Circumnavigating the blogosphere today was an article entitled “How to Ace Your Finals Without Studying”. Naturally, as any student would, I read the article hoping to find some divine secret to enable me to ace tests without studying.

The premise of the article is that it is much more efficient to study in a way that forms relationships within the material in order to better understand it. Forming spiderwebs, as the author put it, enables us to recall information faster and better than the opposite way to store information, compartmentalizing. His analogy:

Compartmentalized learning is an exercise in insanity. A comparable strategy would be if the users of the web didn’t hyperlink anything. So to find any information you just had to keep typing addresses into your browser, hoping that it would pop up. Studying for these learners is akin to setting up thousands of domain names that all lead to the same information, so that you will hopefully get to the right place by just guessing enough.

To me, this is a great example of the importance of relationships and networks in something outside the internet and inter-personal connections. And while this all sounds great, implementing it could be a struggle. I can’t imaging drawing out a web of the terms involved in Psych 205… it would take a huge piece of paper and many hours to accomplish, and that’s only if you could appropriately link each term to the others. However, discovering the links among data is part of the learning process, the article says. Asking how one piece of information relates to other pieces is part of the process in forcing your brain to remember the webs so that you can recall the information later.

After I read the article I spent a few minutes looking for software that could do this type of thing effectively. As I review chapters in a textbook, it would be great to enter them in a system and easily form the connections to other pieces of data. I couldn’t really come up with much. Microsoft Visio does something along these lines, but it’s convoluted and expensive. Bubbl.us does the job fairly well, but it’s web-based and fairly light on the features. If anyone knows of better brainstorming/diagramming software, drop me a line.