Paul’s blog

I’ve previously commented on “A Vision of Students Today” but I came upon an article that is also somewhat relevant or perhaps just depressing.

From the transcript of the video we find some of the following quotes:

“I complete 49% of the readings assigned to me. Only 26% … relative to my life”

“I will write 42 pages for class this semester And over 500 pages of email”

But is the situation any better for our faculty and researchers?

Take a look at “Tomorrow’s Successful Research Organizations Face a Critical Challenge” by Scott Deutsch in Scientific Computing. In the article Mr. Deutsch reports that “approximately 31 percent is spent communicating with others, 24 percent is wasted waiting for decisions to be made or for something to happen, and 34 percent is spent performing administrative tasks — leaving just 11 percent of a researcher’s time to devote to actual research. Further studies have found that over 80 percent of this research time (11 percent) is spent doing work that is the same or very similar to work previously done, and that actually only 2.2 percent of a researcher’s time is spent performing novel research.”

Perhaps traditional teaching methods are more efficient than the students realize? Will the numbers quoted above dissuade a promising student from pursuing a career in research? Or will they inspire someone to tackle the issues that create these inefficiencies and enable researchers to spend more time performing novel research?