board Game Geek]

Dang65 wrote : It's completely absurd to try to stop children from using Wiki or the web. I don't understand this stance at all.

I think the mother's issue was that the child would use wikipedia to answer the homework questions almost verbatim, without checking other sources to get a balanced and accurate viewpoint.

In other words, the child was not bothered with the veracity of the information, just the ease in which it could be obtained. The child was not applying rigourous research of the data obtained.

Don't you think, in that specific context, there is cause for concern ?

Furthermore, if we accept that the child is not unique in her rationale of her use of the internet and wikipedia, and that there are thousands of others in the same position, what does that bode for the future ?

A population which unquestionably accepts everything they are told or read ?

A totalitarian states wet dream I should imagine.

[darmstadt]

The funny thing is Lightng, that's almost the same as the lady's daughter I mentioned earlier.

The mother said that the daughter said that the homework questions just needed a quick google and a linky to answer. Her reasoning is that she's not being asked questions which nobody knows the answers to, so why bust a gut when someone else out there has answered them ?

A bit like IBM manuals years ago used to state that someone has probably already written something close enough to what you need so just take a copy and modify it which was why there were bugger all examples

[dang65]

The mother tried to remonstrate with her juvenile that Wikipedia was not a 100% reliable nor trustworthy source of information.

Said juvenile replied "Whatever, but then you cannot believe everything you read in a book anyway, so what's the difference?"

And what happened next? What is the official parental answer to this totally accurate statement?

Did your parents and teachers try to stop you using electronic calculators or CD-ROM encyclopaedias when they became available, because they never had them themselves? Should undergraduates have been forbidden from watching Open University programmes on television because the generations before them never even had television?

Honestly, the future just wants to get on with it, not trawl around ancient libraries full of out-of-date books just because that's what old people had to do. Wiki may well be laced with inaccuracies, but for the vast majority of the time it is a superb resource which we could only have dreamed of when we were at school ourselves. In fact, we had Douglas Adams to dream it up for us.

It's completely absurd to try to stop children from using Wiki or the web. I don't understand this stance at all.

[expat]

The funny thing is Lightng, that's almost the same as the lady's daughter I mentioned earlier.

The mother said that the daughter said that the homework questions just needed a quick google and a linky to answer. Her reasoning is that she's not being asked questions which nobody knows the answers to, so why bust a gut when someone else out there has answered them ?

And the answer is, or should be, that she is being asked not just to answer some old questions, but to learn about a subject. The homework questions are intended to guide her learning, not to replace it.

[snaw]

You said that in your nursery troll too I believe, it can become your catchphrase...

OMFG God.

You've got me on that one.

Imagine someone on a internet forum offering an opinion on something.

Whatever next, people talking about house prices and Russian dudes talking bollox about the economy?

Where will it end ...