Map reading

[gfish]

Earlier this year I offhandedly mentioned the loss of map-reading skills due to the proliferation of GPS-enabled devices. I meant it seriously, but purely abstractly. It was in the context of finding supplies after a collapse of civilization scenario, after all! Since then, however, I've spent 6 months with a modern smartphone. This now seems like a very real, very immediate issue.

I love maps. Anyone who knows me even slightly will back me up on this. I love maps so much I've accidentally made multiple friends into cartographers, once through a class recommendation and once through a startup project. I love maps, map reading, map making, everything. I own a sextant. I tried using Polynesian etak skills while biking to Portland once. Hell, I once started a project in middleschool to survey the hill I grew up on, just because working out the angles sounded fun and I'd been impressed with the links between surveying and the roots of math as described in one of the James Burke documentaries. (I didn't get very far. Mostly I just made sure to research geometry as quickly as possible when playing Civilization.)

I say this not (entirely) to brag, but to set the stage. For the last six months, I've looked at maps more frequently than any time since the Mackenzie trip thanks to my phone -- but I'm interacting with them on a vastly more shallow level of comprehension. I just don't have to anymore. This has been technically true for a long time, but the ease with which I can get my exobrain to take care of navigation now is just staggering. It's so very easy that I'm really finding it impossible to avoid. And if I'm not bothering, I can't imagine anyone except a vanishingly small percentage of people ever will.

Map reading dies with this generation.

Comments

Important things.

[bigbumble.livejournal.com]

An interesting thing I noticed while in elementary school and confirmed as an adult by asking various groups of students I was substitute teaching. A large majority of people, perhaps 90%, would prefer to do a page of 50 set calculations rather than 10 story problems. The set calculations could be addition, subtraction, multiplication or division with larger numbers than used in the story problems. Translating a verbal problem into numbers is exceedingly difficult for most people.

I am one of the 10% who prefer a few easy calculations because setting up the calculations from a written question is relatively easy for me. I expect that is true for you as well.

Re: Important things.

[hpapillon.livejournal.com]

"Word problems! Thank goodness, something to read!"

I never entirely understood most people's objections to them.

Re: Important things.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Physics can be described in one of two ways--"the science of toys" or "advanced word problems."

Re: Important things.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

The fact that a large majority of people consistently hate word problems shows exactly the problem. They can do the mechanical arithmetic, but they can't apply it to arbitrary real world problems. They can do the thing computers are inhumanly good at, but they can't do the one thing computers are really bad at! (So far.) It's a complete mismatch of priorities with the reality people live in. The abject useless redundancy wouldn't be any worse if we spent years teaching people how to accelerate objects at exactly 9.8 meters per second per second.

Personally, I always loved word problems because they're long and fewer of them fit on a page. :)

Re: Important things.

[orawnzva.livejournal.com]

The fact that a large majority of people consistently hate word problems shows exactly the problem... They can do the thing computers are inhumanly good at, but they can't do the one thing computers are really bad at!

Programming a computer to solve the kinds of problems we normally think of as "word problems" would not be very difficult, because they tend to be stylized and follow predictable patterns. Training a typical statistical natural language processing engine on a corpus of pre-tagged examples of word problems paired with a direct translation into algebraic notation would probably do it.

What's truly difficult is encountering a new situation and figuring out which information is relevant, where to start, what the problem to be solved even is. We don't know how to teach computers how to do anything like that, but our typical program of teaching humans isn't so great at it either. Certainly "word problems" are not an effective indicator of students' ability to do real problem solving.