Learn like it's the twentieth century

This is something of a fun post.  I wanted to try learning something in the style of my assigned historical period, sort of as a spin off from the projects in last semester's class.  It was a little less exciting, maybe, but still interesting.  More below.

The BYU library, where my little drama takes place.

Story:

One morning, while I was scraping off my windshield before leaving to go to school, I had the question come to me: how is frost formed?  I had a vague idea that it might be related to dew, but I really didn't know.  My immediate response was to search Wikipedia, but I was going to be on campus for most of the day, without my laptop.  As I sat in my first class, I was thinking about the 20th century, and I started thinking about how people learned things 'back in the day'.  It was at that point that things clicked in my head: I should try to use the library to answer my question!

And in this case, science is the library.

When class was done, I headed straight to the library to do some research. In order to replicate a pre-computer, real library experience, I resolved to use no computer assistance of any kind. I decided physics would be the right subject material, and located the appropriate section.  Almost immediately after I started browsing, I found myself in books that looked interesting.  I pulled down a few and leafed through them.  I found a book titled Great Feuds in Science: Ten of the Liveliest Disputes Ever (Hal Hellman, Wiley Publishing, August 1999).  I learned more than I had ever thought about the Newton-Leibniz debate (imagine this in color and with pictures, and you'll understand my fascination), and Galileo, and..."Oh, wait," I said to myself after close to an hour in the library, "I was trying to answer a question."

Regretfully tearing myself away from an older book that 'collected the modern theories of thermodynamics in one book' or some such thing, I went back to searching with a purpose.  After maybe another ten minutes, I found what I was looking for: The Encyclopedia of Physics!  This should answer my question, yes?

My question was answered (summary: frost *is* frozen dew, so my instinct was correct.  Dew is condensated humidity that results from a difference in air temperature and the ground/surface temperature.  There is even a frost point, same as there is a dew point.), but mechanics of frost isn't really the point of this post.  What did I learn about my learning?

Results:

Frost--cool, but not my point.
(pun certainly intended)

First of all, I learned that Wikipedia click-through syndrome is not unique to our generation of born and raised internet-ites.  I was surprised to realize this, but I talked with my mom (a thoroughly non-internet-ite), and she told me that she used to spend lots of time in the library pulling books off shelves just to look, and she says I was even worse as a kid, long before I really knew anything about the internet.  Not concrete proof, but at least evidence that our inclinations toward browsing may be older than the internet.


I also came to the conclusion that books and libraries are not the best places to go for simple questions.  The internet has filled the answer-finding niche in our lives, and has done so splendidly.  However, I did appreciate from those other books that I read that libraries are better than the internet for some things.  If I had an entire field that I wanted to study, I think it would be more useful to browse library shelves.  Using the internet you have to search for a specific item, and your search generally only returns the one item you are looking for.  In a library, though, everything the library has on your subject is in one place, which makes it fairly easy to study a topic in depth.  It also helps find relevant material and make certain kinds of connections more efficiently than the internet.  Just browsing around the shelves in a section and reading titles, you can find subjects closely related to your topic that you would never have thought of putting together in a Google search, for example.

In short, the internet is better for quick answers, but at least as of yet the library is better for depth of study in a given topic.

So, as a last question, do you think that Wikipedia syndrome originated in our generation 'having too many distractions'?  Is Wikipedia syndrome a good thing, a bad thing, or a neutral thing?  I'd like to hear your thoughts.


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Click-through syndrome - I'm sure most of us have done this; you look at something interesting, especially on Wikipedia, and you see a blue link, so you click on it.  On that page, you find something you aren't sure about, and it's linked, so you click on that.  Pretty soon, you have a dozen tabs of wikipedia, and you've forgotten what you were originally researching. See comic here for visual description; see article here for the basic explanation of why some think this is a major problem today.