Meta Congnitive Skills

This post will start a series of posts where I will try to show my thoughts on questions suggested by Cecile Badenhorst in "Dissertation Writing. Research Journey" book.
Learning is a part of life? In my case life is a part of learning. What we create becomes a part of the universe and stays there after our lives are finished. And it is important to emphasize that learning for me is part of creation. How can you create something that you do not understand? If something like this happens - and it can happen that we create something without fully understanding it - it is the creation of luck, if we want to claim the ownership of this creation - we still have to go and understand how it happened.
I must say - I like luck. I often invent something, achieve something by the virtue of luck and intuition, but I still want to understand it.
How do I learn? There are 2 main ways for me, which complement each other. I remember what I see. I can learn a foreign word if I know the spelling, otherwise it escapes my memory. Today I was looking for my car after the marathon - I must say that I had no idea where can it be as the long running flushed my mind and I came back to the everyday life with a clean relaxed brain like a newborn baby. I was lucky enough that this newborn brain remembered that I had a car at all, but asking for its location was only bringing back a picture of a sign with road names on it, which I could not read, but could say that one was the street that I turned into yesterday and another one was short and shaped nicely. Shaped nicely usually means a balance between hight of letters and the length of the word. I do not remember the name of the street again, but I think it was Briones (see the shape?). So I had to walk around all the neighbourhood looking for the sign (I could have run another 12 km in this time! ).
Another part of learning is understanding how to get there. If I know that hipotenuse = adjacent/cos(A), because of the definition of cosine - I do trust this knowledge. If I see the map and drive following it - I know where I am. If I know something that I can't prove - I don't trust this knowledge and leave it in the area of "supposed".
Something proveable is easy - who cares about things that are easy? Leave it for those to whom they are difficult :-) I prefer supposed knowledge - things that do not follow common logic. Just as a side note - this book is very useful:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/psa/
So, some things we can't prove, but we have to deal with them. Strictly speaking, these things comprise our world, i.e. the observer affects the experiment (I think it is relativity theory, but do not remember exactly who noticed it initially). My current interest is in people as social beings.
I guess I can say that I have experience in the topic - it just takes paying attention to people who surround you to learn about culture and communication . The practical part is acting within this environment. So maybe the missing component of my learning abilities - practical experiment. As I always want the prove and in some cases I can't prove it using logic - I will try to prove it by experiment.
The other aspect is how to analyse the experiment? I guess for simple scenarios statistics should be fine, but more complex ones require deep analysis. It is not always possible to create a proper experimental enviroment and even more difficult to repeat the experiments in social interactions. It takes a lot of creativity to find similar situations proving certain concepts. But this is a topic for another blog post...

Life as a journey - Part 2

Part 1 did not explain about the journey - right? What I'm trying to do now - follow the prescribed book "Research Journey" by Cecile Badenhurst - and write my reflections :-) So don't judge for being inconsistent - going to add this component later.
Cecile has a beautiful allegory - a hero myth - start a research as a journey full of challenges, dangers and tests - get a reward at the end, get changed by the journey and return to the normal world.
My earlier blog attempt (http://loskutova.blogspot.com/) mentioned a related concept: "Let the world change you". Originally it continues: ".. and then change the world". I'm sure the quotations are not exact, but I hope I do not alter the meaning too much.
I think this way of thinking helps me - I have difficulties accepting life as a set of goals to achieve - I like the journey, I like to try, I like to fail, I like to succeed, I like to be lucky, I like to get new challenges. Sometimes I rush, sometimes just enjoy the moment. I will think more about it during the marathon tomorrow.
P.S. I think I will do my main research thinking during Comrades. Maybe not :-)

Life as a journey

I'm starting a research program on communication. This is a fascinating topic - an art, science, talent? How do you communicate? How do you make another person understand you? How do you make another person NOT understand you? It is so different on different levels - we have culture that prescribes us a way to communicate. But what culture are we talking about? Nation? Religion? Profession? Country? Language? They all intersect and differ. Add personal differences on top. Ok, here comes the research topic: "Communication and Cultural Diversity Management In Virtual Software Development Team"