A Dollar Late And A Day Short

Recently my father loaned me a guide book on skiing- the book is Skiing Skills by Rüdiger Jahn and it was written in 1980. While this normally would seem a rather random attempt to refresh my memory on skiing, since Katie and I are planning on slipping in a few trips this year it was actually a very nice gesture.  The first thing I noticed was how well the book was built. It’s held together very well for nearly 30 years.  The second thing I noticed was how wordy it was.  This made me think about how so many trainings and how-to guides that have been created lately rely heavily on images and videos with minimal words.

Modern web guides are mostly an image with one or two sentence blurbs that explain the image.  While this book had diagrams to show the skills being described, the majority of the information was described through those good old fashioned words.  The bigger, personally better, thing I noticed is not only did it describe what to do but why.  It went into how the different actions worked in terms of pressures on certain parts of the ski, edging the skis and why, also how to move your body up and down while making turns etc.  It was far more detailed and supported genuine mastery of the skill and not just recitation ability.

I mentioned this to Katie and she said that honestly there is so much to know that she doesn’t want to fill her brain with useless information about skiing.  She’s a very bright woman who has always shown me to be fairly intellectual so this desire to minimize information surprised me.  She said that we’re well past the days when we can have true renaissance men because there is simply too much to know in this day and age.  In this day and age we have to be more selective with what fill our minds with.  This minimalist view of just give me the knowledge I need for the task at hand strikes me as the intellectual equivalent of fast food.  Just like fast food, it’s there, it’s edible but it’s hardly the same thing as knowing how to cook a multi-course dinner.

As we have broadened the reach of training materials to greater audiences at the same time we have needed to start developing them for the lowest common denominator.  In my experiences with everything from google searching how-to guides to online graduate level courses, I’ve seen a progressive lowering of the definition of mastery in many areas of knowledge.  I don’t see the needed correlation between broader access to information and the simplification of information.  It is completely possible to maintain higher knowledge while using modern technology as the platform.  We just have to make a concerted effort to keep the quality level there as we develop training and information modules.

While I agree the amount of knowledge that is available in the modern world is far vaster than that of the renaissance era, the thing that defined those men was their drive to master all knowledge they were exposed to.  I see more and more examples of people who just want the simplified “sound bite” answer to their inquiry instead of striving to master a concept.  If the readily available information were developed at higher standards of intellectual quality I’d hope that would be a solid step in the right direction.  That people would start to have a greater understanding of more than just a single field or two.

Next time you have the opportunity to develop a training module, ask yourself are you creating a multi-course dinner or just ordering fast food.