Federico Bonfanti's Passport

Meta-skills

Define: "The IBIS graduate defines the right problem to solve or opportunity to pursue and frames it in a way that invites creative solutions."

Design: "The International Business Innovator develops ethically sound solutions that can better meet the end users’ needs and that generate value for the end users."

Exectute: "The IBIS graduate executes a variety of (specialist) activities as part of the running business."

Learn: "The Business Innovator continuously monitors his (learning) actions, activities and results."

Lead

Reflections and Insights

Development of the 5 meta-skills: During my first term here at IBIS I managed to get a fairly clear idea of what the 5 meta-skills actually mean, and also I have been able to identify when and where they have come into action as useful learning tools.

What’s in my backpack : During the classes of this subject I have been able to understand many aspects I didn’t even know about myself and my personality, here the Define and learn meta-skills made me understand new aspects of my personality and also clarified a lot of doubts I had had in the past about what I want to do and be in the future. Also another meta skill that I used in this subject is execute, with this I mean that the things I learnt about myself and about the potential of my actions, I tried to implement at my best, also in everyday situations I always tried to use what I had learnt in class.

Thinking and reasoning : Following these classes had a great effect on me , it really changed the way I think and act, the learn meta-skill here was very much of use, I learnt so many new things about how the human brain functions, I also learnt about system 1 and system 2 and how our brain works in different ways based on the situation and on the time it has to operate, I found it amazing that we are able to somewhat control if we assess a situation by using system 1 or 2 , this can only be done if we have good understanding of them but I am keen on reaching that point because I believe that if we find ways to obtain even a little bit more control over our brain’s functions then the possibilities are endless. Thanks to the notions learnt in this class I also changed the way I execute, by this I mean that my usual problem finding and solving scheme has changed , now I follow clear steps to identifiy and solve and issue. Another thing that at first I didn’t see the point of but then eventually understood is the importance of the Blog we had to write every week, in that blog I was forced to reflect on what was said in class, and I have to say that at first I found it hard but after a few times I got the hang of it and I understood that it was very useful to go over my notes and to think about things a bit after and from a different point of view. Another meta-skill that I think we managed to start developing is Lead, during the first team assignments we had the chance to either observe or to experience what leadership starts from, an example of this was when during the beginning of the course within my team I think that I tried to lead my team towards the common objective and I also took the responsability to assign different taskt to people based onwhat I thought was the best possible combination to achieve our goal . The following is a direct link to my personal page in which you can find a multitude of information about my thoughts about the class: https://federicobonfanti.wordpress.com/

Information skills: In this class the meta-skill learn was the one I felt the most, during these classes I learnt so many different ways to research for information that I didn’t know of , another great thing that was taught to us during this class was about how we can do more specific research easily through google which is an extremely important skill, most of our assignments have been based on research and having the ability to do that research much more in depth than I use to be able is for me a great advantage .

HTML: in this class aswell I found the possibility to develop and experience quite a few of the 5 meta-skills, the first one I identified was Define , because I gained information and knowledge about things that I didn’t know of before and started to understand what HTML is adn the basic vocabulary I needed to start learning, here comes in action the second meta-skill, Learn, this skill was used when I started to learn about the basics of HTML and coding of which I had almost no knowledge about, the third meta-skill we encoutered was Design, We had to design our own website, and I can assure that it is a particularly long and complicated process, and there are millions of possibilities when chosing the way we lay out the information on a web page. The last meta-skill I experienced was Execute, I identified this skill when I had to put all the information about us on the website we had created from scratch by using Dreamweaver.

International World of Business: studying IWoB I had the possibility to understand and use more than one meta-skill, we executed by finding possible solutions for the issues presented to me and in the realization of the poster, the define meta-skill was mostly used in understandinf what the issues presented to me really were and to understand certain economic theroies and transitions., the design meta-skill was in my opinion very present when I had to make the poster about an ecomonic event , in my case it was the South African Apartheid, in the process of making that poster I had to make quite a few drafts in order to design the way it was going to look in my head before laying it down on paper, being able to create a mental image in our mind before creating something is definetly going to be useful in the future and it will be saving me and many other people a lot of time and in a time in which time is said to be money, saving money is always a good thing.

Fundamentals of business: While studying FoB I also saw the chance to experience almost all of the 5 meta-skills the course is based on, I got the chance to fully experience the Define meta-skill and to obtain crucial knowledge about what the BMC is and the various components of it, the Learn meta-skill was continuously in use during mr. Van der Sleen’s classes, I widely expanded my knowledge of business theory, and I also appreciated the way he taught the class and I believe that his apporach to teaching contributed to the way I learnt. The third meta-skill that i personally experienced is Design, I believe that when we had to create our own BMC’s of different companies havign a clear idea of how the layout should be is definetly going to save us both time and also a few steps on the way, the last meta-skill that I was able to identify in this class was Execute, I am certain that in the moment in which we had to hand in our own BMC’s, and they had to be fully completed with the information that we were able to find on our own we really understood the meaning of the concept “Execute” my personal understading was for us students to learn to put together all the information we were able to gather with the sources we had.