Inspiration for my blog posts often comes from whatever\u2019s evoking emotion in my life (annoyances, victories, gripes, etc.). Three things happened today that ensured that I\u2019d write this post. Here\u2019s the story of a question from a seven year old, a phone call, and an email.<\/p>\n
The first incident was a common one. My son asked me what the circumference of the earth was (ok \u2013 he didn\u2019t use the word \u2018circumference\u2019, but that\u2019s what he asked). Like a trained seal, I grabbed my smart-phone and looked it up. This was stupid, because a) I knew the answer, and b) even if I didn\u2019t, I know enough about distances between locations and longitude to come up with a fairly accurate approximation.<\/p>\n
Just a bit later in the morning, I had a short interview with a journalist from my university \u2013 apparently they\u2019re hard up for stories and are reaching out to alumni for gossip. At one point, the journalist asked something like, \u201cWhat advice do you have for students today?\u201d. I gave a long answer that said (more or less), \u201cA university isn\u2019t a vocational school. Although you may get caught up in the rat race of learning facts and writing papers, to be successful in the \u2018real world\u2019, you need to know how to learn<\/i>.\u201d I also (once again<\/a>) credited my Methods of Musical Research course and Dr. Snedeker for teaching me how to learn and for fueling my own passion for learning.<\/p>\n Less than thirty minutes later, I received an email response to a verbal request. I asked someone to research a topic and see if they could find any interesting<\/u> papers that could foster additional discussion on the topic. They replied with a link to paper that shows up as the top link in Bing when searching on the exact phrase as the topic I presented. I expected my colleague to look at academic papers, and perhaps explore the references in those papers, or to find experts in the field and see what they wrote. I expected them to research\u2026but I guess to them, \u2018search\u2019 was enough.<\/p>\n Perhaps I\u2019m just being an old fart, but the serendipity of these three events launched a thought that scared the crap out of me. In these days of search engines and Wikipedia, I wonder if anyone knows how to think anymore<\/i>.<\/strong> Knowledge is much more than learning or regurgitating facts. The learning that happens when you move knowledge from something you don\u2019t know<\/em> to something you do know<\/em> is trivial compared to when you add discovering what you don\u2019t know you don\u2019t know<\/em> to the top of the stack (1). I\u2019m scared that too many people (not just testers) are happy with on-demand fact finding rather than true learning and discovery. <\/p>\n It could be just me \u2013 perhaps I spend so much time reading and trying to learn because that\u2019s what works for me, and that on-demand learning is the true future. But if that\u2019s true, I worry what kind of future that will be.<\/p>\n (1) For more on this theory of knowledge acquisition, read Philip Armour\u2019s original paper on the topic here<\/a>, or my takes, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Inspiration for my blog posts often comes from whatever\u2019s evoking emotion in my life (annoyances, victories, gripes, etc.). Three things happened today that ensured that I\u2019d write this post. Here\u2019s the story of a question from a seven year old, a phone call, and an email. The first incident was a common one. 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