

Measuring the shelf-life of student interest in their subjects, using Google... - barry-cotter
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/05/measuring-shelf-life-of-student.php

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andyj
Eeek. All you can tell from that data is that the interest in those search
terms becomes decorrelated from the academic semester cycle once terms ends.
If those people go on to search for 'linear algebra' later on, it could be at
any time of year, and therefore just contributions to the baseline trend.

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neilc
Furthermore, students can remain interested in a subject, but just not search
Google as actively for it as they did during the school year: you typically
search Google when you have a _specific_ question, not a general interest in a
topic. For example, when I took a class on the theory of computation, I was
actively searching for terms related to the subject (PCP, Savitch's Theorem,
etc). I remain very interested in complexity theory and I'm happy I took the
class, but my Google search frequency on the subject has definitely decreased.

I think it's clear the author has an agenda, and just uses the data he noticed
as a way to segue into his diatribe.

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schwanksta
I liked this guy's post on the education bubble, but this one seems like he's
grasping at straws. All he's proven is that people Google terms a lot more
often when they need to sound like experts on the subject. Brilliant!

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timcederman
Tagged with "too much school is gay". Right.

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Ardit20
_If they're just going to flush out the course's content once the semester is
over, why make them take the course in the first place?_

Just because someone does not read about slavery all the time it does not mean
that the time he read about slavery he learned nothing. Same with
postmodernism or evolutionary psychology. Semester after semester you have
different things to learn about and if you get stuck into slavery or
postmodernism you might fall behind on the other parts of history or literary
theory.

The guys thinking is same as suggesting that during holidays people do not
work therefore they are not learning or doing anything while they are working.
I still remember some stories from literature of primary and secondary
schools, I still remember how to multiply and do fractions and percentages and
the pyntagora theorem etc, although I have not spent most of my summers doing
any of them. Learning is not about keeping the interest in it, is about
telling you what is and what can be done with it. What you do with the
knowledge might not be handy when you are still in school, but once you're
finished and into the real life much of it will become perhaps crucial as
fractions are just the basic thinking blocks to further more complex abstract
thinking needed for maths and that simple story in literature is the building
block for later more complex stories.

In short learning is about shaping ones mind not necessarily maintaining
interest in any one thing.

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GeneralMaximus
Unfortunately enough, _shaping one's mind_ these days involves gaming the
system. Find out what kind of papers the prof gives out and you're through

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Ardit20
yes, but even learning how to game the system is shaping of the mind, it
involves critical thinking to solving problems :P

