I have examined a quote attributed to Einstein for most of my life: "Never memorize something you can look up." As a teenager, I rebelled against the concept of homework; I would often do the work and then not turn it in on purpose, I made a lot of excuses and to my detriment was a poor student on purpose because it was one of the things I could directly control. So when I was introduced to this quote as a college undergraduate, I felt a sense of validation- Why do any busy work, right? I could simply look up the information I wanted to know.
Did Einstein really mean we didn't have to learn anything? This bravado which I exhibited before the advent of the mainstream Internet was silly then, but what about today? If you buy into Mayer's description of the literalist view of the information processing metaphor, perhaps you see the world as one in which there is no need to know facts, especially in an information age where much rote information is accessible with a few clicks of the keyboard and a few short flourishes of the mouse.
I think the answer lies somewhere between literalist and constructivist viewpoints. My favorite Spanish professor always told his students that you have to know some facts to hang your had on in the midst of interpretation and construction of literary meanings. He was concerned with the historical context in which literary movements appear and interact with what has been written. But you also have to have it make sense to you when you are done internalizing these static atomistic units of information (p. 157).
Moreover, there is a noteworthy issue pertaining to information processing relative to learning. Bernard, Abrami, et al. (2009) report within the distance education milieu student interaction with course content can yield significant learning outcomes relative to other types of interaction such as student to teacher.
So the question for me might be more than, "What is a good tool or resource to help with information processing?" I ask myself "What tool or resource will help me connect and then reconnect to the content to which I aspire to attain a certain level of mastery?"
For me this tool is OneNote, a notetaking application from Microsoft which is bundled with many Office 2010 installation packages. I have used it my entire graduate career to consolidate and interact with my class notes in preparation for qualifying examinations. Every month or so I import all of my notes from my classes into a particular section of a virtual notebook. At this time, every word is not searchable based on tags or keywords. Moreover, OneNote will import my smartpen handwritten notes. They are note as searchable because my penmanship is horrible, but I can hold them and tag certain passages with keywords so that I may easily find them later.
I will point to some instructional videos on OneNote, but my point is not to teach you how to use this program. Rather I want to underscore the need (at least for me) to engage in the continuous process of interacting with information. This means that as new information is discovered, it gets constantly added to older information, hopefully in ways that allow for a robust linkage and a better understanding by me.
Once this repository is mature, I can more confidently do as Einstein suggested. I can look back to my information store and find an answer to a question that I had. moreover, I have a greater facility with information stores outside of my own. Therefore I may be able to find the inklings of an answer of which I have never before been familiar.
I think this is a more high tech version of what good academics have done for centuries; collect a wealth of information be familiar with perhaps a very small subset of this knowledge and then be able to speak somewhat intelligently about a particular issue relative to your field given a little bit of time.
Whether you subscribe to one of the views of the information processing metaphor, a little of both, or neither, a personally-generated information repository of some sort is a worthy tool in your arsenal as a student.
Microsoft Getting Started Guide
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/onenote-help/getting-started-with-onenote-2010-HA010370233.aspx
Visual Quick Start Guide
http://atrc.colostate.edu/Data/Sites/1/documents/Quickstarts/Microsoft_One_Note_Quick_Start_Guide.pdf
References
Bernard, R.M., Abrami, P.C., Borokhovski, E., Wade C.A., Tamim, R.M., Surkes, M.A., & Bethel, E.C. (2009). A meta-analysis of three types of transaction treatments in distance education. Review of Educational Research, 79(3), 1243-1289.
I agree. And from a Jamesian perspective, this becomes a little organized personal collection of sorts, that makes it natively important to us too.
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