I drove from Minneapolis to Grand Forks last evening. I typically listen to podcasts or audiobooks when I drive and I enjoy the time to think. The audiobook for the trip was Jeff Jarvis’ “What would Google do?” I have commented on this book previously, but I was listening again to the chapter on the “future of higher education / what is wrong with higher education” (my version of the title). I find myself reacting to many different issues. To keep this post within practical limits, I will comment on one topic.
General complaint about college in the Google age – memorizing stuff you can look up on Google is a waste of time.
Reaction – I have heard this before. However, I know few college profs who see their courses as an exercise in memorization. Perhaps this is one of those issues we see as a problem in the courses taught by others, but not in of our own. We want to get to things we see as interesting and relevant, but I am guessing we first feel the need to develop background so our students can understand what we see as interesting and relevant. I can understand how students in survey courses (I sometimes teach Introduction to Psychology) may come to believe their performance relies on memorization. It does, but memorization is not the point. Without a shared vocabulary and the ability to represent basic principles of the field, communication and knowledge development are pretty difficult.
Consider the following example as a possible explanation of how students may incorrectly believe that memorization is the goal. If I ask a student which of a list of simple descriptions of daily behavior seem best explained by operant conditioning, the student who is unable to offer a reasonable definition of operant conditioning is obviously in trouble. To me, the phrase I used was simply a way to communicate the conditions of the task and my intent is to evaluate something at a deeper level. Would student performance be improved with access to Google in this situation? Perhaps, but I still believe we need to have core knowledge more immediately available. We work within certain working memory limits – it is far better to know basic information when attempting to perform tasks that assume understanding of prerequisite knowledge than to divert from the more applied tasks while attempting to recognize basic vocabulary and understand basic principles. It may be acceptable to deal with an occasional failure of background through search, but frequent failures disrupt our own cognitive performance and become increasingly annoying to those who depend on us in applied settings.
The idea of Googling what you don’t know reminds me of the concept of just in time learning. I am arguing that pushing just in time learning too far reaches a point of absurdity that is inconsistent with the way human cognition works. We constuct understanding, but we must have some internal representations to work with.
Thinking about a survey course such as Introduction to Psychology it may work something like this. Memorization differentiates the C from the B student. I am hoping the difference between the B and the A student depends on something more.
