The characters in Poul Anderson’s novel The Boat of a Million Years find themselves very disturbed by this trend taken to its logical conclusion; they are upset that school consists entirely of being taught how to look things up—referred to as “Wristpad 101”—instead of actually having to “learn” anything.
Myself, I say, bring it on! I like being able to point people to Wikipedia, or the TV Tropes Wiki, or wherever, when I need to cross an inferential distance.
the problem is that people lose the ability to create connections that aren’t spoon fed to them. it would be fun to see the effect of A/B testing on wikipedia where article A has links to articles with positive connotations and article B negative.
This is the blessing and curse of all really interesting wikis. They make it easy and fun to build up a large collection of miscellaneous knowledge about some subjects. There has got to be some way to apply this more generally to education.
The characters in Poul Anderson’s novel The Boat of a Million Years find themselves very disturbed by this trend taken to its logical conclusion; they are upset that school consists entirely of being taught how to look things up—referred to as “Wristpad 101”—instead of actually having to “learn” anything.
Myself, I say, bring it on! I like being able to point people to Wikipedia, or the TV Tropes Wiki, or wherever, when I need to cross an inferential distance.
the problem is that people lose the ability to create connections that aren’t spoon fed to them. it would be fun to see the effect of A/B testing on wikipedia where article A has links to articles with positive connotations and article B negative.
TLDR
I find that I have to bridge the inferential distance myself, in order to get people to read things. Maybe I’m just linking to the wrong things.
In the case of TV Tropes, at least, the bigger difficulty is often in getting people to stop reading it.
This is the blessing and curse of all really interesting wikis. They make it easy and fun to build up a large collection of miscellaneous knowledge about some subjects. There has got to be some way to apply this more generally to education.