TITLE: Follow-Up on Learning by Doing and Ubiquitous Information
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 10, 2017  3:55 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
A few quick notes on
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2017-02.html#e2017-02-09T16_25_25.htm">
   my previous post</A>
about the effect of ubiquitous information on knowing and doing.

~~~~

The post reminded a reader of something that Guy Steele said at
DanFest, a 2004 festschrift in honor of Daniel Friedman's 60th
birthday.  As part of his keynote address, Steele read from an
email message he wrote in 1978:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Sussman did me a very big favor yesterday -- he let me flounder
 around trying to build a certain LISP interpreter, and when I
 had made and fixed a critical bug he then told me that he had
 made (and fixed) the same mistake in Conniver.  I learned a lot
 from that bug.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Isn't that marvelous?  "I learned a lot from that bug."

Thanks to this reader for pointing me to
<A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHP7P_HlcBk">
   a video of Steele's DanFest talk</A>.
You can watch this specific passage at
<A HREF="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHP7P_HlcBk#t=12m08s">
   the 12:08 mark</A>,
but really: You now have a link to an hour-long talk by Guy
Steele that is titled "Dan Friedman--Cool Ideas".  Watch the
entire thing!

~~~~

If all you care about is doing -- getting something done -- then
ubiquitous information is an amazing asset.  I use Google and
StackOverflow answers quite a bit myself, mostly to navigate the
edges of languages that I don't use all the time.  Without these
resources, I would be less productive.

~~~~

Long-time readers may have read
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-11.html#e2004-11-11T17_17_33.htm">
   the story</A>
about how I almost named this blog something else.  ("The
Euphio Question" still sets my heart aflutter.)  Ultimately
I chose a title that emphasized the two sides of what I do
as both a programmer and a teacher.  The intersection of
knowing and doing is where learning takes place.
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2014-04.html#e2014-04-27T19_20_45.htm">
   Separating knowing from doing</A>
creates problems.

In a post
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2016-12.html#e2016-12-26T08_38_12.htm">
   late last year</A>,
I riffed on some ideas I had as I read
<A HREF="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/learn-by-painting">
   Learn by Painting</A>,
a <EM>New Yorker</EM> article about an experiment in university
education in which everyone made art as a part of their studies.

That article included a line that expressed an interesting take
on my blog's title: "Knowing and doing are two sides of the same
activity, which is adapting to our environment."

That's cool thought, but a rather pedestrian sentence.  The
article includes another, more poetic line that fits in nicely
with the theme of the last couple of days:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Knowing is better than not knowing, but knowing without
 doing is as good as not knowing.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

If I ever adopt a new tagline for my blog, it may well be this
sentence.  It is not strictly true, at least in a universal
sense, but it's solid advice nonetheless.
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