What Happened to the Thiel Fellows

Re:What Happened to the Thiel Fellows by vivekd on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @01:27PM (#13124839)

I remember Bill Gates said in an interview that he still regularly takes online courses on subjects such as oceanography. People still love to learn, just, I don't think a formal college environment with grades and exams is necessarily a pre-requisite for learning. There are so many alternative mechanisms out there.

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Re:What Happened to the Thiel Fellows by mcguire on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @06:06PM (#13127063)

You can learn a lot casually. On the other hand, it is considerably less effective:

* Many people talk about forgetting things as soon as the test is over, but why would they remember it even that long without a test?

* A formal course is more than just reading the textbook; it's a guided tour by someone who is a professional teacher as well as someone working in the field. (Yes, some are bad. Most are at least middling and some a very good.)

* And then there is the whole issue of things you wouldn't study on your own if you weren't required to. A CS degree, for example, is more than a bunch of CS courses.

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Re:What Happened to the Thiel Fellows by sextus_prop on Thursday December 08, 2016 @07:49AM (#13129953)

> Many people talk about forgetting things as soon as the test is over It could be argued that when learning specifically for a test people tend to forget things asap, because things learned this way now carry with them a spirit of something being forced on you.

>but why would they remember it even that long without a test? If you learn something that bores you, sure. But I claim that when you learn not for a test you would properly inspect things and their domains and try to get insights into them, their necessity to the object being studied and so on.

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