Information skills

The new skills acquired by this lectures are very useful and I'm extremely happy that I got this subject in my program. So many different ways of using and organizing sources were shown to us. Before my ways of doing research were using Google, but there are many other different tools that I learned about. Last year I was studying a similar study in another university. It was again applied and there was many research to be done. If I had this skills then it would have been much easier for me to do my reports, and furthermore they would have been on a different, more sophisticated, level.

I got introduced to different tricks, which I could use to make my search more powerful, such as Boolean operators, truncation and exact phrase. For example, three basic boolean operators are AND, OR and NOT. Just by using these phrases you make your search question more concrete and this narrows your results.

The tools and ways of doing research I preffer from my freshly acquired skills are using different databases. The one I find most convenient is the school's digital library. It is easy and fast to use, full with many academic journals and articles and furthermore the information is reliable. As I mentioned earlier in my previous year, in my research I used only google. The problem there was that in google one can find all kind of different information from small to large sites. All kinds of sources with all kinds of information, the worst thing was I was not sure if I could trust the source or if it was relevant for my case.

Now I know which information can be reliable. I use the craap - test(currency,relevance,authority,accuracy,purpose). Whenever scrolling thru information in google, I can quickly apply this and find out what I need.

Other mistake which I encountered last year was plagiarism. Stealing and publishing/using thoughts,ideas, or expressions of another author. I was just not aware of this illegal action which has its consequences. This could be easily avoided by Citations,Paraphrasing or making a reference list according to the APA style.

But how do I deal with all sources and all kinds of information?
I enjoy to read all of kinds of different articles in my spare time. In most of the cases I also get inspired from them and come up with some ideas of my own. These articles could be of any kind, because my way of picking articles is just by interests - whatever catches my eye. However there are often times when I want to save them for later or store them somehow. Well now I can very simply store on organize all of this on my mendele or evernote. Also I can use this softwares for the future and have one place where I keep all my information for my projects.

As a whole informations skills, started as some class in which I thought it does not really benefits me to be in this lectures. However later on I realised how beneficial this actually is and what great help it is for my future. I feel much more save when it comes to writing a report, now I can avoid plagiarism by having a clear reference list, additionally I know how to make my research more deeper and be ready to write one highly graded thesis, which has thorough methodology.

So far only from information skills I have grown and expanded my knowledge to a higher level.

What's in my backpack?

The aim of this class was maximizing your potential. The class was on a journey to discover themselves if they have not, or in my case to get to know myself better. There were deeper discussions on passion and ambitions,when without one cannot reach success, learning styles and our personality. But the most important thing I did during these workshops was creating my master plan which will help me on way to fulfilling my ultimate career goal.

In another class we did two tests which gave me greater insights about myself. One of tests was called Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. According to it I am ESFP(extrovert,sensing,feeling and perceiving) - The Entertainer. All the types were divided into 4 groups: Analysts, Diplomats, Sentinels, Explorers. I was in the group of explorers, surprisingly in my category there was only one other student. Again surprisingly we found quite a lot of similarities between each other, for example our zodiac signs and other general perceived things were matching. After seeing our types we went on 16 Personalities.com. There you have a very detailed description about yourself. One of the things which I looked in more carefully where my strengths and weaknesses.

Strenghts

• Bold - Wants to experience everything there is to experience.
• Original - Traditions and expecations are secondary, if a consideration at all.
• Aesthetics and Shownmanship - Injects creativity into his words and actions.
• Practical - Prefers to see and do than wax philosophical about "wat-ifs"
• Observant - Aware and noticing real, tangible things and changes
• Excellent People Skills - Loves paying attetion to people, achiving happiness and satisfaction stem from the time spent with the people enjoyeied being with.

Weaknesses

• Sensitive - Strongly emotiona, and very vulnerable to criticism
• Conflict - Averse - Sometimes ingore and avoid conflict entirely
• Easily Bored - Without constant excitement, finds ways to create it himself.
• Poor Long - Term Planner - rarely makes detailed plans for future.
• Unfocused - Anything that requires long - term dedication and focus is a particular challenge.

Throughout the workshops we also did other interesting exercises that broaden my horizon - The golden circle and elevator pitch. They were fun to do and also helped in the process of revealing the potential I have. I had never heard about the elevator pitch before, but it is a fun and interesting way to pitch yourself to somebody you could usually not have the chance to. Giving him a very brief story about yourself with your core values and strengths shows that you are organized and to the point person.

We were visited by gaming design innovator Gabriel Mcintyre. He started his talk with the Game Beyond. Basically this was a virtual reality game in which the real world is used as the platform. The person who played the game faces a real world problems but solves them through the game. I knew about some virtual reality games but never about a thing like this. I was so amazed by his perspective of the world and his innovative ideas about using games as a solution to everything from the smallest scale,every day problems, to the biggest scale like education and business. The moment in which I realised that this is the right university program for me was during his visit. He really made me think about my future career and I came to the realisation that this is exactly what I want to do. Here I am not speaking about gamification particularly but I mean that I discovered my drive in life which is solving problems through different ways than traditionals. I have never liked to follow the traditionals ways I had always looked at what is the best way for me and Mcintyre made me see that in my past. What happened is that I connected the dots from my present, had a realisation in the present and saw the way I want to build my future. This is something we did as an exercise as well in one of the workshops, before Gabriel's visit. Only then I was not really able to do that. From his speech I got highly inspired and came up some great ideas about my future which give me the right motivation to work hard and at the same time enjoying my work.

Thinking and Reasoning

For me this class was by far the most interesting one. It was divided into 2 major parts - the first part was focus more and thinking and the second on reasoning, hence the name of the class. Every topic in this lecture was able to capture my interest. The way we set of this class made me think a lot, because it was exactly about that. The topic was thinking and what is it, how do we know that things are the way we know them, can we trust our thoughts. Additionally we had to task to create a blog. There we had to block about our thoughts on the class and also we were often given topics to write about but we had to freedome to write about what we want as long as it is connected to the topic of a given class.

The first three lessons were the ones who had the biggest impact on me. They were all about questioning our perception and view of the world. The topics were about thinking itself, our 5(6)senses and the two systems we use when thinking. During blogging about this topics, I acquired a plenty of additional knowledge about them. In class we touched only the fundamental part of them. I came to a new way of thinking that not everything I see and hear is the way it is. For example the way we see things with your sense of vision is also adjusted by our brain. They eye sees the object as something which would be upside down for us but the brain processes it to look the way it does, thus making the reality we live more comprehendible. Judging from this I started thinking that just because I perceive the reality in a certain way, I should not accept this as the absolute truth.

In this class I also got to further my knowledge on argumentation. We learn about credibility and fallacies. Fallacy is when someone's argument is irrelevant to the case and is directed to something else but not the topic itself. For example:
- Smoking is bad for your health, you should quit!
- But you are also a smoker, why should I listen to you!.
There are many different kind of fallacies which attack on a personal level or another instead of tackling the argument itself. I realised about myself that I often use some of these fallacies to defend myself in certain situations. And I can see myself from the side now,how funny I must have sounded. What I really enjoyed about the lecture about fallacies because it was very interactive. Furthermore the class was divided into small groups and every group had to present a different kind of irrelevant arguments and the rest of the class had the challenge to guess them. In this kind of classes I really believe students learn something, as they have to make their own research and present.