Getting the Best out of College or University

[Hugo]

Based on my last post where I recommended you access the learning community I give some tips on doing that. It will often be hard work and sometime annoying but its always in the end ultimately good and worthwhile.

Set up a Study Group - There are some cautions we might apply if we form study groups and that is to do mainly with their size, though there is no easy guide we might note again the work of Parkinson, of Parkinson's Law fame since many people have tested this law and modelled it mathematically and simulated it in use using computers. Interestingly, the work suggests quite strongly that group sizes of 6 members (US National Security council), 9 members (UK Monetary Policy Committee) and 20 members (many world governments have cabinets of this size) are good sizes if you want to get things debated and decisions made. But oddly, though no one quite understands why, a group with a membership of 8 will almost certainly fragment and factionalise and become unworkable.

The other thing you may note about groups is not only its size but its member types and the one type to avoid is colloquially call a ‘cuckoo’ because their only purpose in joining your group is to take what they can from it but give nothing to it and one often finds that they dominate the group by drawing everyone into helping them and very often they don’t attend meetings but will demand that everyone brief them or send them notes of what was discussed.

One must also say that although your group may have a “correct” size and composition there may be times it cannot function because information is not to hand or a stakeholder is not available. In such cases you must recognise this and ensure that you get whatever is needed in reports, notes or the presence of an expert (not technically a member of the group). If you don’t acknowledge that the group needs support you are in grave danger of making mistakes or rendering the group ineffective. Here as some brief suggestions for setting up and running a workable group.

Group Size – ideally, groups should be about 4-20 people but note that ideal sizes might be just 6 or 9 but never 8.

Location – you can meet via an online chat room at any time, you can meet in a Skype conference, you can meet in IM. All you need is to be a little disciplined in terms of getting together.

Leader –to set times, dates, mailing lists and just do the necessary administrative work.

Time – set a regular and convenient time to meet and meet regularly.

Duration – this is up to you but it is best to set a limit of about 1.5 hours on any one meeting.

Resources – be aware that every group needs resources and these might be notes, books and occasionally people are invited with special skills or knowledge or a stake in what is being discussed

Tutor – if you want to discuss something specific you can ask if the tutor could join with you but it best to work hard within your own group because if a tutor is there the focus is on them.

Topic – decide what you are going to discuss when you meet: look over test questions, review a lesson, review one another’s work but do not copy, look at difficulties encountered by a group member in the notes or workbook.​

Finally. all groups are social learning centres and I will have much more to say about this in a later post. But in your group you can have fun, you can make friends, you can meet just for the joy of it anywhere any time. Remember these people will often end up as friends for life.

 

[Hugo]

Social learning - it is better sometimes to learn from others than to muddle along on your own although no one quite knows how it works but in essence we copy behaviours from what we see around us or perhaps from what we read. However, if we only copy there is a catch because we need innovation to help us cope with change - one cannot copy everything blindly because the information may be wrong, outdated or unavailable. Possible models for social learning might be the:

Conformist Transmission Model - where we copy what is common not what is rare or to put it more simply we as it were follow the crowd.

Copy an expert – this is or can be an excellent strategy; because one hopes that by doing this you feel confident that you are learning the best practice or most relevant and current knowledge.

Copy the most successful – here you might look around and follow those who appear successful and whatever they do therefore might well be good for you. There are obvious dangers here, for example because the latest ‘celeb’ endorses diet X implies nothing about their actual practices or knowledge?
​

Social learning is in some way underpinned by an implicit trust in others. However, this has its own difficulty perhaps best illustrated by the famous Prisoners Dilemma which shows how in certain circumstances what happens when members of a group trust each other; they can choose a course of action that will bring them the best possible outcome for the group as a whole. But without trust each individual may well aim for his or her best personal outcome - which can lead to the worst possible outcome for all.

