A Web of Memories
The near ubiquitous web, even in it’s basic form, provides a vast interconnected mesh of facts, thoughts and ideas such that there is almost never a question where the answer is not at our finger tips, but can our education system, and the world, keep up with such a radical new way of thinking and learning?
With the ever increasing ubiquity of the internet, carried wherever you might want it on your laptop, tablet or smart phone means that you now have constant access to a stream of information about almost anything. Who’s that actor? What’s that song? What is the speed of light? When was Mozart born? Two or three taps on your device of choice and you have the answer, anywhere, any time.
If you can have the answer to anything at your fingertips, instantly, where is the value of memorising untold quantities of facts, figures, formula and processes? More and more the human condition is being stored in a digital enclave, thoughts and feelings, facts and figures, all safely stored for later retrieval away from our fragile collection of flesh and bone.
Those in accademia have long accepted that learning to do things repeatably and accurately by rote has become less and less valuable, this is highlighted no better than manufacturing. Once the great engine of the British industrial age, manufacturing has withered away as such tasks have been moved to areas with suplus labour, and hence lower wages, such as China. Even the precision or artistry of an engineer or craftsman has been largely replaced by mechanised alternatives who work tirelessly without mistakes. So what of our studies?
One might argue that even at the university level much of what is required is nothing more than creative plagiarism and rote regurgitation. Take Brunel University’s CS3010 where the students are tasked with filling a wiki with social web concepts. Here much of the work required is simply ripping off the appropriate articles from Wikipedia and not getting caught. A task that could no doubt be accomplished algorithmically with a little thought, replacing the students with nothing more than a small shell script.
And here in lies the answer. It is the creation of such an algorithm, such a script, which requires thought, understanding and presence of mind. It could be argued that universities already assess understanding of concepts and ability to apply concepts in their testing, but ever so frequently this is entirely dependant on rote learning of an underlying thought. For example, imagine a question like so: “Apply a WBS to the following case study.” Here we are undeniably testing the ability to apply concepts, but without the rote learning of how to do such a process, or even what WBS is, you have little hope of attaining any grade.
The fragile existence of human beings lends itself to offloading as much as possible into this backing store, a cloud brain, that can be accessed at will without burdening our main cognitive processing abilities, but at what point do we stop such progression and how do we determine fact from fiction and who has what abilities as we move on from the Information Age, where information is currency, to an era where information is ubiquitous and truly free?
Slower Computer, Higher Productivity
While good enough computing maybe the future of the tech industry, the unfortunate failure of one modern machine has seriously improved productivity in an age of constant distractions.
My MacBook died. Again. The nice man at Apple Care tells me it’s a hard drive failure. Again. You might think I lob the machine around, no consideration, just chuck it in my bag – but no; for the last month it’s been happily sitting, safe and sound on a laptop stand on my desk. So I’m sitting there, listening to Leo Laporte and the machine just stops responding, pin wheel and everything. I hard-reset it an no OS X for me. Great. No machine, and to top it off as of next week it’s exam season for me.
Fortunately, being sat on the desk full time, I have a Time Machine backup of the drive so my files, in particular my class notes, are safe. With any luck the restore functionality works wonderfully and I’ll have my machine back in no time at all and restore it right over the top. In the mea- time, however, I’m on my Blue and White PowerMac G3. For comparison: Black MackBook, 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB DDR RAM, OS X Leopard, vintage 2007 vs PowerMac G3, 450 MHz o/c, 512 MB SD RAM, OS X Tiger (slowly), vintage 1999. The machine is 10 years old. While its a beautiful machine and my first Mac (kept for sentimental value), obsolete is a generous way to describe it.
Yet, my productivity is up.
As I mentioned, it’s exam season for me right now and my revision has been almost non-existent; I am easily distracted by the vast amounts of interesting content to be found on the information superhighway. Not being able to open more than 4 tabs in my browser without it slowing to a state where I can no longer scroll coupled with a total inability to watch video at a frame rate higher than 4 frames per second has made me really consider the way I work with my computer.
Email drives me, for a student I get a fair amount, and as such I really appreciate a good desktop client, like Mail.app on OS X – but there is no way I’m going to set that up on this machine, it’s only temporary and I have GBs of the stuff which will have to be synchronised before the barely usable spotlight search can provide anything like accurate results. My new found tab limitation has really killed my obsession with this killer app of the 21st century.
My two favorite time killers, Digg and Slashdot, are also stemmed by my browser’s limitations. Where as before I’d browse down Digg or Slashdot and open 50 pages of trivial information, audio, photos and media. Now I have to seriously consider every page. Video of dancing hamster? No point. Photo stream of worlds cutest cats? Only if I want to reboot the machine two photos in. Want three different options on a particular current affairs issue? Not all at once. Flipping back and fourth to open links, it’s just not the way I browse the web. I like to cue my content up.
So I spent the entire day on the university website doing quizzes and practice tests, reading materials and browsing the student discussion boards for tips and reviews of exam questions. Not only do I feel like I’ve made serious progress in the last few hours I’ve unlocked reams of additional content to review which should help me tie up my studies over the next few days.
But make note: once I realised this old beast could handle one page of text at a time, notice what I had time to do… oh well, maybe I’ll pass next year.