Knowing and forgetting

That was one of my disagreements with school, they spent more time and attributed much more value (tests!) on how much data you can store in your cells. And recall a short time later. Little thought was put into teaching how to effectively look up information. There are interesting ups and downs to this, but overall I think it's a positive. There is so much information freely available that the only way to make use of it is to just remember references.

Not sure this would be of direct, relevant interest, but here are some related things:

- Citizendium goes into public beta today. I think it could take off. That actually suggests that, should people receive very public recognition for their knowledge, they will become *less* forgetful and more intelligent. Add this Reputation system into the mix with Siberry's honor system, Chui and Hillhorst's Reputation Management ideas, the push toward OpenID, research
showing how people when given a choice freeload or pay will choose freeloading but *only* until a whistle blower calls it out at which point some kind of "social gene" kicks in and they switch, and negative things like the recent issue with anonymous threats against blogger Kathy Sierra...

- the Passive Multiplayer Online Game ("PMOG") which, in effect, gives us "Experience Points" for browsing and "levels up" the best participants. Extend that out and make it a specific *kind* of browsing... say to MIT's Courseware offerings. Now feed this into the above bullet point with Citizendium and again the issue of developing intelligence flips from "kids will be stupid because of the Intarweb" to just the opposite; like how we seem to generate *more* paper not less in our "paperless" society. Same as how we were supposed to write less and become grammatically-challenged as we resorted to more Copy and Paste activities (I don't know about anyone else, but my dictionary has gotten much more use since I started using the net).

PMOG is currently in alpha and I found it to be too buggy, but I'll be giving it another go when it reaches beta.

- FWIW, education and by extension intelligence is also inside virtual worlds. Not "game" smarts, but real world-applicable stuff. Besides the obvious learnings that people get from experiencing a "CopyBot" problem which winds up teaching them a little something about Intellectual Property (when else do regular people care about IP in the real world?), there are increasing numbers of people using virtual worlds to teach/learn real things. I've written previously on the impact this might have on the global community. The short of it is: what happens when some kid from a bottom-run caste in a third world cesspool gets a college education inside a virtual world?

Anyway, hope those are of some interest.

First, perspective. When I was a boy, I remember watching test patterns on Saturday morning until the first of our two TV channels came on.
I was going into business when some foreign correspondents were still filing their reports with Morse keys.

The problem used to be finding information. I we had three weeks to prepare for a major presentation, we spend two of them gathering information. Strategy took a day or so. Then the corporate art department prepared slides for us. The problem was finding information.

Today the problem has shifted to sifting and analyzing. It's not a smaller problem. It's just different.

If find that the ready availability of information for the routine tasks of life is great. As Einstein is reputed to have said, "Why should I memorize my phone number when I can look it up."

But having quick answers without the ability to determine if they're right answers or having extensive information without the knowledge to apply it is dangerous indeed.

"When I was a boy, I remember watching test patterns on Saturday morning until the first of our two TV channels came on."

I'm *not* alone!

laptops are so last decade. when are you going to buy the boy an iphone?

Schaden, he can buy the iphone himself, and probably will.