Thought for the day

In the last fifty years, modern life has become far more complicated than it has been throughout all of human history. Not a bad complexity, apart from when being ill or in hospital, I have never gone a day without eating, even though that food may come from the other side of the world. We can drink water without getting diseases, even though I have little understanding of the processes of flocculation and filtration that bring this about. I can bring up almost any kind of text and any kind of image at the touch of a button. In the words of Google, "I'm Feeling Lucky".

A traditional agricultural existence was cyclical, as long as you did not anger the wrath of God, everything happened more or less the same each year; it was second nature, indeed there was little distinction between the human world and nature. Moreover, for people of my class, new information was sparse, reading was expensive and activities and people did not vary a lot. Most life changes happened to you rather than out of your own plans.

However, today there is a lot more to remember, and the amount I try to cram into my head never stops increasing. Especially at the moment. So we know how to do a lot of things in general, and have done a vast array of things in the past, but at any moment, we may not have perfect recall of the specific details; but they are in there, somewhere, filed alongside the images, music and film. They just need a spark, a reference, pull the right plug and it will come flowing out.

At the end of the classic sci-fi novel, Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist, Guy Montag joins a group of wandering story tellers who have learned to reach in and remember every piece of text they have ever learned.

Life After Grep

The real answer, of course, is to write things down. Then have these texts accessible to be re-read whenever the need arises. I once heard a talk called "Life after grep", and the ability to 'grep' (search for keywords), has truly transformed the way knowledge exists. These days, I put everything I need to remember on the web somewhere, either here, on my homepage, in my email or in my own private offline notes, all of which have a search function.

However, grep can only go so far. There are still some skills that require structured and edited information. One good form of structured and edited information is the 'Reference card'. I will try to 'free' or 'open source' some of my private notes in this form, so watch this space.

Reference cards

The modern world often displays symptoms of the Oedipus complex. Things are ripped from their historical context, both to feign inventiveness and often in a coy attempt to rewrite history or coyly appear non-controversial. 'Reference card' is one such instance, albeit a small and not very significant one, the term 'intellectual property' would be another, more significant, example. So in our talk of 'Reference cards', lets not forgot this arose as a direct descendant of another older term.

Due to time pressures and the need for discreteness, people in former times would write down the most important formulas or the key historical dates on a single piece of paper - the crib sheet, later called 'cheetsheat', that could be snuck into an exam and then just appear as part of the normal answer papers.

That may have worked in the 19th Century or in the 1960s, but now, of course, there are printed exam books so a piece of regular piece of paper is clearly out of place. But it is more than that, in the modern age, remembering arbitrary facts is no longer the way to pass an exam and no longer a valued skill. When I was at school, we were given a page of formulæ as part of the exam materials, the cheatsheet had gone mainstream, it had won. Arbitrary facts had been abstracted down the stack. Humankind had evolved in a new direction.

Life after Ethernet

How do you test an individual in the modern networked world? Surely not by cutting the child off and recreating a bygone age. The exam room is the last non-networked place, but it cannot hold out forever. We will need to find new ways to test children, ways that take account of the informational age and test the new skills that are required for it. I'm sure that in the future, assessment will have more in common with distributed revision tracking systems than with a cramped little desk in a sports hall.

The slingshot may have technically been cheating in pre-stone age hunting, but a ranged weapon is a lot safer and more efficient than a blunt club. Now apparently the kids wear mobile earpieces under their hair; downright sneaky but also ingenious and inventive. The mobile phone and the Internet is the new formula sheet. Today's cheating is tomorrow's best practice as more gets abstracted down the stack, as things get more complicated and humanity evolves.

Perhaps it will not matter if complexity continues to expand and people in the future will not be able to recall any of their studies or jobs unaided. Perhaps we will just get over it and return to looking in wonder at the sky and the stars instead?