Sunday, July 8, 2012

Bad Luck or Bad Taste?


Most of us believe in our luck. We wish good luck to peers and sometimes bad luck after the event. Whenever something good happens, "Oh... Luckily, thank God" and in contrast, "why this always happens to me :(, I am not so lucky – Bad Luck".

In the first quarter of 2012 a road accident had occurred on Motorway, Pakistan, in which a high profile politician had passed away. Many people said that it was his bad luck. After a complete investigation report a fact was disclosed that the accident occurred due to low quality tires – Bad Taste.
Luck influences one’s life yet there are also certain controllable factors in his/ her life span that are more concerned about good taste rather than good luck. What if someone uses standard quality tires – also affordable, rather than low quality or weak tires?

Smoking is injurious to health and still people do smoke, sometimes we make habitual mistakes in business and we keep on repeating them, etc. – Bad Luck or Bad Taste?

Saturday, June 30, 2012

Managing Learning Behavior

An Article by: Adeel Ahmad Shahid (Pakistan’s Context)

Mankind owns a spectacular learning mechanism and most of us are well aware of the statement that learning starts from the lap of mother and continues till death. Also one of the basic aspects of learning is that everybody learns to manage and manages to learn for achieving his/her life and career objectives simultaneously within the lifespan. Learning significantly impacts the human behaviors, and more specifically we can call them the learning behaviors.

We channelize our personal and professional objectives with new thoughts and methods but still a question arises that how many of us have ever though to manage our learning behaviors? Now if we think about the learning behaviors so there are many questions that are still unanswered. For the very first time back in 2008 when I asked myself that what kind of learner I am, so a few queries originated in my mind – they might also be most frequent among the readers’ minds. The significant of them are:
  • Is there any such thing like "learning Behavior"?
  • If yes; then what is my learning behavior?
  • Is there any technique of efficient learning?
  • Indeed what kind of learner I am?
  • Is my learning environment favorable enough to learn efficiently?
  • How can I manage my learning behavior?

We can justify the existence of learning behavior of humans because of the inborn learning attribute. Now the major concern is to increase the effectiveness and efficiency in learning our behaviors by observing the learning styles and their proper management. There are different learning styles’ models and VAK – Visual, Auditory and Kinesthetic, is one of them. This psychological model can make us an efficient learner.

We learn; when we hear or read – auditory learning, we can do better if we visualize it in a picture, video or demonstration – visual learning, and we can bring best out of it if we personally get involve or demonstrate it – kinesthetic learning. Some people are more visual learners than auditory while others are more kinesthetic than visual and/or auditory and vice versa. It does not mean that if I am an auditory learner than I cannot visualize or demonstrate things.

One can find out his/ her efficiency in all modes of learning and make an ample mix out of this for a paramount outcome. The better way is to perform a self-learning aptitude test in all three types by considering the same subject and see how much you learn what you hear, visualize or by getting involved physically. Now make a learning mix according to your aptitude so that you learn supreme.

In our cultural context it is not so easy and also there is no ideal state in reality. For instance in our higher educational institutes mostly the instructors depend on explanatory presentation with a lot of content in them or on a white board by filling it with alpha-numeric data with least visuals and kinesthetic stuff in it. The major impact of this factor over the mind of students is that most of them start getting mentally absent within fifteen to forty five minutes.

While associating the learning behavior with the cultural context we might face difficulties yet we have to make ourselves capable of understanding and adapting diverse learning styles. On the other hand; awareness regarding the modes of learning is needed and those who find themselves socially responsible can take initiatives in the form of capacity building sessions, creative writing and through other possible means.