I have seen my family doctor on many an occasion pull out his CPS (Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties) to look something up, err, cheat, help my kids get better. I was glad he did.

Simon

Just for the record, I totally agree that there must be baseline standards in “knowledge” and I’m not suggesting that we dump the idea of learning and recall in favour of being ignorant but armed with a cellphone.

I often think about it like this… when you’re putting a jigsaw puzzle together, the first few pieces are really hard because you have no reference points. You have all those blue pieces that you know are part of the sky, but it’s hard to join them together at first. As you gradually get more pieces on the table it gets progressively easier to figure out where the next piece goes. The last few pieces are really easy because there is so much of the rest of the puzzle in place… the more pieces you get the more you, quite literally, get the big picture.

Learning facts and remembering information seems kind of similar. If you don’t have a good general knowledge, then it’s hard to connect the pieces as you “learn” new facts. You get presented with them, but if you don’t have a lot of other “knowledge” to hang those new facts on, they often just don’t connect in your schema of the world. If you have a pretty good general knowledge you are probably more likely to learn new facts more effectively because many of them will be building on things you already know. The more you know, the more you know.

Just having access to something like Google won’t help much if you have a limited ability to connect the facts you discover. Well, it will, in that you can “find answers”, but you probably won’t build real learning.

And that’s where I think a teacher brings value to the learning process. Although we all espouse the value of a student-centered learning process, it’s a wise teacher, providing explicit teaching that’s the link between just helping kids to know stuff, and helping kids to learn how to learn, helping them to know how to find information when it’s needed, helping them to connect the dots.

All of you who spoke about the idea of “just Googling” not being enough, you’re absolutely right. But it’s a useful skill to be able to find information on demand when you really need it. It just needs to be seen as one of the skills – literacies – of living in today’s world, as is just another way that we keep adding pieces to the jigsaw puzzle.

http://betch.edublogs.org/2008/08/20/the-truth-is-out-there/

I work at that school.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/athome/phone-a-friend-in-exams/2008/08/20/1218911794460.html