Can Curiosity Be Taught?

"An obvious boon of living in an information society is the sheer amount of knowledge available to us within seconds."

Very true. Where else (on Earth or in time) can you suddenly get the itch to find out if a carbon fiber toilet seat is a reality?

Not only is it a reality, but in a few clicks you can buy that gem for yourself or perhaps an unsuspecting friend.

The problem with the internet is that it is loaded with cr@p. Actually, overloaded. It is like trying to find a four leaf clover in a field of poison ivy.

So, next time you get that itch you find that you need to navigate through so much junk and misinformation it can be much more difficult that it first seems.

If you are looking for something scholarly, it can be worse unless you are prepared to shell out some cash - in some cases enough to buy that carbon fiber seat. Or, surrender your email to every advertiser this side of the Milky Way.

Perhaps the real curiosity is just how the internet has evolved since its conception. Perhaps a more accurate account is how it has devolved. Just ask curious George!

We are naturally inquisitive.
In many cases it is 'educated' out of us.
Now shut up, sit still, don't fiddle with that, don't argue and do as you're told.
If you're 'good' we'll put an anodyne Disney DVD on the TV for you and spoon feed you pap.
Del

As a reference, a similar discussion happened a couple of years back.

Have you tried the gutenberg project? lots of old books there

Yes, I've had a link to Gutenberg for a while and I've downloaded some books from that site. I'm glad to see it's improving too. Early on, I think you could only get .txt files, but now you have a variety of formats to choose from including html and audio.

A friend found and sent me the link to an old book from the 1800s which was a primer on being a railroad engineer. It was filled with amazingly detailed drawings of steam engines and various components, all done in the very artistic pen-and-ink style they used back then.

It's good that Gutenberg preserves old books like that which otherwise might just turn to dust.

An interesting story about a particular ancient text is 'The book that Nobody Read' by Owen Gingerich of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. The book is about hs quest to see, for himself, all of the existing copies of Copericus' "De Revolutionibus". Among the copies he saw was the copy at Edinburgh of a First Edition that was richly annotated in the margins by Erasmus Reinhold, a leading astronomer back in the 1540s. His marginal notes added tremendous value to the text (and to the history of the text). -- But a work like this simply cannot be 'copied' and put into electronic form, at least, not when using the electronic copying media commonly used like manually keying-in the text or using an optical character recognition device.

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Nobody-Read-Revolutions-Copernicus/dp/B000BNPG8C/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357655532&sr=1-1&keywords=the+book+nobody+read

Good post and a good warning for those who depend strictly on the internet for source information. I own far too many books and my wife threatens to cut me off access to Amazon. Internet was not around when I went to school so mostly it was not a factor. It did not take long before I remembered the lessons of primary source researching. It still applies but the internet does contain many good sources. Avoid the ones written by someone with some basic information passed on without supporting documented sites to back claims. They are abundant in the herbal industry.

Did Google Earth not have a fictitious island in the South Pacific?

Curiosity is one of the few common human traits. It can be promoted at many levels and at many stages of one's life. Learning is a life time venture. School is just an essential step on the way to learning. The curiosity should last till we die.

Yes, the ficticious Google island -- another good point.

I have 3 cats, And Christmas is over, This is the first year we didn't have to throw the Christmas tree out (artificial) along with half the ornaments. But we did have to keep re-wrapping the presents because they wanted to know what was in them.

What do you think my take on curiosity is????

As "curiosity killed the cat", it's difficult to say...

Yea, but I love them, so they continue to live..

Curiosity exists in everyone, just some have the benefit of having been taught how to learn from it. I have been amazed by some people who know little about a subject they enjoy, but have not been given the tools by their parents (or schools) to investigate further on their own.

Too many people are told the basics and no more - they are often actively encouraged to 'leave it at that', instead of expanding their knowledge when they are enthused to do that. Too much 'leave it at that' at an early age leads to disillusion and an expectation of failure - very apparent in many of those coming from schools in poorer areas, where the school has to teach to curriculum to get the minimum results for league tables.

Nice answer and I like the analogy of learning to fish. I believe most of the curiosity seeds should be encouraged at home. You as a teacher can help scratch the itch and teach the child to fish. Once impelled to satisfy a curiosity, the process should last one's lifetime.

That last is my primary goal. Get them curious, teach them how to satisfy the curiosity and have fun doing so, and you'll keep them learning as long as they are breathing. My teachers did that for me, and I'm passing it along. Once you find something that works, stick to it. And it doesn't take a lot of money, or a lot of skill, or even a lot of support. Most kids can find a way to test any theory they can come up with, if given the proper knowledge.

Thanks for the responses, everyone. This discussion has taken an interesting, if unintended, direction. As a sometime information professional (read: librarian) I'm also greatly interested in the consequences of information overload, the prevalence sponsored results, and the disappearance of accidental discovery - they are certainly problems worth wrangling with.

I've got a music periodical from the 1930s at home in my archive. It consists of a few long articles and pages and pages of reader-submitted questions, answered by the magazine's "experts." Some of these questions are very basic, and begin with "How do I do..." or "What is..." It just amazes me that these curious readers had to wait months for a straight answer to a basic question - compared to today's culture, these people must've had more patience and determination.

Alternately, you could've bought a book like this and hoped for the best:

We are born curious. All of us. Curiosity isn't something we get, it is something we have - or used to. It is how we reward - or punish - that curiosity in others which nurtures or destroys this priceless treasure. Rather than ask how to teach curiosity, we should direct our efforts to safeguard and nurture what we already have.

Your a little late to teach Curiosity it's already deployed on Mars.

As an emotion no it can't be taught. I can be nurtured! I believe that nurturing to be more effective on a individual level. As the same subject matter may not provide the stimulus for everyone. And in that the reward is different. The reward being chemical in the brain. If there is little or no reward one gets bored. We see this in young children. They run around until something catches their interest. Curiosity takes over, they explore learning what ever this new found interest can tell them. Once whats learned is stored in memory curiosity peaks there is a chemical reward in the brain. Then they run around until some thing else interesting catches their attention.

Nurturing means to build on those things that catch and hold their interest the most.

Curiosity, meanwhile, is as curious as ever...