Knowing vs. Finding Information

One thing I think my generation is very good at is finding information. Not necessarily knowing information off hand, but being able to sift through search engines and databases and find what we want. People of my parents' generation keep complaining that we can't do basic math, we can't spell, and our handwriting is atrocious. But my parents are amazed at the speed at which I can retrieve information off the Internet. (Part of it is that I waste an atrocious amount of time browsing--but I do discover a lot of new neat shortcut Internet applets and webpages this way).

Now in light of science education and science as a whole, I'm not sure where this puts us. I have a really hit or miss memory (I either know extremely detailed information or I totally blank out), and memorizing enough information to do well on exams is a chore. I mean, I'm glad I was asked to memorize the amino acids in biochemistry, enough basic organic reactions, and enough pKas to be able to guesstimate most pKas of organic materials because it does help with my fluidity in understanding papers and talks. It's not that I'm incapable of memorization--I'll do it. I'm supposedly "good" at things that people traditionally associate with being memorization heavy, which I contest are more problem solving. In fact, the way I studied organic chemistry was by stringing together the reactions in goofy synthesis problems of partial structures of psychedelics that I looked up on wikipedia or just some molecule I thought looked cool that I made up. I would make up practice problems for my friends--and this would give me a chance to think about the problems retrosynthetically and when I got to a problem on a test I was used to thinking about a variety of sequences that would be useful for making and breaking bonds and had several strategies for this laid out in my head. I talk to a lot of my classmates who also did well in that class and most of them tended to take a more conventional flash card and practice problem approach. I did some practice problems and flash cards, sure, but every now and then I needed to make it more of a game to maintain my interest. It probably has something to do with my ADHD--I try to turn studying into games because when I'm engaged I go into hyperfocus mode which is really conducive to studying, writing papers, or lab work (ADHD can be a curse, but also a blessing). This is a tangent, though.

My ability to retrieve information came especially in handy in my advanced synthetic organic course when all of our exams were open book and taken straight out of the lit. The problems, then, were extremely difficult, but that meant that I could focus on categorizing information and developing strategies in my head for how to put it together rather than storing it, which is much better for my learning style.

Given the great abundance of information available to us, I'm not even sure that knowing information off-hand is even all that useful--especially in very interdisciplinary fields. I think it's more important to be aware that information exists and then be able to retrieve it quickly or ask another person who is an expert. Learning how to critically think, to research, to evaluate, and to organize information is important when you have endless sources of it at your finger tips.

Honing these skills, obviously, is not always a practical approach for a lot of classes geared at giving you a basic background in the subject, though, and I'm not sure how to reconcile this. I also see how you should very detailed information about a project you are very close to, like a thesis. But in terms of a general knowledge base of scientific literacy? I still contest that it's more important to know how to find information in this day and age.

Incidentally, a friend of mine who is a classicist said similar issues came up in their field when the Perseus Project went up. It meant that they didn't necessarily need to memorize as many strict grammatical rules and vocabulary since it was hyperlinked in the text, and revolutionized the way students would go about reading ancient texts. So the question of "how much information is necessary to hold in your head compared to what has conventionally been deemed necessary" is not unique to science. I guess in some ways it's akin to the fact that people stopped memorizing whole epics to perform orally after the printing press allowed books to become widely available and people talked of the demise of the oral tradition. In reality it just led to a whole new set of opportunities in literature.