How You Should Learn Technology in the Information Age

In this article, I intend to change the way you look at learning technology and education in general. I expect many of you here at Wealthy Affiliate will discover that the way you are currently learning technology is shockingly inefficient and that many of your assumptions about how to best learn technology are completely wrong.

I know these are strong statements and you may be ready to dismiss them out of hand immediately. After all, you've been learning technology all along, you've been working in the field, you've been getting good grades in your classes and you have certification.

Take a moment and think back at the last technology you learned.

• Why did you bother?
• Did you think strategically and evaluate whether the benefits of learning that technology justified the effort when you started?
• Did you take the time to plan out your course of study or did you just grab whatever resources you happen to find careening from website to book to course like a ball on a tilted pinball machine?
• How far did you get? Beginner? Intermediate ? Expert?
• Did you choose the level you wanted to reach ahead of time or just kept studying out of habit?

That last one is a trick question. As it turns out, thinking of learning a technology as a spectrum from beginner to expert is hopelessly obsolete. I'm not going to waste your time here with cliches or obvious approaches like taking a class or using online search to find information.

That's common knowledge and the real problem is that common knowledge itself is obsolete. In this article we're going to demolish some well-loved cliches and assumptions and explore what it really means to learn technology in the information age.

The Information Revolution

Now I want to demolish well left cliches and here I am starting with one. We live in the information age. The world has changed. It's the information revolution. What a cliche and what does it bring to mind?

Flat screen TVs, smartphones, and endless gadgets. So let's get one thing clear. All of those gadgets and technology are superficial and irrelevant. I love gadgets as much as anyone, but those are not what makes this the information age or makes this era the information revolution.

You see, the term information revolution is not a cliche. It is a reality a hundred years from now. They will refer to this period in the same way that we look back on the industrial revolution, the Renaissance and the agricultural revolution and this is not marketing hype or general hyperbola.

There is something new under the sun and its impact on human society is and will continue to be as significant as the discovery of agriculture, the printing press and the steam engine.

In fact, there are two new things under the sun. First for the first time in human history, it is possible for any individual to communicate directly with any number of other individuals and to engage in commerce with any number of other individuals at effectively zero cost and with zero delay.

In the past, it has been possible for a few people to communicate with many people, the printing press and later broadcast media sought to that, but for anyone to do so that is new.

Second for the first time in human history, every individual can have access to virtually all human knowledge at effectively zero cost.

A few of you may object to this point noting that it's not true for every individual on the planet and that is true, but it's also being picky. The technology to support what I described exists and the trend in that direction is clear.

We are well on the way. These changes are having a huge impact on every aspect of society. Many of the consequences are obvious though we don't always see them in the context of these two facts.

The growth of eCommerce and online retailers, the increasing mismatch between available jobs and people with the skills needed to fill them and the widespread adoption of social networks are clearly results of these two revolutionary developments.

Despite its best efforts to resist change, education is being impacted as well.

I'm not referring to the obvious changes, the presence of computers in classrooms, computer aided training, testing, and even online courses.

Those are just symptoms. Today's expressions of the massive underlying changes that are occurring and are, but a hint of things to come. The change that really matters can be found in the death of a cherished phrase. One that is not just obsolete but is now a blatant lie.

You've heard the phrase, knowledge is King. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is the most valuable commodity.

Well, if knowledge is King, the King is dead. Once these phrases were true, one would study to gain knowledge and your knowledge could open the door to opportunity and respect. You could be the one people would go to for answers and would be paid nicely in the process.

One of the consequences of the information revolution has been a sudden and extreme devaluation of knowledge. Knowledge is now cheap indexed by Google and delivered directly to your computer or phone instantly.

Wait, you may argue that's not knowledge. That's information. They aren't the same thing. And while that's true, it doesn't really matter. Both have experienced the same devaluation.

