{"id":1653,"date":"2013-03-18T15:39:26","date_gmt":"2013-03-18T20:39:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/?p=1653"},"modified":"2013-03-18T15:51:01","modified_gmt":"2013-03-18T20:51:01","slug":"why-learn-understand-when-you-can-search","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/UnhinderedByTalent.com\/Phi\/archives\/2013\/03\/18\/why-learn-understand-when-you-can-search\/","title":{"rendered":"Why learn & understand when you can search?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recently and widely (in my nerd circles) shared XKCD comic featured ineffective sorting techniques<\/a>. The alt text (what you get when you hover over the comic) proposed an additional sort:<\/p>\n

StackSort connects to StackOverflow, searches for 'sort a list', and downloads and runs code snippets until the list is sorted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Internet nerdom being fairly OCD, someone (Gregory Koberger<\/a>) of course went and implemented this<\/a>, and it works!<\/p>\n

As Gregory says, this is potentially a security nightmare waiting to happen, so it’s not clear that you should actually run his code. Being a brave and foolish (and somewhat careful) soul, however, I’ve fallen on this sword so that you don’t have to, and I can confirm that it works. After trying several dozen StackOverflow pages (most of which yielded either “Could not extract a function to run” or “Contained potentially bad code”), it stumbled across a working version of Quicksort in JavaScript<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ta Da!<\/p>\n

The success of this approach, however, does suggest interesting things about how people approach certain kinds of problem solving these days. Where “old people” like me would have bought a book to learn something new, my students are much more prone to assemble a patchwork understanding from tons of Googling. While I think this often leads to a quite fragile and incomplete understanding of the topic at hand, it is often sufficient to get them through what is assigned<\/em>. In other words, they’re very skilled at answering the question that was posed, which was itself often somewhat shallow because that’s what we all have time for<\/em>. So while faculty would like to think that we’re creating experts (whatever that means) in certain topics, we rarely have the time to give them assignments and tasks that require a deep level of expertise. <\/p>\n

In the land and time of books, we might have believed that everyone read and understood the 8 assigned chapters, but the assignments almost certainly didn’t strictly require that. In fact I’m willing to bet a whole lot skimming actually went on that was not so different from the Googling that happens now. The difference is that when I skimmed a book, there was a reasonably coherent thread connecting the dots that were touched on. “Skimming” the Internet, however, is a much less coherent experience. The authors, examples, and assumptions aren’t the same from search result to search result. Worse (in computing) the versions<\/em> aren’t necessarily the same, so we often end up with inconsistent and downright contradictory results! A few years ago I taught a class that used Python 3, and it turned out that almost all Googling pointed us at Python 2 examples and answers, which lead to all manner of confusion amongst my students.<\/p>\n

So call me old-fashioned, but I still like a book, even if it’s an e-book, when I’m learning something conceptually new, as I do really appreciate a coherent voice and structure. If I need to remind myself of a library function or piece of syntax, it’s to the Googles. If I’m learning something that’s very similar to something I already know, then I’m happy with on-line docs if they’re well written. If, however, I’m expanding my horizons in more significant ways, a book is still the thing.<\/p>\n\n\t

\n\tTags: book<\/a>, Books<\/a>, Computing<\/a>, googling<\/a>, internet<\/a>, learning<\/a>, search<\/a>, sorting<\/a>, students<\/a>, teaching<\/a>, xkcd<\/a>
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