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Tales From The College: Assorted Nuts

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  • #31
    Quoth Bumbershoot View Post
    Another aspect of the stupid university mindset? If you copy, you are condemned forever. If you come up with an original idea? Forget it. You don't have any peer-reviewed articles to cite.
    Right? If you have an original or near original idea good luck proving your point without peer-reviewed stuff to cite. Which defeats the entire purpose of originality. But if its not 100% your own brain child then you must be deliberately coping someone else's hard work. And once they've called you out for plagiarism, even if you're later cleared, if it ever gets out that's all anyone in power will hear.

    There's different kinds of knowledge too. There's the Singular Knowlege, which is anything you learn for yourself or from others regardless of the source or means. And there's the Colective Knowledge. Which comes from a group of individuals to create or come up with a means of either solving a problem or creating new stuff (be it material object, an idea/hypothesis, etc).

    An example being: Most people drive a car. Therefore you have to learn certain things in order to effectively use this object. Ie. How to drive on the road, how to fill the car with gas, what the signs mean... And if you have any intelligence then how to change a tire or top up and check fluids (oil, coolant, windshield washer fluid, etc.).

    These are all examples of Singular Knowledge. You are taking information from once source or another (whether it's taking a course on safe driving, a book about signs, knowledge handed down from parents on how to do basic maintenance).

    But if your car suddenly decides to do strange things or the breaks start squeaking. That is where you rely on the Collective Knowledge and take it in to a damn mechanic.

    You don't need to know how every aspect of how a car works or how to grow vegetables or how to repair a roof of a tree takes it out. There are people who specialize in those fields, who overall benifit society and allow people to live as easily as they do. Can you fix complicated car problems? Or grow your own garden? Do your own home repairs? Sure. Anyone can learn but to do so to an extent in every aspect of living would be impossible to account for unless you are immortal (and if you are please tell me the secret).

    It's why humanity as a species divides itself my careers and through that social and economic classes. It takes much more time to learn how to transport organs then to become a school nurse. So we adjust pay accordingly and two people might live very different lifestyles because of it. What's stopping the school nurse from becoming a doctor. It could be time, money, interests... And the nurse might be able to handle most shit that comes through her doors but they always have the option of calling someone more specialized if necessary.

    Sometimes I think schools get so focussed on what you know as an individual and the information you are gaining through whatever resources that they completely overlook the fact that when you graduate with that fancy ass diploma you are probably going to be working [i]with[\i] people who will not have the exact same job as you but who's job may provide you with critical information to do your own work or your job may involve passing key information on. Which then forms a Collective source of information and skills. Your job does not rely on your skills alone. Googling will not help because you need other people to do things that then provide you with the tools to do your job.

    School does not bother to acknowledge that at all. It puts all the pressure on the student to get and have the information.

    Again with a car.

    You have basic knowledge on how to keep things running.
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    Your mechanic has means of solving all the complex problems
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    Someone makes the tools they use. Without those tools of the trade they are useless.
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    Someone comes up with a price for the service of a mechanic.
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    All the people behind the scenes figuring out what is appropriate for what job to keep competitive.
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    Someone owns the business, decides all the really important things.

    All of these jobs involved are individually considered Singular Knowledge but how they interact with each other, how they fit together to make a prosperous business that in someway benifits the customer is an example of the Collective knowledge.

    If schools started incorporating how Collective Knowledge works and how it can be made to work in your favour rather then just shoving information at you and trying to force everyone into the mindset of if I do my job everything will work then I'd bet there would be a marked improvement on society. From advancements in medicine to improvements in design.

    I know what I need to in order to operate a car but I don't know what makes it work. But I do know people who do know these things. So when my car breaks down because somethings not right I can get it fixed.

    Companies are about efficiency. Most of them don't give two shits about the employees so long as the bossman makes money. If you could better understand how someone else's job and more importantly how their job effects yours the. You could better do your job because instead of assimilating a whole shit ton of info you could cherry pick what is necessary for the people who's jobs interact with yours and for your job.

    We've all done it on a smaller scale in school. You know a teacher favours a certain viewpoint or is dead set on this is the way it is regardless of reality or facts and you cater your essay or report to that viewpoint to get a better mark (teacher are human too, even if some of them don't seem it.).

    But whereas that's relying on on a known bias imagine if someone taught you how to work that Collective Knowledge to gain. Could you not pair up someone specialized hereditary genetics with someone specialized in genetic mutations (which is already a thing) to find out how hereditary might determine the susceptibility to certain diseases? That's a very straight forward simple example. Things like that already occur (after all didn't we all do group projects in elementary school?). But could you imagine how instead of just having one person pair up certain jobs that made sense to pair up that everyone was trained in school how to recognize when someone's work while matched up with your own could produce something beyond expectations rather then the current you do yours and I do mine and if one of us stumbles on the others work we might infer something from it. Ever notice how brainstorming with a group produces better results then each person brainstorming on something and then getting together. In the first ideas build on each other. In the second you spend more time eliminating duplicate work and then having to go back over so you can be sure nothing's missed before moving forward again. Both groups might reach the goal eventually but you can bet the one's who worked Collectively rather then Singularly will come up with a better answer and sooner.
    Don’t worry about what I’m up to. Worry about why you are worried about what I’m up to.

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    • #32
      Quoth LadyofArc View Post

      This is why we take notes...

      We also have ANOTHER student who's appealing a fail grade, this one from them failing their clinical placement. They had a meeting with Super Manager and during it, it came out that apparently the mentor who assessed them disappeared for around 2-3 hours.

      While we will be investigating that further, there are copious amounts of notes to back up the student's fail grade, so the grade will likely not be changing.
      So I have a follow up to this appeal.

      Unsurprisingly, both appeals in this post failed. But during those appeals, a LOT of stuff came out that was quite interesting.

      As it happened, this particular student had everything work AGAINST them. Including:

      - Claims that the mentor disappeared for 2-3 hours were not backed up when we talked to the hospital staff. The mentor in question did leave the student for periods during their shift, but they were for incidental reasons eg bathroom, lunch, report writing. Nothing unreasonable there at all.

      - The student also claimed that another student (student B) would back up the claim that another mentor had discussed their progress with them. When we contacted Student B however, they proceeded to tell us that at no point was the student's progress discussed with them, but in fact the mentor in question had actually suggested things to help the student! Far cry from the "Oh, other students knew that I was failing," claim he made.

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