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At Least I Minored in PPOWER

Via Timothy Burke, I ran across Course Hero, a Web 2.0 startup whose mission is:

Accelerating and maximizing educational breakthroughs ("Ah-Ha" moments) of students from inquiry to Course Hero Responses via an open, best-of-breed content sharing model.

Or in other words, a site for collecting student notes and papers. Now, Prof. Burke isn't particularly worried about term paper download sites in general. (He has an excellent defense strategy — don't hand out boring, easily-copied assignments.) However, in the case of Course Hero he observes,

"What you find in the folders for Swarthmore is a bunch of junk pulled straight out of specific folders on the server, with the server folder titles on it, most of them connected to the oldest layers of our web presence. Almost none of the stuff in there has got anything to do with actual courses taught here: it’s some old .pdf handouts, some faculty c.v.s, a few papers or publications by faculty. Useless to anyone, especially to some would-be plagiariser at another college who is hunting for a paper to rip off. It’s a lot of noise. But seriously, don’t even try to pretend that this is all coming from user submissions, that’s laughable."

It seems like a bad idea In These Economic Times (TM) to launch a site whose business model is obviated by typing “site:swarthmore.edu {query}” into Yahoo! or Google or Bing. But I'm not an MBA or a VC, so what do I know.

Anyway, I was particularly tickled not by the bad content, but the bad metadata. Here's the landing page for my alma mater:

Harvey Mudd College) is a private university in California. Harvey Mudd College has over 738 undergraduate students. The top 10 departments are CS, ENG, MATH, LIT, E, FOOL, PPOWER, WIN, WMF, and WINW.

What an idiot I was to major in FOOL!

Posted by Evan Goer on Oct. 07, 2009 at 8:04 AM | Comments (3)

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