Group items tagged

Heuristics & problem managing from approach, research, visualization & planning

"[Good ideas] come from crowds, they come from networks. You know we have this clichéd idea of the lone genius having the eureka moment. Slow hunch: John Snow, who discovered how cholera was spread, had no 'Eureka' moment "But in fact when you go back and you look at the history of innovation it turns out that so often there is this quiet collaborative process that goes on, either in people building on other peoples' ideas, but also in borrowing ideas, or tools or approaches to problems. "The ultimate idea comes from this remixing of various different components. There still are smart people and there still are people that have moments where they see the world differently in a flash. "But for the most part it's a slower and more networked process than we give them credit for."

This paper examines undergraduate student use of laptop computers during a lecture-style class that includes substantial problem-solving activities and graphic-based content. The study includes both a self-reported use component collected from student surveys as well as a monitored use component collected via activity monitoring "spyware" installed on student laptops. We categorize multitasking activities into productive (course-related) versus distractive (non course-related) tasks. Quantifiable measures of software multitasking behavior are introduced to measure the frequency of student multitasking, the duration of student multitasking, and the extent to which students engage in distractive versus productive tasks.

At a recent meeting of the 23-year-old MIT Entrepreneurs Club, one recent graduate of the Sloan School of Management described his plans for a business - one based on his solution to a little-recognized problem that currently costs airlines $10 billion a year. Another alumnus, an engineer who recently retired after a career in the telecom business, talked about his patented approach to fighting wildfires in remote locations. A new MIT graduate student, who just earned his undergraduate degree from the Institute this spring, spoke of three different startup businesses he's currently cultivating in his spare time - one of which he co-founded during his freshman year at the Institute.