In the Prisoner's Dilemma two participants as prisoners who have been jointly charged with a crime (which they did commit) but questioned separately. The police only have enough evidence to be sure of a conviction for a minor offence, but not enough for the more serious crime. The prisoners made a pact that if they were caught they would not confess or turn witness on each other. If both prisoners hold true to their word they will only be convicted of the lesser offence. But the dilemma occurs when the police offer each prisoner a reduced prison term if they confess to the serious offence and give evidence against the other prisoner. This sounds like a good deal, confess and you get the minimum possible term in jail - although your partner will get the maximum. But then you realise that if both you and your partner confess then both will be given the maximum term in prison. So the dilemma is whether you trust your partner to keep quiet - and if you do, should you 'stitch them up' to get out of jail quicker?

It is easy to see from the above how in group leaning you may sadly always find there are individual who sponge on the group, lurking in the background scooping up what others have done but adding little or nothing themselves. Therefore with the above dilemma in mind we may state broadly three ways to learn:

Innovate by individual learning – this means you have to put in the hard graft and in so doing produce something new; not necessarily intrinsically new but you have uncovered the knowledge or worked hard to acquire the skill by your own dedicated and persistent effort - this perhaps is the most rewarding way to learn and has the most lasting benefits.

Observation - acquire new learning by social learning, implying there is a sense of trust from and toward you and a sharing in some sense of the burden involved. It is worth saying here that this form of leaning may easily become total exploitation where you take but give nothing.

Formal Teaching – one must not forget the role of formal teaching where there is an intensive effort to pass on skills and knowledge in a defined setting.​

In all learning you must take time out to rest and reflect and just let the learning ‘sink’ in. Research suggests that this might be up to 1/5 of the available time thus you space out learning by thinking about pay offs or tradeoffs. One final point is that in social learning there is a kind of parasitic dimension because eventually you run out of things to copy and then someone has to do the hard graft to gain new skills or knowledge that can then be copied. It follows it only pays in the long term to do social learning if there are some innovators around

Finally, when you copy, other individuals have probably filtered the stuff for you so you have to weight up the relative costs and benefits of sticking to a behaviour you have or inventing/copying a new one. As humans of course we are aware of how quick information gets outdated or a skill lost or no longer needed but you can look to the future, talk about what might happen and consider consequences.

 

[Hugo]

Re: Kewy

Two very important issues

Listen – many times in this list of strategies you will see the word “listen” because often we are very poor at doing just that and as a result stop ourselves learning because we only want to hear something agreeable or something we already know so we get confirmation instead of listening for useful and critical comment and that is most to be desired because it allows knowledge to grow. Be aware that often this takes the form of us reviewing what we thought we understood but a question pops up and we suddenly almost realize that in fact we don’t quite understand it.

Be cautious with Certainty and Assurance – one can often get into a position of certainty over your own knowledge; a kind of assurance that you have finally got there. Now this sounds wonderful and indeed it is nice to feel that you know and can do something well. The trouble is it can shut your mind down so reflecting from the standpoint of certitude allows no new meaning, no deeper understanding no surprises to emerge, indeed if you are certain you will implicitly tell yourself more or less that reflection is pointless because there is nothing new for you to learn.

It follows, that certitude may simply reinforce the way things are emotionally and intellectually so in that mindset reflection can become stale and unappealing and we rely on current experience and perspectives and so frustrate movement toward insight, or to put it more bluntly when something new comes along we “don’t want to know”. To counter this you need to always be on the lookout for new ideas and insights, they will not always be obvious, you do not have to swallow them wholesale but you do have to honestly chew them over, you have to be aware, seeing them as precious gifts aimed just at you, in this way you grow continually in knowledge, intelligence and emotional awareness and share what you have with others in your learning community.

It is tempting to avoid the idea of doubt because it can have negative connotations. But it is a way of thinking that is to be cherished because doubt, when you are not sure, drives you on to seek information and struggle until that doubt is removed – that is creative doubt. Doubt therefore is what brings you eventually to the truth, the answer. One might usefully recall what Dostoevsky in the Brothers Karamazov said “Without criticism there'd be nothing but Hosannas. But man cannot live by Hosannas alone, those Hosannas have to be tempered in the crucible of doubt..”

