Month: July 2010

What you get when you graduate

I was thinking about writing a piece on what you get when you graduate.  The recognition, the skills, the anecdotes, the endless possibilities…

It could have been epic.

Then Joe Oliver came along.  Oliver, Sheffield’s Education Officer, recently graduated himself.  He summed up what you get when you graduate with great clarity:

“I officially added six extra letters to my name, now being able to call myself B.A. (hons), on application forms, name badges, online pizza delivery forms, tombstones, and the like.”

Anyone who did a B.Sc must be laughing.  Seven extra letters surely beats six. 😛

My congratulations to Joe and to everyone else who graduates this year.  Please remember to share some of your pizza with me.  I’d be terribly grateful.

Ripping up the ‘generation’ labels

A month ago, I wrote that “Gen-Y is a term to debate, not mould into a definitive shape”.

Here’s another interesting take on position within a ‘generation’, courtesy of Jessica Miller-Merrell:

“The idea and use of creating labels like generational labels and categorizing those around us has been a characteristic of human beings since the beginning of time. […]

“Instead of labeling one another, I encourage a different and unorthodox approach, human interaction, engagement, and good old fashioned conversations with your employees, friends, customers, peers, or whomever.  Of course my impressions could be due to the fact that I’m a Gen XY and Cusper myself.  At 32 years old, I’m essentially an inbetween who is often mis-labeled and mis-understood…Cuspers like myself feel extremely comfortable being uncomfortable.  Being inbetween and feeling as an outsider to your own generational label among other things is normal.”

Who chooses which generation you should be plumped with?  You can’t choose and neither can anyone else.

Your generation lasts a lifetime.  But it will take longer than a lifetime to work out what that generation is called.

EduLinks – More debt, fewer exams, just as much fun

Happy Friday. A few more links for you.

Psychology Today – Coffee Vs. Energy Drinks: Caffeine Wars

How much do you know about the caffeine you consume? And what can you do to fix the caffeine fix?

Speak Schmeak – Yes, you are being judged

When you speak and when you’re presenting yourself, it’s common to worry about what people think.  But your audience is not looking for you to slip up.  They are paying attention, but not how you think:

“The audience is trying to determine what their relationship is with you. Can they trust you? Will you listen to them and understand where they’re coming from? Is this relationship worth their time and money?

“Your job on stage is to connect, relate, and deliver. You don’t have to be like your audience to do so, but you do have to be compatible with what your audience expects from a speaker in the general sense, and with what the audience is looking for specific to your topic.”

I think the same can be said when you meet new people.  You may not be up on stage, but people are trying to fit you in to their lives.

From James Dunn – Why a university degree is still worth its weight in debt

“My degree in archaeology from Durham University seems unimpressive on paper, three years with a mountain of debt snowballing out of control and a degree that was not conducive to employment in journalism, a market that is furiously competitive out of recession let alone in it. This, however, is a gross misinterpretation as the common saying ‘Don’t let your degree get in the way of your education’ rings very true in my case.”

Harvard Magazine – Are final exams on the way out?

A lengthy exam at the end of a module?  That may well be falling out of fashion.

Learning by doing, not by listening

A great little piece well worth spending 3 minutes on.  You’ll be respected not for the answers you give, but for the questions you ask…

JP Rangaswami’s life was turned around when a teacher told him that he would be respected not for the answers he gave, but for the questions he asked.  Rangaswami suggests, “An intelligent answer you can give half-asleep. An intelligent question requires at least one eye open”.  He also says that “Words like ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are wasting time”.

More info at JP Rangaswami’s site, Confused of Calcutta [link thanks to @nlafferty]

To Do: Dissertation

Just found this site.  The tagline is: “Motivation and Encouragement for Dissertation Writers Across Disciplines”

In other words, get reading this site when you start working on your dissertation.  You’ll be happier for it!

Awesome Highlighter

Enjoy highlighting in your books and course guides?  Now you can use a highlighter on web pages, make notes, send your annotated pages to classmates, and all sorts.  There’s even a helpful bookmarklet for instant access and a Firefox addon for even more functionality. Hat tip to @jennifermjones for this EduLink.

What is learning?

It doesn’t matter HOW you learn if you ARE learning.

Perhaps an over-simplified point.  Nevertheless, how you learn has to come first.  What you learn comes next.  Without the ‘how’ you can’t have the ‘what’.

photo by Jeezny

photo by Jeezny

But where does ‘how’ end and ‘what’ begin?  Does a person know when they are learning?  At what point do you know you’re learning the right thing?  Does a top grade prove you’ve mastered:

  • The ‘how’;
  • the ‘what’;
  • both;
  • neither;
  • or something else entirely?

Take the person next to you in a seminar.  They may be on the same degree, studying the same modules, but you will both learn different things and you will learn in different ways.

For all the similarities between yourself and a person next to you, your focus is unique, so you must be responsible for what you learn.  You can learn to play the trumpet, but it won’t be worth a thing if you were meant to be researching computational physics.  A stupid example, but it shows that a link must be achieved before you can learn with a particular end goal in mind.

If that’s the case, what exactly is the ‘what’ of learning?  You can learn anything, but the true relevance is in tackling what is appropriate to your situation.

In this regard, you can only take an ‘educated guess’.  That guess may be quite obvious to you and it may be the same guess the vast majority of people make.  However, this doesn’t make it any more objective.  Your job in learning is to develop, to understand, to question, and to explore.

That’s a pretty open remit.

But you’re not alone.  Guidance and motivation are provided along the way.  Tutors help shape your experience and give you a platform to start from.

At this point, learning itself is more important than the tutor or the student.  Tutors cannot be expected to dish out answers and clear the way until a single, specific path is left open.  Many paths are available, none of which are simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Learning is subjective.  And that’s okay, because higher learning wouldn’t exist without subjectivity, no matter what the topic.  Break things down to their core concepts and it’s still difficult to give a definitive answer to a question such as, “What is learning?”

Such uncertainty sounds negative at first.  But it’s not.  It’s exciting.  The possibilities are endless.  And the power is yours.

You need to do one thing.  It’s the most simple and most difficult thing about study within higher education.  You must take responsibility for your learning.  ‘How’ you learn and ‘what’ you learn will somehow fit in naturally after that.  But you need to want it.

Keep going down the road long enough and you may even find that valid link between trumpet playing and computational physics.