Podcast: University of Chicago Professor on Research
Our latest guest on the podcast Alex and I run is Dr. Andrew Abbott, a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. He talks about learning via the experience of his students and the general decline of research skills, as well as the researcher's relationship with the Internet. One particular quote I liked of his:
“We’re moving to a point where everyone in the world thinks everything can be abstracted... This notion that you can get to ‘the point’ and extract ‘the point’ has become central to people’s thinking about how knowledge works. Well, that isn’t the way knowledge works, and we’re actually in a bigger crisis about this, than about libraries. The bigger problem is that students coming up don’t actually know what knowledge is. They only know what the internet is. And the experiential message of the internet is that everything has an address somewhere, you just need to find it, you just need an address. Of course, that’s not what knowledge is. Knowing is not knowing a web address. It’s assembling things, it’s making new things in your own head. The internet only teaches you to find things.”
Checkout the show here.