How we learn...

 

 

"Learning today should be as easy as falling off a log compared to what it was 50 years ago or so..."

Okay. This is going to make me sound like I just escaped from Jurassic Park. I am going to reveal how I learned when I was growing up. First off, the only electronics I used to learn were the nightly news on TV and maybe a radio station. Other than that, the only thing electrical devices were the light bulbs in the library.

And the library. It was all books. No computers or any other electronics. To find a book, one needed to be educated in the fine art of the Dewey Decimal System. For those who don't know what this is, please don't ask me to explain it. It is still too depressing for me to ponder.

I thought about learning yesterday. It was triggered when I was at physical therapy in the morning. My provider, who is a very nice young man, was telling me about doing some mechanical surgery on the motor for his fishing boat. He was very proud of himself, as he had never tackled something like that before. When I asked him how he figured it out, his answer was very short - You Tube. He said he uses You Tube quite often to learn about things. It is a great visual tool.

Who would have thunk it? Today's learning can come from a plethora of sources. So many it seems, there is really no excuse for not learning. I think that even though the Google Corporation dives me crazy with all their liberal gobbledy gook, I am still amazed by their technology. I you can't find something on Google, it probably does not yet exist.

As our smart phones get smarter every year, they are forcing us to learn stuff even if we don't want to. Some of it is good, some is just more clutter to move around in our heads. Every day many of us are exposed to desk tops, lap tops, tablets, smart phones, readers, televisions, radios or all of the above. The current generation of Millennials should be lapping their parents and grandparents in this whole learning thing. But they are not.

As for me (a grandpa), who did most of my learning the old fashion way while growing up, I now choose to eschew it. I like the new learning tools! I can learn more, and learn it faster. Both my wife and I use Google numerous times a day. Yes, I even use You Tube also. I use the internet, I watch cable news. Soon, more and more cable stations will be offered in streaming format to watch on our lap tops (or smaller) devices. 

Speaking of websites, there are monitoring tools online which can tell you (in real time) the number of websites available. Right now, the number of websites is just a tick below 1B. And that does not include any nefarious sites from the Deep Web. One billion websites! As they say in Wisconsin, that is a lot of cheese!

Time to wrap this up. I need to get back to the internet and do some research for another project I am working on. In this brave new world of learning, even us oldies can adapt. And adapt I have!