Jun 15, 2009
Does the internet make the knowledge of rote facts less important?
In a world of wikipedia, where every definition is a click away, it’s foolish to give me definitions to memorize.
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© 2012 Abuyo. All rights reserved.
A larger vocabulary enables one to think more complex thoughts without having to use double plus ungood constructs. It’s worth the memorization.
The more you have memorized, the less you need to google. The less you have to google, the more productive you are.
(Replying in 22 words is like writing a haiku!)
More knowledge is better than less knowledge. Even if it is only rote factual information.
“A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age” C.S.Lewis
I think we should outsource all of our thinking to computers. It’s so exhausting. :)
I suppose we wouldn’t be able to speak with a very wide vocabulary if we didn’t have definitions memorized…right? And what about all the information we receive when we don’t have the internet right by our side–day-to-day conversations, viewing the news, etc.?
Yes!
Here is an article about just that:
http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/07/is_the_iphone_making_us_stupid.php
I would argue the opposite, actually – with so much information available at our fingertips, we have the resources to learn all kinds of things. There’s no good reason or excuse for us NOT to know things these days. :-)
so glad i read his post. i disagreed with the quote as it stood alone. but, in the context of his post, i can dig what he’s saying.
this just in:
i feel like setting textbooks on fire.
i’m not a big fan of textbooks by any means, but i do think marketing is kind of an extreme example. i think in a field like that, what was once the gold standard matters very little in the face of the next big thing NOW. that’s what marketing’s about. i’d think textbooks being outdated and irrelevant kind of goes with the territory.
on the other hand, in other fields, sometimes it’s important to know what people USED to think, even if not many people think that anymore, because it’s more important to see how we got where we are now and why old ideas are wrong.
and i still don’t like what that quotation says, even in the context of his whole post. of course we should memorize (not rote, verbatim definitions, but general ideas). a person can’t properly think and create and imagine and invent and tolerate and accommodate and grow, if they keep hitting dead ends that they have to Google (and will probably be too lazy to Google, oftentimes).
knowing lots of stuff about lots of stuff, i will always believe, is good for the whole soul.
As a person who is some kind of a critic or analyst or something (what does he do for a living?), you’d think he would understand that definitions are first principles, the basis for more advanced reasoning.
Moreover, they give us the ability to say things like, “You can decrease the bounce rate of your blog by sizing your content into web-optimized bundles — about 22 words being the average web-reader’s tolerance.”
I really don’t see it any differently then using a dictionary, it’s just made it easier. I find that I look up words more actually because it’s so easy.
Absolutely. It’s easier to just look something up than to spend the time trying to keep it stored in our brains — unless it’s something we use more than a couple times a month. Then it’s worthwhile.
If things stick for you, great. But if not, the information will usually only take you less than a minute to find.
Do calculators make elementary and secondary math education irrelevant? The spouting of rote facts is never the goal of education, but rather the synthesizing of those facts for practical application. I guess I’ll have to think about this one a little more.
Sometimes we have to know something before we know something else needs to be looked up.
A question I ask myself everyday. I foresee a soon terrible reality that for many learning, that is to say true understanding, will quickly go by the wayside assuming all that needs to be “known” can be “accessed” externally from the self.
ummm… so because it is on the internet it is true and correct?
http://tinyurl.com/nwyk33
bump bah… (that’s the sound of “wrong” by the way)
I don’t think that knowledge becomes less important. Just more easily accessible and therefore less of a panic item in terms of having to memorize it.
I actually have a Roman numeral conversion website on my “favorites”, as well as the detailed Dewey Decimal system. Love it.
you can’t play jeopardy with a computer at your side. more seriously, rote memorization is a good discipline with many applications.
Memorizing definitions is futile, because in a world of change, even the definitions are shifting.
These days, it’s not what you know, but that you know where to find out what you need to know.
The teacher in my junior high library would be proud of me for saying that. He’s probably been dead for years. I’ll check online.
Don’t be duped into thinking that rote memorization isn’t important anymore. Your mind will get mushy and you will miss many opportunities.
Dudes, WordWeb – awesome.
http://wordweb.info/free/
In order to make the distinction between rote and trivial we need an established base of knowledge to weigh incoming ideas against.
I am a Doctor who has tens of thousands of medicines at his fingertips. I cannot memorize the details of all of them.
But I had darn well memorize the details of the common ones, the ones I use a lot, and the ones with extra importance.
Maybe words are the same way.
PS: I have corrected errors on Wikipedia on a number of occasions. Does that mean I am ultimately hard-wiring your brain?
The internet does provide a new way of “knowing”; one certainly can memorize less and rely on its accessibility on-line, especially within a certain category, such as the medicines Lowell mentions.
But if one’s own knowledge base gets too much smaller, the effects may be larger than dependency on access to (accurate) internet resources.
What if we start thinking smaller? What if we economize thinking so that we not only eliminate memorization, but also internet research? Could having a smaller base of knowledge inhibit inquiry?
One of my chief concerns with the new way of “knowing” via the internet or other fact storehouses that are easily accessible is that it will leave us less able to engage in the act of synthesis.
Because we are always retrieving information linearly, we don’t have at our command immediate comparisons, contrasts, etc.
All knowledge becomes discrete and trivial.
It makes it less important – my Dad likens memorizing useless facts to memorizing the phone book. Wisdom is more important than knowledge.