Ephemeral Learning
The study of Dante Aligheri - the author of the poem the Divine Comedy.
There is more to learn on the internet than ever. Courses, tutorials, primers, introductory guides etc. Its incredibly easy to consume, but in my experience also much easier to forget.
Digital delivery and test taking makes it easy to activate short-term memory but does it have the same impact as having to etch the same knowledge in your brain through physical immersion. Spending the one minute a day using language learning software may be effective and give the positive stimulus of making progress but is it better than living in a country and being forced to experience and use the language? What does it mean that you’ve completed a certificate in Machine Learning online, but when it comes to build a novel algorithm you don’t know where to start?
Ephemeral Learning and Candy Crush culture come together to cancel each other out in a way that leads to many hours consumed but no net change in the ability of one to use that knowledge productively. Because we spend so many hours in front of our screens do we even consider learning time to be any different from casually reading a text message.
Digital learning creators need to account for the experiential changes it takes to permanently change one’s brain biochemistry to impact long term memory and skills development. As computing becomes more experiential e.g. with VR enabling one to experience situations it might be that we can take ephemeral learning and make it more permanent. Can you learn Spanish by visiting Spain in VR, and interacting with virtual but real Spaniards. Will the Coursera equivalent of VR involve sitting in a virtual university facing the cyclic stress of doing an exam?
For ephermeral learning to be permanent one needs to retrace steps. Practice makes perfect only because knowledge and experience of the same thing strengthens the synaptic pathways. Also if i want to retrace my steps how do I know where I was -- a physical notepad and a pen in this respect has a huge advantage over activating my memory versus a web browser. Perhaps this is the reason why paper books will always have a place -- they create focus and enable us to retrace our steps. If the next generation of learning & information platforms can master going from ephemeral to permanent they will have a place.
Otherwise we are all just wasting our time.