Sign me up: the fifth class (actual fifth class, that is)

The adventures in the Google's Power Searching course continue. Here's the link to the previous part. And here are the random thoughts.


Random thought #1. "Huh. But I haven't seen the topics of class 5 before - why would I think I'd already taken it?" So yeah, it just so happened that Class 4 had 5 lessons in it and after completing those I congratulated myself on completing the fifth class. Thank you, brain.

Random thought #2. "These latter classes do require a whole lot more attention than the first ones!" The second part of the course is no longer about just the nifty tools you can use but the ways to put them in use. So, even though the lessons are similar in length, the world of information each bit of instruction drags along into the learner's attention is far larger. At this point I am no longer using the text and the slides; at this point the actual person explaining how he does what he does helps to grasp the ideas better.

Random thought #3. "These lessons are primarily about overcoming the confirmation bias, aren't they? Yup, they said the magic word too!" I can't even count the times I've searched for the "fact I wanted to find". I don't feel totally crappy about that because oftentimes I was attempting to locate a "proper" source for something I "knew"/ knew I'd learned beforehand. But I've also tried to find the statistics to match my preconceived ideas so there's that.

Random thought #4. They're emphasising the importance of context. (And the relation between vocabulary and context.) Now they're speaking my language again :)

Random thought #5. "Whenever someone says something of substance and impact, other people will go to great lengths to attribute those words to someone famous." A lot of this class's focus was on quotes - identifying quotes origins, the anatomy of quotes that came from other places than thought, quotes that weren't quotes at all, and so on. I gotta admit: I like me some good quotes - oftentimes someone else has already found the perfect words to say what I mean. I also gotta admit: I like me some good origin story - as in, I like finding out the actual origin point of things, ideas, custom , words, etc. (as opposed to their popularized stories). So all this kept my interest up.

Random thought #6. "Search result relevance does not equal source credibility." I think they could make it a weekly class just to remind that one idea and never run out of learners. I know I need the reminder every now and then.


I know the perfect pretty picture I'd like to add to the end here, but I can't seem to find it just at the moment. It features a stick figure sitting on toilet, reading off the toilet wall and saying s/he is looking for inspiration from wrong places sometimes. I know I've got the file itself saved somewhere so I'm going to try out that search by image trick from class 4.


ED: Apparently I'd deleted it but finally the quote (on the booth wall) did the trick. Here we go:

(It is one of my very favourite images, ever.)