How did we learn things?

wwkirk

Divine
...before Google, that is. With Google, we can find out almost anything, in an instant! Which prompts my question, before instant knowledge tech, particularly in the form of Google, how the hell did we acquire knowledge?

Seems like long ago and far away...
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
I regularly encounter people who appear to be illiterate, and not in insignificant numbers.

If I had a need to know when I was a kid and the Colliers or World Book Encyclopedia at home didn't cut it I had to walk all of two doors down to the town library. As a nascent ufologist an old typewriter and the rotary dial phone managed to put me in touch with a surprising number of people.

In some ways - not all - we've traded quality for quantity.
 

Dejan Corovic

As above, so bellow
In some ways - not all - we've traded quality for quantity.

Quality is really down to individuals own choice. If one wants to challenge himself quality is there.

Over the last 10 years I became an absolute hoover for knowledge, owing to Google and YouTube. Both in terms of humanities and physics, which is my favourite, I learned so much so fast, it would be impossible with olden ways.

Before I read books, but books are slow to read and there is a particular problem with books, that author usually writes a book to show to world how clever he is. So, one needs to go through 200 pages of beating around the bush, to get 20 pages of useful knowledge.

But with videos, there is no this problem. Most videos have to be squeezed into about 12 minutes, and author has to keep throwing interesting stuff at you to prevent your attention drifting to his competitor's video. Because this content creators don't waffle at all in comparison with book writers who just stretch their egos from horizon to horizon.

As well, I find YouTube vastly superior to Google search. There are so many "little" things that I picked up on YT, because, it seems that people talk in a very different way they write. Additional quality of YT is that learning is really dependant on teaching style. Some people are way more clearer in passing ideas on, than others and with some harder subjects its very easy to watch several videos on the same topic till you find one that "speaks to you" :).
 

pigfarmer

tall, thin, irritable
Quality is really down to individuals own choic

True. You write a paper for a class and you are supposed to cite scholarly sources. Availability of such things is vastly greater but unfortunately so is the tripe that gets peddled.

Only thing that hasn't changed is our ability to tell the difference.
 
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nivek

As Above So Below
Memorizing knowledge and/or the accumulation of undigested knowledge is not learning...For many people these days, this is what's really transpiring, even in schools now, there's no learning taking place but instead its memorizing and collecting of knowledge...

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