Ask a question or ask for help. Chances are good. You'll find the question asked and answered already. Your problem solved and the information in a correct context, what you think that doesn't count well, if you have a problem to solve and you can solve it by bringing somebody else's knowledge to the task at virtually no cost.

How important is it that you yourself have the knowledge to solve the problem? I know that's almost blasphemy, and I bet you can come up with many reasons why it is important that you do gain the knowledge yourself. But from an economic perspective, if the knowledge needed to solve the problem is readily available for free, the value of you having that knowledge yourself is effectively zero.

In the realm of technology, it's not just the knowledge that has been devalued, so has the technology itself. Gone are the days when using or building technology required a small fortune in hardware and software. The cost of hardware of all types has crashed.

It's been years since you needed access to university or corporate labs to have hands on experience with most technologies. Today, individuals can afford all the technology they need to learn whatever they want, and the tools will probably be better than what you'll find in school or even at work.

And when it comes to software development, almost everything you need is free.

Open source, alternatives to paid software, are widely available and sometimes just as good or better than the commercial equivalents. If knowledge and tools are cheap, what is left?

The answer is skills. We are no longer a knowledge based society. We are a skills based society.

Most people just haven't realized it yet, though the signs are all around us. Once, almost any college degree guaranteed a good job. Now it doesn't. Nobody cares what you know. They care what you can do.

Having knowledge is not enough. Knowing how to use it, whether it is your own knowledge or someone else's, is everything.

So in this article, our emphasis is not on learning, at least not in the traditional sense of acquiring knowledge. Our emphasis is on gaining skills, learning how to put to use the knowledge that you have and knowledge that you acquire as needed.

Qualifications matter. Even when I graduated from school, there was a common belief that when it came to technology, nobody cared where you went to school as much as they cared about what you did on your last job. It was true then and it's more true now.

It's not enough to be able to do something. You have to prove it. You need evidence.

Formal degrees matter more and less than before: more because they do represent a form of certification that you know something; less because knowing things is less important than it was, and because there are more and more ways to prove your skills and knowledge.

As we continue, we're going to look more deeply at the consequences of these changes, how they demand that we look differently at learning technology and on the strategies that you can use to take full advantage of the information revolution going forward.

Learning Paths

When we think of learning anything, there's a tendency to think of it as a journey from beginner to expert.

We start out at the beginning of a path knowing nothing about a subject. Then travel along the road, picking up bits of knowledge along the way until we reach a finish line that declares us an expert, except that in technology at least as soon as you reach a finish line, the officials congratulate you and mention that by the way, we've moved the finish line out beyond that distant Hill, so you really should start running again!

Even if we do question this view of learning as a journey, it's usually to observe that the path is never straight. It has twists and turns, roadblocks and potholes and occasional dead end spurs where we discover that the things we learned turn out to be completely wrong.

This model of learning as a journey was occasionally a useful tool a decade ago, but it's completely flawed for the information age.

Instead, look at learning as four distinct paths or tracks, I'll call them

1. fundamentals
2. information
3. skills
   
4. innovation

Each one of these represents a distinct journey. Dividing learning into four tracks in this way gives us a mental model to better understand the learning process and the characteristics of different types of knowledge.

The Fundamentals Track

The fundamentals track is where you learn fundamental concepts relating to the technology you are interested in. It's where you learn how to speak the language, call it the basic literacy of the technology.

For example, if you want to study network configuration, this is where you might learn about internet protocols and the concepts behind acronyms like TCP, UDP, and DNS. If you want to be a software engineer, you would pick up the concepts behind common language elements such as data types, arrays and principles of object oriented programming.

I remember going to the West coast computer fair when I was in college and hearing everyone talking about the different types of computer buses. I found this very confusing as I had absolutely no idea what a bus was doing in a computer. I did guess that it wasn't a real bus of course, but I had no clue what the word meant in this context.

At that time, I had no real idea of how a computer worked at all. It wasn't long before I figured it out and being an electrical engineering major as well as a computer science major. I not only learned what a bus was conceptually but ultimately learned aspects of computer buses of which most computer scientists remain blissfully ignorant.

