Working without a net
When I was in my second or third year of university, lo these many years ago, a classmate commented that it must have been really hard to be a student in the days before copiers. I grunted my response, probably too high from burying my face in a freshly minted mimeograph to care about the implications of what she was saying. Yeah, I said mimeograph. Look it up.

Was it harder way back in Grandpappy's day? I think what my old classmate was getting at was that we were so dependent on reams of paper as backup to what we had studied that we no longer had to trust our own brains to hold all of The Knowledge (not this kind). She was, in effect, expressing admiration for that ability to retain new information efficiently and effectively.

We've all heard stories about struggling students in [insert your developing country of choice here] who do not have their own books and who, consequently, absorb every word that is taught them, committing unreasonably large amounts of material to memory. After I get done with wanting to slap them, or at the very least, to give them wedgies on the playground, I start to wonder why it is that I don't have the ability to learn that way. I wonder if I would have the mental wherewithal to remember anything if you took my books away from me.

This self-doubt comes in part from a love of reference books and doing research. I always thought that it was more important to remember where I could find the information I needed than it was to remember the information itself. Several years ago a colleague of mine in Japan brought the flaws in my approach into sharp relief. He had a congenital illness that made it unlikely he would live into his fifties. He never wanted to waste a minute re-learning anything. He made a good point.

And yet. Here I am in my [ahem]th decade and I just can't seem to turn it around and take a new run at the whole book learning thing. I am back in school. I do have reams of paper (thank you you-know-who-you-ares) to support the in-class work. And it's getting harder and harder. I blame the internet.

Much as I love it, the internet has complicated life for students almost as much as it has eased it. Or it has for this student. There is an endless supply of information, all of which must be assessed for reliability, validity, credibility, and forward-to-a-friendability. Every day a classmate or instructor casually mentions a site (or six) that will be invaluable to me. My bookmark lists are obscenely obese. There are about eleven sites that I use every day. (This fits neatly with my friend Lenora's contention that we have only eleven articles of clothing that we always wear and eleven types of food that we always eat; in the interests of objectivity I should admit that there's a small chance that I have misrepresented my actual site statistics to fit with her theory.)

I have to say that sometimes I just want to escape from it all and run away to a beach somewhere--English Bay would do nicely--sans internet. But then I remember The Night of the Power Outage. I came home full of beans and ready to put in a good evening's work doing research on those wonderful new websites I had heard about in class. I couldn't get into the garage. The house was dark. There were just the tiniest of imaginable flashlights and a few (small) candles. I'd used up my PowerBook battery at school. By 8 p.m. I was asleep. My Grandpappy would have been more resourceful, I'm certain.

One of my colleagues makes a case for working without a reliable power supply (yoink to you, too). He's next in line for a wedgie.

Back to my point (and oh yes I do have one), despite my failings as a student and my urges to run away from the demands of technology, one reason I think I enjoy the whole business so much (and do as well as I do) is because of my ability to appraise analytically a document's relative worth to me. And I have that ability because I have had reams of paper and (what's the counter for websites? wonders of? whales of? wastings of?) websites given to me as resource material. I don't know if Grandpappy or that brat in [which country was it again] could have been as discerning in their learning, simply because they did not have the amount of information available to them that I do.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 11:52 PM