If you need to constantly look up informations, it means you have no long term knowledge of anything.
Hence you can't verify that piece of information.
> Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore
The long term knowledge, AKA "your expertise" kindly disagree.
You can't look up informations when you are at a meeting with the client. You should already know what you're talking about and know the answer to the most probable questions.
Prior knowledge gives you confidence, without building a "memory only" information storage you can't be sure of anything.
What do you do if you disagree? Engage in a google battle? Or, even worse, use Wikipedia as a baseline for the truth?
I don’t think this is a very charitable interpretation of what GP was trying to say. Of course you can’t get by being a blind conduit of Google’d/Wikipedia’d/etc information, but you certainly don’t need to (and probably can’t) cram everything you need into your memory for instant recall on demand.
How about a middle ground: memory can be thought more like an LFU cache, where “use” is defined as reliance on explicit details of a concept. For example, I rely daily on programming language syntax and best practices and therefore have them deeply embedded in my mental cache. Other knowledge however, like sorting algorithm implementations, I rarely utilize and probably won’t remember after the next time I’m quizzed on it in e.g. an interview or conversation with someone where I’m trying to sound smart (cache miss).
In many cases where I suspect that I’ll frequently encounter cache misses with a particular piece of knowledge , I often find it better to just cache high level details (useful properties of sorting algorithms) and Google the missing details. That or work with subject matter experts.
This sounds like an uncomfortable kind of meeting. I often find myself saying "we can easily look that up".
Knowing where and how to effectively look things up is a critical aspect of knowledge.
It depends on what you need to look up: I don't need to know that the Eiffel Tower is hold together by 2.5 million nuts, bolts and rivets (I looked this one up), but as a western european, I should know that the Eiffel Tower is made from some kind of iron.
OTH though, if I'm the company in charge of maintaining the Tower, I should probably know more about it. So it really depends.
Facts become information, information becomes knowledge. Learning is about processing what's in front of you. Becoming aware of facts presented to you in a book or a powerpoint presentation, then reflecting on those facts, turning those over, engaging with them, asking new questions, trying to apply them in different contexts and so on.
As you do that, the entire experience of gaining knowledge also leads to self reflection. That is, learning to know yourself. And others around you. When does it matter to apply what you know? When not? What is relevant to me and to those around me at which point? This is about learning to formulate effective critical argumentation based on what you know. And that involves challenging viewpoints including your own. Context matters.
The latter is a skill. It's something you need to practice if you hope to be any good at it.
Expanding on your example:
I think it's important for engineers to have a proper understanding of the details about nuts and bolts when they are actually building the Eiffel Tower. But in a meeting with stakeholders - the mayor, city officials, banks, sponsors,... - it's also about knowing that they probably don't care about those material aspects. Unless the context changes and those become super important. Like when it becomes appartent that the iron wears out because of changing weather conditions. And even at that point, those stakeholders likely aren't interested in the exact chemical formulae that explain the process unless it's necessary to cover risks and liabilities. They simply want a good, terse explanation from an expert and an assurance whether it can be solved.
Hence why knowing things isn't enough. It's about knowing how and when to apply them effectively.
However, the reason why it is so useful is because it gives you more room to use for the stuff that really matters.
Knowing stuff has much lower latency than looking stuff up and having the ability to quickly correlate multiple relevant facts and draw connections allows for much higher capabilities and productivity.
They key is figuring out which stuff you need to know to be able to quickly build and evaluate mental models and which stuff is best looked up.
In practice, you see that with non technical managers all the time. You see it when people just throw around smart sounding soundbite about history if you happen to know period well.
Many charizmatic confident people rely on others not checking what they talk about.
Maybe I need to clarify, with "you can't lookup informations" I meant a meeting (or an exam) it's not the place and moment where you verify if a piece of information is valid or to learn something completely new, it's the place and moment where you put what you already know about something at work.
Knowledge is mainly about recognising patterns, if you know something can be solved with a certain formula you can look it up, it's not easy to keep everything in mind, but you have to already know what to lookup (at least the general domain of the problem)
In my experience if I attend a meeting about (for example) implementing the new company SSO component, I go there assuming we all know what an SSO component is, what it does and that each participant understands the problem for their angle (business, technical, legal etc. etc.)
So Education IS changing to meet that reality but its still a work in progress. Consensus is still developing on what the best route ahead is.
You are right that expertise is only possible through the accumulation and quick recall of facts. That said, the time it takes for an expert in Physics to become an expert Programmer or vice versa is much more than it takes for an expert Physicist to find and collaborate with an expert Programmer. So in a networked society, Educations focus is shifting to collaboration and healthy communication at an early age rather than producing mediocre experts in all subjects which is what past education systems have produced in great volumes.
imo an exam is much more akin to meeting preparation than the meeting itself. I completely agree that you should know what you are talking about in a meeting, but the reason you know what you are talking about is because you spent time beforehand working out the specifics for the expected problems. Everyone knows meetings require preparation time to make sure the things being talked about are verified and accurate.
I actually wouldnt really want to talk to someone who's going to try to do everything off the top of their head unless I'm convinced they're a genius. If something wasnt already prepared, you dont half ass it in the meeting. it becomes an action item to be taken care of after the meeting. It's a waste of everyone's time to have anyone working out a problem live.
umm, this is new... why don't you think the exam is "the meeting itself"?
If you see grades as an objective, then the exam is something to study for. If you see grades as a metric, then the exam is there to measure progress and guide your study.
In a well designed meeting with a client, you show up to present work already done - or discuss what work needs to be done. Internal meetings might be more ad-hoc and you can get brownie points for working off the top of your head but its not necessary
I assumed that the student said this because they were blind to the fact that their poor performance was due to inattention.
Knowing things is more important than ever. Googling crap on your phone is also too slow and too failure prone.
Looking up stuff is no good if you can't integrate it with a pre-existing scaffolding of concepts and knowledge. That pre-existing knowledge is essential to being able to make use of the search results.
Unless you need to pass a whiteboard job interview that depends on remembering some obscure algorithm. ;)
No one _needs_ to pass those kind of interviews. There are plenty of jobs that doesn't require that at all. But if you want to, it is sure handy to be able to remember obscure algorithms.
The exam is going to cover some well-tread parts of whatever subject you are studying. For most reasonable exam questions, especially at undergraduate level, you can find some answer online without having to do the reasoning yourself as long as you understand the terms. However, I would like to see undergraduates prepared to answer questions which are more obscure or unusual, and being able to reason through these questions with your knowledge of the field is a critical skill to make this possible.
Additionally, you should be spending some of your time memorizing things. This is just necessary to have some kind of fluent conversation with other people studying the same subject.
My personal preference for most subjects is a combination of open-book and closed-book. It’s hard to design the closed-book portion so that it doesn’t come down to a memorization game. The solution I usually prefer is to create a larger test, and allow students to a subset of the test to answer, but this creates a larger burden on the graders and the instructor creating the curriculum.
But anyway, I think some of this is true that things like social media have gone to far in attracting our attention. But also a lot of blame is with the structure of education. Listening to one person for at least an hour with sometimes a hundred other people in the room is not a good way of learning, at least not for everyone.
Also learning to remember to complete a closed book exam is not a useful skill anymore. One of the good things about phones is that almost any information can be found almost instantly almost anywhere. No need to remember formulas or dates. Instead how to find information, verify it, and use it is far more important.