These are topics like line termination, use of ground planes, electromagnetic interference, capacitive effects, current handling and high-frequency characteristics. In other words, on the topic of computer buses, I went from beginner to a high degree of competence, though I never approached real expertise.

Widely Applicble

Fundamental concepts are a type of knowledge that are widely applicable. For example, your knowledge of internet protocols applies universally to any piece of network hardware, object oriented programming concepts apply to numerous languages for all that the syntax and implementation may differ. Virtually every computer has a bus and the concepts I learned in college are just as applicable today as they were then. This brings us to the other characteristic of fundamental concepts.

Rarely Becomes Obsolete

Though new concepts do show up and existing concepts sometimes are improved on, they rarely go completely obsolete. They represent the foundation that allows you to understand additional information and knowledge that is more specific to particular technologies.

It is wrong to look at fundamental knowledge as the exclusive domain of beginners. I assure you there was nothing beginner level to the analysis we had to apply when calculating the effects of line termination on a bus.

Fundamental concepts can be complex and difficult to learn. While I'm sure there are people who can pick up any concept quickly, for myself, I find that it usually takes three attempts, learning a concept three different ways before it really sticks. Along the way there is a lot of banging my head against the wall in frustration.

I remember when I was first introduced to object oriented programming, there was a week or two where I just didn't get it. I talked to the teaching assistants and asked numerous questions but it didn't make sense.

Then one day in class something clicked: a lightning struck and I got it. While there have been advances to object oriented programming since then, that basic understanding I gained so long ago is as valuable and applicable today as it was then. Maybe more so.

The Information Track

To work in a technology, you must inevitably acquire knowledge and information that is specific to that particular product or technology. We'll call it the information track for convenience,

For example, where your fundamental knowledge might cover what a router is and what it does, the information track might cover the features and programming of specific Cisco routers where fundamental knowledge of computer languages teaches you how an integer is stored and manipulated by languages.

In general, the information track teaches you how to declare and assign one or more integers in C# (C sharp) and later as you gain expertise, how variables are boxed and unboxed or how you can use reflection to dynamically access into your variables by name.

Logic suggests that one must learn the fundamentals of a technology before being able to use or understand information specific to implementations of the technology, but this is one case where the logic is simply wrong.

If you've been involved in technology for any length of time, you've probably met someone who has on hand a vast amount of information on a topic with no real understanding of what they're talking about.

I remember working with one programmer who was struggling to debug an application. He had assigned an untapped variable with the string representation of a number instead of the numeric value, 4 in quotations instead of 4.

Var x = "4"
Var x = 4

Now this in and of itself wasn't the problem. We've all done that on occasion. The problem was that on discussing the issue with him, I came to realize that the developer didn't even understand the difference between a number and the text representation of that number, which means he didn't really understand data typing conversions or charactering coding. Yet he was working as a software developer.

A solid understanding of the fundamental concepts of a technology gives you a huge advantage when it comes to learning and understanding specific implementations and applications of a technology.

People who go directly to the information track can be effective, but there are almost always holes in their knowledge.

Unfortunately, much of our technology education is focused on learning specific information, learning a particular language or platform. Beginners who take these courses often miss out on fundamental concepts and have no idea what they're missing.

One of the main characteristics of knowledge on the information track is that it goes obsolete very quickly. Your knowledge of best practices for configuring a domain controller or mail server become obsolete with each version update.

Platforms evolve rapidly. Even languages that are based on standards change. JavaScript ECMAScript may seem relatively stable, but in most cases it's used as tightly bound to one of many JavaScript libraries which evolve rapidly.

Information is also acquired quickly, especially if you have a good knowledge of the fundamentals of a technology.

I discussed this in one of my courses where I point out that many software developers today really do learn technology as it is needed rather than studying broadly with the hope that something will prove useful someday.

Click here to go to Part 2.