 

[Hugo]

Be a “Renaissance Man”
Life is about thinking, feeling and believing and these all go together. Unless you think for yourself you will never get an original thought and 50 years from now you will regret it. So with regard to learning you might ask, “what do I get out of it" or “what’s in it for me"? Well you might get a qualification or win a prize but is that all there is to it? Real learning changes you and makes you “think”, “feel” and really “believe”, perhaps for the first time because you are not afraid to face up to any question, you may not get an answer but you will learn something in the process. Often we talk about this experience as becoming a “Renaissance Man” which in modern parlance refers to someone who is constantly wanting to learn and master new knowledge and get new skills not just in one narrow area but in almost everything that interests him or her.

The genesis of the term was the renaissance in Europe driven in some large measure by Arab learning but also a new freedom to explore whatever questions came to mind, anything and everything could be 'dug up' and turned over; a return to learning and this learning spawned some of the greatest thinkers and practitioners the world has ever seen or is ever likely to see. You must understand that the great men and women of history were not just clever in one narrow field but had learning and skills in several: they were painters, historians, philosophers, mathematicians, runners, jumpers and medical practitioners all at the same time.

 

[Hugo]

Avoid the Quick Fix Outlook
The trouble with the “quick fix” when you don’t really understand something is that sooner or later it will come back to “bite you”, it will show itself again and again until you do fix it so don’t waste time with supposed short cuts. There is a saying “the shortest way round is the longest way home” and that is almost 100% true in learning. Another reason why there is no quick fix is that answering one question invariably makes you want to ask another, and another and so on in search of a deeper and deeper understanding – that is why research in its own peculiar way is always exciting.

Wittgenstein used an analogy here to explain learning and he thought of it like a high building with various levels reached by ladders. So as you wander round at one level, questioning and learning as you go eventually you bump into a new ladder and up you go to the next level where again you wander round and eventually find yet another new ladder and up you go again. But once you are up a ladder it’s taken away; you cannot go back down again or to put it more simply you cannot un-know something.

At each level one might struggle but eventually you will find the ladder (though it may not be the same ladder for everyone) and that learning experience will almost always be positive. It might not be comfortable because you may have to modify or even discard things you had certainty about but nevertheless it’s positive because always you are moving upward, there is no turning back. One might recall what Popper said in 1945 in this respect.

For those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost. The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism. Beginning with the suppression of reason and truth, we must end with the most brutal and violent destruction of all that is human. There is no return to a harmonious state of nature. If we turn back, then we must go the whole way - we must return to the beasts.​

Do you find this a fearful idea? No turning back? No it is an exciting idea because the future opens up before us. If we fear learning then it means we don't want to solve problems and if our forefathers took that attitude we would not have penicillin or eye surgery. Science has a history of great men and women who REFUSED to accept received wisdom and two of these come to mind. Sir Ronald Ronald Pitts Crick who refused to accept that nothing could be done about glaucoma (raised pressure in the eye that is a leading cause of preventable blindness) and so today we have early diagnoses and treatments. Secondly, in the early part of the last century there were hundreds of people studying the cosmos and gravity but the brilliant break through came from the 26 year old Albert Einstein, working alone as a patent clerk.

 

[Hugo]

Two thoughts for today.

Assemble Learning Resources – it is important that you assemble carefully all the notes, exercises, examples, time tables and so on that you need and this also applies to any group working needs. This is not usually difficulty but it does need discipline and some organisational skills. One needs a little common sense here else you will get swamped by all the things you think you need so a certain level of circumspection is required. One might recall again Parkinson’s Law “that work expands to fill the time available for its completion” and by extension “resources needs expand to such an extent it is impossible to do the work.” One might also say here that when you look at all you have to do and all the things you need if you are not very careful you create so many dependencies that again nothing gets done.

