November 9, 2010 at 7:41 am
Great subject! To my mind I think the arrival of the internet, and the constant availability of information at our figure tips is simply a change. It doesn't make us better or worse, but it does change the level at which we can operate. In the past a really good IT professional would have learnt everything they needed to know, and be able to call on that knowledge when ever required. Now however that level of knowledge is still handy, but it's not the most critical thing. By having the minutia of what we do handily available online it leaves us more capacity to expand into more areas, and to focus on the what rather than the how. What sets us apart from the normal users now is our understanding of how things work, and what needs to be done to achieve the require goals, and it's that which we memorise instead since it is much harder to reference that kind of knowledge.
A person who fully understands how a technology works under the hood can easily search a reference source to find how to do something specific. Someone else however who has just memorised that reference source is unlike to be able to do much with it, since they lack the understanding of what they need to do.
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