Earlier, when I was was working for Big S, an ERP major, I was pampered by the eco-system.
One’s area of work is so compartmentalized that you hardly get to know anything outside unless you make conscious efforts to do so. Help is very easily available and it denies “learning the hard way”. There are, of course, some exceptions.
Now, my source of learning is from my colleagues and the Internet. Sometimes I wonder if it is any advantage at all to be “knowledgeable” about something, as Google makes information painlessly available. I am indeed convinced that searching and finding is way different from understanding, but then, merely searching and finding the right stuff is indeed a big deal and it is a breeze.
To help understand things, I turn to forums and discussion groups. People are always willing to share their knowledge. Questions that others ask trigger certain lines of thought that never occurred before. It enriches the overall learning experience.
Recently, I had some really dumb doubts regarding MapReduce and its infrastructure. Click here to read the discussion. Many thanks to Benjamin Manes.
September 5, 2008 at 10:36 pm |
Another take on knowledge via internet is here: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicolas Carr http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google. Does that dim your view?
September 8, 2008 at 2:04 pm |
I completely agree with Nicolas Carr. But I feel it does not contradict with what I have said above. My point, sorry If I hadn’t made it very clear, is that people in the internet community are willing to help others with their expertise and with effective means to search for what we want, learning has become efficient on the net. But the understanding is still left to the individual consuming the content.
Nicolas Carr’s view, as I understand, is more to do with how internet has made it all easy and how rigor has been done away with. I feel this is how we have been evolving over the ages. Before print, people used rote learning and could recite monumental works by heart. It made them learn the hard way but very few could. With Print, this rigor was done away with and people could learn from books. Likewise, with google, people with lot of information or those who enjoyed exclusive access to information have lost their edge. Spolsky talks about perils of Java Schools (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html) and the effects of losing rigor.
More than making someone stupid, I would say that Google has enabled (already) stupid ones to do more useful things (which sometimes might prove to be dangerous) than they thought were possible before
I feel, all through intelligence has remained supreme and would continue to be so.