2nd year college student here--it feels that the structure and organization of coursework at many schools (including mine) seem to encourage this kind of learning. Projects that may seem technically involved but end up being a race to Google are common. Our school year, like those of many other schools is built around the quarter system. Quarters are ten weeks. It's not uncommon to be doing completely different and unrelated from week-to-week, and my first CS undergrad lab course was a good example of this kind of structure. One week you're doing bash scripting, the next week python, then you learn some basic git, rudimentary multithreading in C, and so on for 10 weeks. You'd hammer out an assignment only to forget the details of what happened days, maybe hours later. By the time the final rolls around you wonder how anyone would survive this course without the Internet or if we weren't allowed to bring copies of our notes and past code for the exam. Each assignment is a mad dash to learn just what you need to finish.
Of course, even with such brief bursts of effort, you can "relearn" quickly by consulting various references and refreshing your memory, but it becomes difficult and scary to imagine what life would be like if we couldn't look up whatever we needed.
"scary to imagine what life would be like if we couldn't look up whatever we needed"
It'd be scary to work out math problems without pen and paper. It'd be scary to cross over the amazon without an airplane. Applies to every tool you use.
I'd like to think of Google as my secondary memory (HDD?). All I seem to have is RAM.
Comments
2nd year college student here--it feels that the structure and organization of coursework at many schools (including mine) seem to encourage this kind of learning. Projects that may seem technically involved but end up being a race to Google are common. Our school year, like those of many other schools is built around the quarter system. Quarters are ten weeks. It's not uncommon to be doing completely different and unrelated from week-to-week, and my first CS undergrad lab course was a good example of this kind of structure. One week you're doing bash scripting, the next week python, then you learn some basic git, rudimentary multithreading in C, and so on for 10 weeks. You'd hammer out an assignment only to forget the details of what happened days, maybe hours later. By the time the final rolls around you wonder how anyone would survive this course without the Internet or if we weren't allowed to bring copies of our notes and past code for the exam. Each assignment is a mad dash to learn just what you need to finish.
Of course, even with such brief bursts of effort, you can "relearn" quickly by consulting various references and refreshing your memory, but it becomes difficult and scary to imagine what life would be like if we couldn't look up whatever we needed.
"scary to imagine what life would be like if we couldn't look up whatever we needed"
It'd be scary to work out math problems without pen and paper. It'd be scary to cross over the amazon without an airplane. Applies to every tool you use.
I'd like to think of Google as my secondary memory (HDD?). All I seem to have is RAM.