Piazzza Blog

Daniel Pink just released a much talked– and blogged–about book in which he argues that pride and a sense of purpose are bigger motivators than money. That book jumped to my mind when I saw today’s story on Piazzza, in which student Joe Lau asked a question at 3:50AM and student Evan Rosen answered 22 minutes later, closing with “Doubt these suggestions are terribly helpful, but might as well respond if I’m awake.” Turns out Evan’s answer was indeed helpful to Joe.

One of the central assumptions behind products like Piazzza is that there will always be answerers as well as askers, but this immediately gives rise to the question, “What’s the motivation”? We’ve always been curious as to which incentives, if any at all, need to exist for people, but the fact is that there are cases where we see people who answer just out of a desire to be helpful.

Upon further examination, this isn’t surprising, as there are plenty of intrinsic benefits to helping out your classmates. Usually explaining a concept to someone else is a good way to test how well you yourself understand the idea, it honestly doesn’t take too long to answer a question that you know, and often times it just feels good to help out your friends. But regardless of the payoff, this kind of altruism is very important to models such as Piazzza’s, and I believe it’s important to collaboration in general.

This is one of the reasons why I’m worried about excessive competition in the classroom… I’ve personally heard some horror stories about students deliberately tripping each other up to lower the curve. But then again, these are just rumors, and I haven’t encountered any of those kinds of things in my own personal experience. Is competition really becoming a problem, or am I just being paranoid? Feel free to post comments, etc., below.

One of our core beliefs here is that study groups are in general massively beneficial, but I don’t feel that this is true universally – if you’re working in a group that doesn’t share your study habits, style of thinking, etc., it can be very stressful.

If you’re in a class with people you don’t know, it’s helpful to shop around to find people that you can work with, but sometimes this is hard to do. Many times people are open to collaborating with strangers, but if the rest of the class is tight-knit, then it can be hard to find an in, and you don’t want to be “that guy” who goes around asking everyone to join his study group. Even when you aren’t in this situation, it’s often taxing (on yourself and on your inbox) to keep everyone organized. So study groups can be tricky sometimes.

One of Piazzza’s core strengths is its ability to facilitate online collaboration. I’d never had the thought that it could help with offline collaboration until I came across a story in which Stanford student Tomas Pueyo posted a question about forming a study group with like-minded students, and Prof. Jennifer Aaker referred him to students Roli Paragallo, Jen Paragallo, and Kat Wolf in half an hour.

This is beneficial collateral from Piazzza’s design. The site was designed to help students get help when they needed it, but the fact that it provides an environment where students can quickly and effectively communicate with their peers makes it useful for organizing offline as well.

A few posts ago I discussed how technology eased people’s workloads by helping them to overcome the limitations of working in the physical world. In this post I’ll discuss the ramifications of that principle with respect to textbook distribution and the dissemination of knowledge. Handheld reading devices like the Kindle (and now the iPad) have the potential to change publishing in general, and it’s an exciting prospect (to some, an unsettling one to others) to consider how they might function in the world of education. Read on to see what exactly we stand to gain from digital textbooks…

Continue reading ‘Beam Me Up – How Digital Textbooks Can Help Us Find and Process Information’ »

Everyone warns about the differences between high school and collegiate methods of education, and they are definitely myriad, but for this post I’d like to focus in on the two which I consider to be most substantial: information density and academic transparency. By information density, I mean a measure of both the quantity and the difficulty of the material covered in a given class, and by academic transparency, I mean the degree to which teachers, professors, teaching assistants, etc. are able to asses their students’ understanding of that material.

First, information density: this varies widely case-by-case, but as a general rule college has harder material than high school, and more of it. The practice of dividing the collegiate academic year into semesters or trimesters exacerbates the problem, and the upshot is usually heightened time pressure that can force out much of the mandatory review time that students are accustomed to getting in high school classes. Continue reading to see what the links are between this phenomenon and academic transparency…

Continue reading ‘“Like Drinking from a Fire Hose” – Why Academic Transparency is Especially Important in College Classes’ »

One of the things that I like the most about the technology we have today is its ability to overcome limitations of the physical world…that statement probably looks pretty inane at first glance, but when you think about it that principle is behind some of the most important advances in information technology. For example: the invention of the computer was extremely important, but the invention of the personal computer changed our lives because it allowed us to do research, play games, and conduct business from our homes. PCs freed us from many constraints intrinsic to dealing with the physical world, both in a spatial sense (having to drive to the post office, the library, the arcade) and in a temporal sense (having to schedule around when different services are open/closed). Roughly the same thing is happening with a Piazzza question I came around earlier, where Stanford student Geoffrey Woo asked a question at 2 in the morning and classmates Alex Easton and Andrew Easton replied within 1 (!) minute. Continue reading ‘Gone in Sixty Seconds: The PC Revolution and Some Impressive Answer Times’ »

PC LOAD LETTER is one of a number of esoteric printer errors¹ that have become staples of popular culture (c.f. “Office Space”), but more importantly it’s a model example of the kind of infuriating snafus that pop up at 3 AM the night before your 20-page paper is due. These kinds of problems are often obscure and ambiguous, but they’re usually pretty trivial as well. For example, the PC LOAD LETTER message merely indicates that you need to put letter paper in your printer, but the message is not very specific. Moreover, it’s not a grammatically complete sentence, and the words “PC” and “LOAD” can be misleading. Many people misinterpret the message as a request to re-send the print job from the computer itself, reading PC as “personal computer” when it actually is intended to mean “paper cassette”. In the rest of this post I’ll attempt to pinpoint what about problems like PC LOAD LETTER makes them so annoying. Continue reading ‘The Thick and Thin of It (or, What the $%&# is PC LOAD LETTER?)’ »