On Age+Learning and the Internet

[pyronius]

Good morrow citizens of my information box! I didn't see any topic regarding age and learning specifically so hopefully it doesn't already exist.

Condensed version

1: does age actually make learning more difficult or is it a matter of will
2: is the internet and its vast store of knowledge likely to make older people more likely to continue learning
3 (bonus!): "use it or lose it"-does it always apply or can you learn something well enough that you will retain that knowledge regardless of use.

Non condensed version

Spoiler:

I guess what I'm wondering is whether you believe age has an effect on the ability to learn new material and concepts. The common understanding is that as you approach middle age your brain loses its ability to learn and so it becomes more of a challenge. This supposedly is why my grandfather doesn't understand why you need Facebook when you could just do all that stuff on the Internet as well as why he gets my father to send email for him instead of learning to do it himself. Some people however (including my granfather's girlfriend) argue that it's a matter of laziness. Their belief is that it's simply unwillingness to put in the time necessary to learn a new skill.

Is the fact that you rarely see people beyond about 35 obtaining further education a matter of inability or are they just content to live with what they already know? Is the fact that my mother who is 52 today is within months of achieving a PHD a fluke? I guess in summary of that whole concept what I'm asking is whether I should get to learning while the getting's good.


Secondly: how do you believe the Internet currently does or in will in the future affect this usual lack of middle aged learning? For instance, I'm a generally curious person. When I run across something of interest be it related to anything within the scope science, the humanities, art, or any other topic I immediately run to Wikipedia and if that fails to satisfy I google it to find a deeper explanation. I have no plans of ever stopping this. It might not provide the kind of understanding i could obtain with a formal education in the subject but it tends to form a basic understanding. Older generations didn't have access to the wealth of knowledge and sonmay have been less inclined to look up topics they don't already understand. The current generation of people older than roughly 60-65 are still less likely to use the Internet. So then, as current generations age do you believe the Internet will increase the amount of continued learning beyond school or will they, like their predecessors eventually deem even such readily available knowledge too difficult to actually learn to be worthwhile?


Finally a smaller sort of question: do you believe the idiom "use it or lose it" applies to all knowledge or do you believe that it depends on how well the subject was learned at the time. Obviously if you learn a subject only as a cram session before an exam you'll forget it within a semester, but if you were, say, a chemistry student because it legitimately interested you and this learned the subject out of pure interest would you still remember it 50 years later even though you ultimately became a folk singer?

[Iceman]

My basic thoughts on it are that learning things becomes less natural and more difficult over time, but that its never a matter that you cannot learn new things and new ideas, only that it will potentially increase in difficulty.

I don't think that the increase in difficulty is extreme enough that you shouldn't try to do it. It would be one thing to attempt at 47 to begin the path to a PhD in Physics or something, but as long it was a decently reasonable thing, I'm sure there's no real barrier. And I think it may be very subject dependant.

I think there's larger barriers in the form of willingness or just personal ability to absorb information that would vary more person by person than in the same person at age X and age Y.


2nd point: I think the internet is a great way to begin an education or become educated on some more casual topics. You could learn a lot about film, literature, history, learn more about finances, carpentry or something. Anything a lot more formal, I think you'd have to pick up a little more rigourously through classes or something, again to continue the example, you're less likely to just learn complex science or math on the internet if you don't already have a basis for understanding it.

3rd thing: I do think use it or lose it applies to many things. I've always thought that you retain education to the last point that you truly understood it inside and out, you retain it, because at this point you could recreate it if you had to. If you had to memorize it, or you kind of understood when it was explained but you wouldn't have been able to actually get there yourself, you'd probably forget it.

[aoeu]

In terms of learning capability people peak in their thirties.

[curtis95112]

For the first, I'd say that age affects ease of learning and the extent depends on the subject.

It's very well known that some types of knowledge have critical periods when they can be best learned. For instance, a thirty-year old learning a new language isn't going to do as well as a four-year old.

But I wouldn't venture as far as to say that age always makes it harder to learn.

For 3, I think basic muscle memory lasts for your whole life? I don't think I'm going to forget how to ride a bike even after decades of not riding it.

[Iceman]

In terms of learning capability people peak in their thirties.

Any justification or elaboration of this? This doesn't seem true when it comes to, well, anything, but specifically languages which peak very young, math, sciences, physical learning etc...

[KestrelLowing]

I think that the main reason older people don't know how to use the internet as well as younger people is simply because it's so different from anything they grew up with. Yeah, you might have had a TV, but this interaction with a virtual space didn't happen.

