Checking facts and faking expertise
Jason Lodge recently asked on The Conversation: is technology making as stupid?.
Of course this depends somewhat on what one considers to be "stupid". As Sue Ieraci's comment observes, "every generation appears to value its own ways of knowing and relating above those of the generations above and below." Lodge's article starts with whether or not rote learning has been displaced by ready access to sources of information such as Google. If so, we might be becoming "stupid" insofar as intelligence is measured by an ability to remember facts.
I, and probably Jason Lodge also, would be surprised if anyone still considered rote learning to be the pinnacle of "intelligence". Well before the World Wide Web even existed, there was far more information in the world than any one person could be expected to remember, and how many teachers these days would consider their students to be "intelligent" merely for copying something into an essay or computer program? Modern educators therefore prize skills like knowing how to find information, determining whether or not it is reliable, and synthesising it into a coherent response to a question.
I think that being able to recall a certain breadth of factual information is nonetheless useful: imagine that you had to resort to a dictionary to look up the spelling and meaning of every noun you came across! And imagine what a teacher I would be if I had to look up the textbook every time a student asked a question!
I suppose that knowing what needs to be remembered, and what can be left for looking up, is a skill of its own. A Java programmer who can remember the difference between "int", "double" and "String" is surely going to be far more productive than one who can't, for example, but it's probably safe for the same programmer to know that he or she can look up the documentation should he or she ever need to parse hexadecimal numbers using the java.util.Scanner class.When giving advice about presentations to my research students, I often advise them that they ought to be able to talk knowledgeably about their subject without having to look everything up as they go. The title of the article aside, I guess Lodge is really asking whether or not technology has made us complacent about what constitutes "knowledgeable". Has ready access to search engines and the like, he asks, made us imagine we are experts in subjects that we can't actually talk about except insofar as we can look them up?
