A paradox.
As a correspondence student I find myself in the "business" of learning how to learn as well. Not to mention my day job as a business systems programmer forces me to learn new information, bad and good. I've come to realize though that our understanding of the learning process, and my practices of learning are fundamentally flawed.
Our current process of education (atleast from my point of view) still relies heavily on memorizing facts because looking them up became industrially impractical.
Here is an article worth reading just to get a different perspective : http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/07/study-why-bother-to-remember-when-you-can-just-use-google.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss
I've come to the conclusion that our education system needs a revamp. Our issue is no longer about memorizing applicable facts, its about applying applicable facts. This creates a bit of a problem in that knowing where and how to look for information does require some understanding of the problem domain. I can hear the hardcore academics screaming murder simply cause they've worked hard to get the natural depth of knowledge. Now while understanding is important, being able to apply meta-concepts could potentially be far more useful. Imagine a two or three people replacing a team of twenty five diverse specialists (such as physicists and engineers) simply because they had access to twenty five people's knowledge, but enough core knowledge to apply it all. I doubt in practice that it will be that simple. But our education methodology will clearly need to change with the incredible availability of information.
Anyway, I'm still trying to work out what the best direction would be for our education system. I hate bringing up a problem without atleast ONE suggestion for a solution.
Hmmmm.....
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