You’ve probably heard a lot about the importance of information in today’s world. Instead of information, we could use the word “knowledge” and mean pretty much the same thing.
You may have heard the expression, “There’s no such thing as a dumb question.” Well, even when someone tries to comfort us with that cliche, we may often hesitate to ask when we don’t understand something. We’d rather pretend we know what’s going on than demonstrate a lack of knowledge.
I’ve found a couple of good tools online I can use to remedy my lack of knowledge that I’ll share with you. I’d also like to share these with you because I’d like to see more people online using resources that are more reliable than Wikipedia. I’m not trying to say that Wikipedia is all bad, but we know about several of the drawbacks from allowing the entire public to participate in compiling the information it contains. These sites are edited and/or controlled by an established organization or institution that provides more credibility. Wikipedia is a great point for starting out, but use these sites to help validate what you read on Wikipedia, or any other site for that matter.
The first one is about as basic as you can get: a dictionary. Specifically, it’s Merriam-Webster Online and it’s not just a dictionary. In addition to a source for word definitions, it is also a thesaurus, Spanish-English dictionary and medical dictionary. And it’s a heck of a lot more convenient than carrying around all those books. It’s also great to cut-and-paste definitions, so you can say things like, “According to Merriam-Webster, a cephalopod is…” The other great thing about this dictionary is that if you don’t know how to spell the word you are looking up, you can spell it to the best of your knowledge and M-W will provide different choices based on what word it thinks you might be looking for. And since most computers are equipped with speakers, you can also hear the proper pronunciation of the word.
The second reference is great for me because I work with a lot of legal contracts in my paying job and need to understand the language they use in order to explain it to clients. It’s a law dictionary from Law.com. It’s pretty easy to use, which I like. The biggest recommendation I would make for improving it would be to provide clickable links within the definitions leading to the definitions of other legal terms: some of the definitions can be rather complicated, and I need to look up what the terms in the definition mean and that entails doing another search. It would be much easier if I could click on a link within the definition and than hit “back” to return to the original subject. Anyway, it’s still a great resource and simple to use.
Moving into something a little more complex, I’d like to recommend the Library of Economics and Liberty - specifically the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. I was an Econ major in college, so maybe I’m a little biased. (Yes, people do actually choose to major in Economics of their own free will!) You hear a lot about the lack of science and math education and how this is leading to less of a competitive edge with the rest of the world. I think the same is true of economics. You hear so much on the news that revolves around economic decision-making: mortgage crises, rising gasoline prices, the ever-changing Fed rate, and so on; yet very few people understand any of the discussion taking place. It’s easy to be led astray when you don’t know what’s going on. If you visit this encyclopedia, it won’t turn you into an economist, but you can educate yourself on a variety of economic topics, and that way you can understand more of what is going on.
Finally I’d like to recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It’s not a dictionary that provides simple definitions of philosophical concepts and ideas, but more of a database of work done on different topics. You can look up articles on people like Plato or Aristotle; or ideas, such as Integrity or Honesty; and you can read discussions on topics like Pornography - what it is, whether we should censor it or not, and how would we go about doing that. It’s certain to get the wheels in your brain spinning.
Post a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.