Be open minded – be ready to listen to new ideas even if they frighten or even offend you because unless you learn to listen, debate and analyse logically, learning will always be a chore for you and your intellectual growth stunted. Open minded does NOT means we have to accept or agree with everything we hear but it does mean we have to give it a hearing. Knowledge is a gift, millions before you have trodden this path and it’s their writings and example that has been passed to down to you freely as a gift. Open mindedness implies three particular things.

Be ready, without rushing, to consider new learning that comes your way
Be ready, without rushing, to modify what you know in the light of new learning
Be ready, without rushing, to discard what you know as no longer valid in the light of new learning​

Finally and perhaps most importantly, open mindedness means you try to become acutely aware of your own biases and predispositions – if you do not gain this awareness you will just dismiss things out of hand because they are ‘obviously’ of no value and that might be a disaster for you. As Professor Jacob Bronowski said "It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to hero-worship what is known but to question it"

 

[Hugo]

Some ideas

Read and Record - Read the learning material over again a few times and write your own short outline. If you feel unsure about something then use a book, the internet, look at the examples or call on the tutor again and it’s certain that sooner or later you will understand.

Keep an Ideas book - Make notes as ideas or questions occur to you no matter where you are, use your phone to do it or a small note book but whichever way is best, do it. Good ideas and questions can disappear in seconds and once lost they are often gone forever. I use a small note pad with a pencil attached (there is nothing more annoying that having a great idea, having a note book but no pencil!)

Use your Long Term Memory - You have both short and long term memory and practice putting what you know into long term memory by careful, directed repeated study effort. For example, when you find a new insight or understanding of something update your notes or at least make a concerted effort to put it into your long term memory. This might mean going to an answer that has been marked and re-writing it for your own learning consolidation, you might also tell the tutor, he would like to know if you have uncovered anything of interest – he/she will not mind no matter if it’s a minor point because it then become a shared experience.

Test yourself/Practice – look at the tutor’s examples or comments, see if you can spot where answers might be weak or improved or have elements that you don’t quite understand. Look at other people work and offer a critique and see what you can learn, look at samples but don’t just use them as things to copy from use them as things to learn from. It is simply astonishing that so many students never look at anything but their own work.

 

[Hugo]

SMART
This is just a way of thinking about projects and their essential elements. It is a little circular in its working but the basic idea is that once you have an overall project plan you need to turn your attention to developing goals or you can say objectives that will enable you to be successful. The idea is simple and in some ways obvious but the trouble is that it does not tell you how to get any of these very desirable features.

In summary, Goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, agreed upon, realistic and time-based however it does have a number of slightly different variations in the literature. Just a simple example, a goal/objective might be to hold a weekly meeting with project team members but the one key idea that binds the 5 elements together is to make sure there is always a milestone; that is an artefact that can be seen and used. In the case of the meeting mentioned above it might be a list of actions or a summary or a report that sort of thing. Essentially, we say that if there is no milestone (a kind of “proof”) then there has been no activity either. In the meeting case if there is no milestone then for all practical purposes we say the meeting did not take place.

Specific or one might say significant as made clear in the statement of milestone

Measurable and meaningful (hence the milestone) and that of itself might be motivational

Agreed upon with stakeholders but must be attainable and acceptable but action-oriented

Realistic in the sense of relevance and rewards within available resources so results-oriented

Time-based meaning timely, enough time, tangible (hence the milestone) and trackable​

 

[Hugo]

Code of Conduct and Discipline
Codes of conduct are a kind of definition of professionalism where you spell out ideals and duties. But they all have at least common elements.

Expectation of selflessness - we who accept responsibility for others – whether we are doctors, lawyers, teachers, public authorities, soldiers, or pilots - will place the needs and concerns of those who depend on us above our own.

Expectation of skill - we will aim for excellence in our knowledge, expertise and practice.

Expectation of trust-worthiness - we will be responsible in our personal behaviour toward our charges.

Expectation of discipline - discipline in following prudent procedure and practice and perhaps most importantly of functioning with others.

