Walkapedias & Googliputans

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  http://www.toonpool.com/user/997/files/applicant_job_wikipedia_1522415.jpg 

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 For: 'Google only will do':

Giles Coren, the restaurant critic of The Times, is even more adamant that all book-learning has been rendered redundant by Google:

What use is any learning at all in an Internet world? What use are books and the ability to read and understand and remember the contents of books when every fact in the world can be on hand in the blink of an eye, literally, right on your Google Glass? What is memory in 2013? What is knowledge?

 Against: 'Google only will do':

...even if a child at the Webb-Coren Academy does manage to perform an accurate search, he or she won’t be able to understand the information retrieved without knowing something about the subject already (and that’s assuming they’ve been taught to read). For instance, if you Google "space station" the Wikipedia entry you pull up is only comprehensible if you already know a bit about "low Earth orbit", "propulsion", "research platforms", etc. The child could perform further searches to plug these gaps, but the same problem will just recur, with him or her being condemned to carry on Googling for ever.

In short, Google is no substitute for committing facts to your long-term memory.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100265649/why-google-is-no-substitute-for-learning-things-off-by-heart/ 



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During my school years in the early 1950s my HM Father was my trusted walkapedia (short for 'walking encyclopedia'). I just had to ask him and most of the time he used to come up with answers to my elementary questions like:

"What is IMF?"

When I was preparing for my school final exams in 1957, I was hearing names of Guides like Leo and LIFCO. But Father frowned on these guides and asked me to just read and reread the text books. But I managed to secretly borrow these two guides from my friend for a couple of days to have a peek into them. I could manage to understand what Leo meant because Father made me mug up names of all the dozen constellations in Telugu and English:

Mesham...Meka...Aries

Vrishabham...Eddu...Taurus

....

Simham...Simham...Leo

...

etc.

But I couldn't make out what a Lifco was, and was curious. Since I couldn't ask Father without getting rebuked, I asked our friendly Assistant HM, Hari Hara Sarma. And he promised to look up his pocket dictionary (which he never carried in his pocket) at home and revert to me the next day...which he never did and I didn't persist.

It was only when I peered at the small print at the back cover of the guide that I guessed the answer: LIFCO is short for 'Little Flower Company'.

I got curious just now and Googled for LIFCO and it is there alright...a Chennai publishing company that turned religious lately.

So I was wondering how simple it would have been for our Assistant HM to give me the answer just by Googling on his cell phone like nowadays...or even Ishani a couple of years later.

In the 1960s I was an avid reader of Readers' Digest and used to subscribe for it annually. It was cheap, fat, and had many tidbits that were useful to me in our chitchats. A few months after I joined IIT KGP in 1965 and started living in the Faculty Hostel there, a Quiz Competition was held between the three Blocks: E, S, and N. There were three senior participants from each block. And the venue was our Common Room. And the Quiz Maser was one of the three walkapedias in the campus then: Prof MD Joshi (the other 2 were Profs SH Rao and VD Chitnis).

We were about 50 in the audience and whenever a question stayed unanswered by the 3 teams it was thrown open to the audience and a toffee was hurled at the chap who came up with the right answer. I still recall I got 3 toffees, all from my RD knowledge:

1. Which river flows by NYC?

2. Which mountain peak on the Equator has perennial snow on it?

3. What is the name of the Japanese WW2 fighter plane?

That was our level of ignorance those days. I guess nowadays no toffees would be doled out to the audience since each one of them would be equipped with a cell phone with Google on it.

By when I returned to my Father's place on a summer vacation in 1970, he had an IAS chap as his first son-in-law and thought the chap was like Thurber's 'Owl that was God'...or an Oracle who knew everything. And I was looked down upon by Father for the simple reason that I ran away from Vizagh to KGP without finishing my Doctorate and was still in search of a 'suitable' guide at KGP.

So one day the IAS golden boy and a couple of his yes-men and I were sitting in our front verandah with Father standing by (retired HMs were scared of IAS chaps...they may get angry and stop the HM's meager pension of Rs 100). And the talk turned to old age and its problems and the IAS was preachy about it. In between I happened to blurt:

"There is now a science of old age known as gerontology" 

And the IAS quipped abruptly:

"Never heard of it"

And Father thought that what an IAS didn't hear was not worth hearing. Neither did he hear the new word...he didn't subscribe to RD ;)

Father then wanted to prove me wrong and went in and came out with his age-old Concise Oxford Dictionary, opened the relevant page and triumphantly declared to one and all:

"There is no such word as gerontology"

I was dumbfounded and silenced since I didn't have my Nokia Asha with Google on it then...I never forgave Father to this day for the insult he dumped on me in public just to please an IAS chap who happened to be his first S-i-L.

It just shows how internet and Google changed the world.

But I am sure Google is a mere help only if you knew your oats already more or less...you must have read or heard of gerontology earlier and not confined yourself to quoting Shakespeare from Manorama Year Books.

Google is good for ordering online a swimming trunk. But it is no good for learning swimming for which you need to jump into real water assisted by a real-world teacher. It helps you to choose a good pushbike and buy it online, but you have to learn cycling the hard way...seated by your friend and pushed and left to fend for yourself by falling and bruising.

The other day, my son was composing an important mail with my subtle help here and there. And he wrote: "I was apprised..." and I asked him to check if that was 'apprise' or 'appraise'. He pulled out Google on his laptop in a separate window and instantly confirmed it was 'apprise' and not 'appraise'. But Google would be useless if he hadn't learned that there is word like 'apprise' from his reading or hearing or shop-talk. 

Google and Webster are always open in separate windows while I do my blogging. The other day I was reminiscing about the charming book Father gifted me in my Class VIII, 'King Arthur and his Knights'. I got confused if the sword in the rock that King Arthur pulled out was 'Excalibur' or 'Excelsior' (a different thing altogether). And Google settled it in half a minute.

But it wouldn't have helped me write my blog that day had I not read that charming book in my school days in hard copy.

So much for the 'for' and 'against' of Google as a substitute for school books...a debate raging in England now and joined issue by Toby Young quoted above.

Don't forget that Google was NOT invented by Hyderabadi school kids using iPads to cheat on their home work, but by PhD students dabbling in pure math and computer science:      

Google began in March 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Ph.D. students at Stanford University

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