For example, some people have a heck of a time learning to use a mouse. My grandma did. We tried to get her to play solitaire. That connection of physical to virtual movement is a difficult thing to learn. The only difference is that younger people have been introduced to that type of thinking from very early. Of course when we put her on the word processing she was typing like a maniac (she was a secretary and was amazed at how quickly you could type because you didn't have to wait for the typewriter to work). It's all about what you're familiar with.

I think we can all agree that childhood is the best time to learn - you pick up things quicker, you've got more connections in your brain, etc. So if you're introduced to a way of thinking when you're small, you'll probably be better at it.

It will be interesting to see what new technologies come out in my lifetime. I don't know if there will be anything as drastic as transforming to that virtual space though, so it may be that when I'm an old fart, it won't be quite as difficult to understand.

[Zamfir]

I am not sure that young children learn in general so much faster, it depends a lot on the issue. For example, look at a typical history book for primary schools (or even scondary schools). They're thin, heavily illustrated, with a easy and slow pace. Yet such books fill a year's course of primary school history. If someone writes a fake-history book in that style (so with new information in it), I could probably learn its contents to acceptable levels in one or two hours. That's hardly boasting: many fantasy or science fiction novels contain literally a primary school worth of fake history as background, just as a matter of course.

The same is true for many things (though not all). I have taught training courses for adults, and participated as students in others, and the pace of such courses is often murderous compared to high school education and completely bewildering when compared to primary school. I once tried to teach the basics of a CAD system to reasonably bright 11 year old, and it just didn't connect. Kids are supposed to be good at using computers, but the truth is that complex computer programs are usually too difficult for them.

There are many good reason for that. Adults have 'learned to learn', especially adults who went to university and who spend many, many years to practice that skills. COmpared to themselves as kids, they know better how to focus on the important parts, they know which learning strategies help them personally to learn, they know how to pace themselves (sometimes fast and concentrated, sometimes it has to be calm with many breaks), they have more discipline, they can place the material in a wider context, they understand and respect teachers and are willing to cooperate, they dare to ask questions, etc. They also have more experience to draw on, more useful analogies to help them with new stuff, etc.

There's one thing that adults really lack: time. Kids who get an interest in dinosaurs or hoola-hooping or FPS or facebooking will easily spend hours every day on it. Adults don't even start if they're not convinced of the benefits, their schedules are already full and in the spare time they are tired.

[pyronius]

I once tried to teach the basics of a CAD system to reasonably bright 11 year old, and it just didn't connect. Kids are supposed to be good at using computers, but the truth is that complex computer programs are usually too difficult for them.

I think a large amount of that sort of thing is due to the way children learn to use something as complex as a computer. building a computer or programming one to do something requires a large amount of context and previous knowledge. you can tell them "perform steps 1 two and three and the computer does X" and they'll understand, but if you ask them why those steps lead to that conclusion they might not be able to tell you. they don't understand what a "computer" is. its just the computer. they know it as the machine that produces certain effects when you perform certain actions but they can't necessarily place the information in such a way that they can then achieve a desired outcome they haven't been taught the steps to yet.

concerning the density of a children's schooling (history texts etc...), one important thing to keep in mind when considering how fast a child is learning is that there are a large amount of bits and pieces you take for granted. for instance, in a sci-fi novel they may start giving you the history of the Sciferica without ever using the word country or nation and you'll be able to get that its a country based on the context. by the time a fourth grader is learning the basics of the french revolution they know what a country is, but go ask a kindergartner what a france is. at what point do they learn what a revolution is? is that the point at which they actually understand it beyond just the definition? your ability to so quickly pick up on the basic facts of a history in such a short time is largely due to the fact that you have all the background information on how civilizations are organized in the first place as well as a large store of basic patterns you know history, whether real or fictional, falls into. the point being that there are a lot of things they're learning that aren't part of the text because they seem so obvious to the adults who write them and we trust that the kids will learn these things by osmosis.

[Zamfir]

Sure, that's part of the story, but it would be weird to discount adult learning on such grounds. If adults learn faster because they have more mental scaffolding to help them place things, they still learn faster.

When it comes to computers etc, there is a tendency to use a double standard when comparing adults and kids. The world is full of adults who learned to use email as an adult without any trouble, but no one counts this as example that adults are especially good at learning about computers. There also lots of children who can't use email and still need years of practice before they will understand it, and they don't count as example that kids are bad at computers.

[sam_i_am]

I don't think It's so much that adults can lean faster, as much as adults don't need to learn as much, since they might already know parts of what you're teaching them