This last concept of discipline is almost entirely outside the lexicon of most professions who tend to hold up “autonomy” as a professional lodestar, a principle but it stands in direct opposition to discipline. But in a world in which success now requires large enterprises, teams of professionals, technologies, and knowledge that outstrips any one person's abilities; individual autonomy hardly seems the ideal we should aim for. It has the ring more of protectionism than of excellence.

 

[Hugo]

Structure
This word is used all over the place but it seems that few know what it is supposed to imply about the area to which it is applied. Giving something structure implies that it is supposed to be predictable towards a certain end. So if the degree course is said to be “structured” it implies that it has been designed with its end purpose in mind and that the structure we have given it assures us that we will get the required end result.

 

[Hugo]

Social learning - it is better sometimes to learn from others than to muddle along on your own although no one quite knows how it works but in essence we copy behaviours from what we see around us or perhaps from what we read. However, if we only copy there is a catch because we need innovation to help us cope with change - one cannot copy everything blindly because the information may be wrong, outdated or unavailable. Possible models for social learning might be the:

Conformist Transmission Model - where we copy what is common not what is rare or to put it more simply we as it were follow the crowd.

Copy an expert – this is or can be an excellent strategy; because one hopes that by doing this you feel confident that you are learning the best practice or most relevant and current knowledge.

Copy the most successful – here you might look around and follow those who appear successful and whatever they do therefore might well be good for you. There are obvious dangers here, for example because the latest ‘celeb’ endorses diet X implies nothing about their actual practices or knowledge?​

Social learning is in some way underpinned by an implicit trust in others. However, this has its own difficulty perhaps best illustrated by the famous Prisoners Dilemma which shows how in certain circumstances what happens to members of a group that trust each other; they can choose a course of action that will bring them the best possible outcome for the group as a whole. But without trust each individual may well aim for his or her best personal outcome - which can lead to the worst possible outcome for all.

In the Prisoner's Dilemma two participants as prisoners have been jointly charged with a crime (which they did commit) but questioned separately. The police only have enough evidence to be sure of a conviction for a minor offence, but not enough for the more serious crime. The prisoners made a pact that if they were caught they would not confess or turn witness on each other. If both prisoners hold true to their word they will only be convicted of the lesser offence. But the dilemma occurs when the police offer each prisoner a reduced prison term if they confess to the serious offence and give evidence against the other prisoner. This sounds like a good deal, confess and you get the minimum possible term in jail - although your partner will get the maximum. But then you realise that if both you and your partner confess then both will be given the maximum term in prison. So the dilemma is whether you trust your partner to keep quiet - and if you do, should you 'stitch them up' to get out of jail quicker?

It is easy to see from the above how in group leaning you may sadly always find there are individuals who sponge on the group, lurking in the background scooping up what others have done but adding little or nothing themselves. Therefore with the above dilemma in mind we may state broadly three ways to learn:

Innovate by individual learning – this means you have to put in the hard graft and in so doing produce something new; not necessarily intrinsically new but you have uncovered the knowledge or worked hard to acquire the skill by your own dedicated and persistent effort - this perhaps is the most rewarding way to learn and has the most lasting benefits.

Observation - acquire new learning by social learning, implying there is a sense of trust from and toward you and a sharing is some sense of the burden involved. It is worth saying here that this form of leaning may easily become total exploitation where you take but give nothing.

Formal Teaching – one must not forget the role of formal teaching where there is an intensive effort to pass on skills and knowledge in a defined setting.​

In all learning you must take time out to rest and reflect and just let the learning ‘sink’ in. Research suggests that this might be up to 1/5 of the available time thus you space out learning by thinking about pay offs or tradeoffs. One final point is that in social learning there is a kind of parasitic dimension because eventually you run out of things to copy and then someone has to do the hard graft to gain new skills or knowledge that can then be copied. It follows it only pays in the long term to do social learning if there are some innovators around

Finally, when you copy, other individuals have probably filtered the stuff for you so you have to weight up the relative costs and benefits of sticking to a behaviour you have or inventing/copying a new one. As humans of course we are aware of how quick information gets outdated or a skill lost or no longer needed but you can look to the future, talk about what might happen and consider consequences.