TITLE: Knowing, Doing, and Ubiquitous Information
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 09, 2017  4:25 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I was recently reading an old bit-player entry on
<A HREF="http://bit-player.org/2016/number-factoids">
   computing number factoids</A>
when I ran across a paragraph that expresses an all-too-common
phenomenon of the modern world:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 If I had persisted in my wrestling match, would I have
 ultimately prevailed?  I'll never know, because in this
 era of Google and MathOverflow and StackExchange, a
 spoiler lurks around every cybercorner.  Before I could
 make any further progress, I stumbled upon pointers to
 the work of Ira Gessel of Brandeis, who neatly settled
 the matter ... more than 40 years ago, when he was an
 undergraduate at Harvard.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

The matter in this case was recognizing whether an arbitrary
<EM>n</EM> is a Fibonacci number or not, but it could be have
been just about anything.  If you need an answer to almost
any question these days, it's already out there, right a your
fingertips.

Google and StackExchange and MathOverflow are a boon for knowing,
but not so much for doing.  Unfortunately, doing often leads to
a better kind of knowing.  Jumping directly to the solution can
rob us of some important learning.  As Hayes reminds us in his
articles, it also can also deprive us of a lot of fun.

You can still learn by doing and have a lot of fun doing it today
-- if you can resist the temptation to search.  After you
struggle for a while and need some help, then having answers at
our fingertips becomes a truly magnificent resource and can help
us get over humps we could never have gotten over so quickly in
even the not-the-so-distant past.

The new world puts a premium on curiosity, the desire to find
answers for ourselves.  It also values self-denial, the ability
to delay gratification while working hard to find answer that
we might be able to look up.  I fear that this creates a new gap
for us to worry about in our education systems.  Students who
are curious and capable of self-denial are a new kind of "haves".
They have always had a leg up in schools, but ubiquitous information
magnifies the gap.

Being curious, asking questions, and wanting to create (not just
look up) answers have never been more important to learning.
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