Search Find Learn

I said yesterday in my Liquid e-Learning: Laptops and Mobile Phones as Thinking Prosthetics post that I know how the American college student who carries his laptop around everywhere feels. I sometimes feel like Google is my second brain. I frequently don't make any attempt to memorise facts as I know I can access them when I need them - why waste my brain space?

On a personal level though, Google sometimes scares me. In the olden days (The Dial-up Connection Era) if I needed to know something (like A Good Pancake Recipe or How Do I Clean my Leather Jacket?) I'd ring my mother. And I would always get great advice (it helped that I knew not to ring her for advice on Cheap and Effective Cocktail Recipes or Useful Lies for Uncomfortable Situations).

But along with the great advice I might also have to get other information - my mother's equivalent of Google Ads. So I'd move along from How To Clean my Leather Jacket to hearing about Your Man up the road who had his leather jacket destroyed that time he was hit by lightning, and from there onto Josey Meehan's cows that Got Loose and went running into...you get the picture.

Google ads are elective information - I can choose whether or not to explore them. And more often than not, I don't have time to check them out.

My mother's information always comes with context, and often with years or generations of experience. And when I make the time to connect with this source of information, it really makes me appreciate the fact that information has always been hard won. That it's taken generations to get things right. That things that make a big difference to me could have so easily been lost. Will there be a whole generation growing up now who will not appreciate the effort behind the information? Who won't have time to listen to the context behind the facts?