3 Memory

The goal of IT study is to get IT information into your memory. But which memory? The memory in your brain? Or the memory on your hard drives or other digital storage devices? The correct answer is – yes! – you need to put information both into your own brain and into your external storage devices too. You need both. Let’s find out why.

The article below compares human brains to computers.

https://www.crucial.com/blog/technology/how-does-the-human-brain-compare-to-a-computerLinks to an external site.

Who wins – the person or the machine? Actually, you do some things better than a computer does. And a computer does some things better than you do. The winning combination is you and your computer working as a team!

Things a Computer Does Better:

• high speed calculations
• factual recall
• easy to backup completely

Things a Person Does Better:

• making connections between different types of information
• deciding what is important
• lifelong learning
• more total memory capacity
• better energy efficiency

As a person, you have more flexibility than a computer does. You can do math on paper if you need to! But for complicated math, it works much better to use a computer if you can. You can write your thoughts on paper too. But for long papers, and for using things like spell check, computers are very helpful. In general – choose the best tool for the job. If that tool is your own mind and body, put yourself to work! But when a computer helps you get more done, be sure to reach for the computer.

A Winning IT Strategy

So how can you get the most from your IT studies? Just memorizing more and more things about IT is not the best approach. Like the article says above, computer memory is better for some things (facts and calculations) than human memory. Don’t waste your human memory on things a computer could do better! Focus instead on what only a human can do – sort out what is most important and focus your studies on those things. Here is a simple rule you can keep in mind for focusing your IT studies:

Learn the fewest things you can, to make your computers do the most.

Learn less? Why does that make any sense? It’s very simple. The rule says “fewest”. It does not say “very few”! If you are studying IT at all, you are going to learn a lot! IT is full of new ideas, vocabulary, abbreviations, languages to learn, and skills to practice. IT studies will keep you very busy! But for exactly that reason, you need to focus on what is most important. If you try to memorize everything about IT, you will “lose the forest for the trees”. Every new IT idea is a “tree”. You need to focus on the “forest”.  Don’t get lost bouncing from one fact to another to another! You need to figure out what you need to do with all the facts. Some of those facts belong on your hard drive, not in your head. Only you can figure out which facts are important enough to keep in your head!

Note to Teachers

Help students identify external sources of information they can use for simple IT fact lookup. Encourage students to focus on the efficient use of reference materials. Bloom’s Taxonomy is a common reference model in education. We can use Bloom’s Taxonomy to clarify things IT students should focus on.

https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/blooms-taxonomy/Links to an external site.