Friday, May 25, 2007

Problem Solving Skills


Some works by George Polya captured my attention recently. In part, this happened because some of his works provide very powerful models to characterize large scale content/resource sharing communities (or systems, if you wish). For example, the Urn Model is suggested by Golder and Hubberman as a model to explain collaborative tagging behavior.

Another interesting work, which I am reading now, is the book How to Solve It. This book brings a methodology to motivate students on the process of strengthening their problem solving skills. I wonder how different it would be if some undergrad professors inspired a little bit of their course mechanics on that material.