Learn to surf the web?
It is a big problem.
How many times do you seat in front of the computer to look for something on the www and 4 hours latter, yeah you found what you were looking but just general information, and you spent the other 3 hours looking, link after link, popup after popup, like a gigantic tree with thousands of ramifications. Besides you just can not remember the hole stuff you have being reading.
Why? Well because you just don’t know how to use the www. Simple as that, but I think it should be mandatory in the classrooms. It is very simple. You are looking for info about the moons of Pluto. Just that for the moment; remember, moons of Pluto. You find what seems to be a good essay on that. And you start reading, then you come across a link about our moon, leading to a site talking about an eclipse that is going to take place next month. Ok, there’s a link to The National Geographic web site… And you end up with 10 tabs; the last one, a non profit organization that cultivates potatoes on the Australian Outback.
Well 4 hours latter you bombarded your brain, your eyes are tired and you know nor much about a thing, even a bit about many things. You know barely nothing. We are curious for nature, well thanks god some of us are. And yet the traps for our curiosity are many in the internet. So the procedure is very simple. Try it once, let’s be pragmatic you don’t have nothing to loose, so…
1. Grab a peace of paper good quality, one old fashion notebook that you like.
2. Write down what you are looking at.
3. Google it.
4. Start looking at the sites you know, if you are my age, to be more thrustful like National Geographic for instance.
5. Do not open tabs as you look on those sites. Write them down, it is gonna make those crapy doodles you call handwriting improve along time.
6. Now we found a decent place on our virtual world that seems to have the correct info. I really like National Geographic as an example.
7. Now you face three choices:
A. Print it, preserve the planet but not your brain, depending on how much you care about the future generations.
B. Don’t print it. Well let’s say you are deeply concerned about the future of the planet although driving an SUV that sucks oil like a dragon…
C. Do it like myself, sometimes I print it sometimes I don’t. Use that thing called wisdom. Or the middle path, where most of the times wisdom resides.
8. So you have your text about the moons of Pluto, paper based or digital. If you decided to print it shut down the computer. Turn it off!
9. Start doing a Summary, excerpt, resume, synopsis. Yes just the same way some of us did back on high school, doodling, underling. An index is also a good idea. The point is that you have to write down a condensed version of what you have in front of you. You have to end up with a few points. Write down 10 times the most important points like “I won’t talk in class” 100 times. I sure you don’t remember… And the hole procedure is going to make your handwrite, assuming that it is important, so much better.
10. Read your own text loud, or not, and try to memorize it. Memorize. Yea, memorize those points. Try doing this exercise in the morning and see what you can remember by the end os the day. It can seem a little dummy to you but as time goes by that exercise in going to make your visits to the www so much productive, so much fun.
Point being just not to look like a crazy monkey jumping from tree to tree, just wanting to remember nothing.
And yes you got to memorize, All the knowledge is based on memory.
H.
