Separate

One of the oldest questions in the word:

You were on the dock. Both your mother and spouse, who could not swim, fell into the pond. You can swim, but you can only save on of them because, oh well...who would you save?

Morally, it threw you into a pit without a safe choice. You know you have to sacrifice one among them, and you will be pinned guilty whatsoever. That is why this question is not only tricky, but often held men hostage without possible ransom.

I was rinsing under the warm shower when this question suddenly dripped into my mind. Something made me think...

An alternative scenario, where you can save both.

The above scenario is close to a deadlock, and whoever asked it should be hung without jury for causing public (read:men) outrage. But what could you do in a situation under similar fashion. Let's imagine that the examination period is near. You are having a different examination than what your sibling and boy/girlfriend have. Both of them need extra coaching. After considering the spare time you are able to allocate, you can either pay total attention to either one of them, or spend sparing time on both and sacrifice by not coaching them sufficiently, while jeopardizing your own study time.

Who would you choose to help?

Let us rewrite the question statement by focusing on "what could you do", This way, you will think of what strategy you could employ for a better result. One of the methods I am revealing in this post is to craft learning plan for both. Identify their individual weaknesses, learning styles and habits, and the content which would be tested. Conduct the coaching session with both of them, and together you extract the gist of the syllabus (or anything which you think will be tested) into diagrams and notes. Let both of them practice before they teach one another. Later conduct a formative assessment on each subject to reinforce their understanding.

By extracting the gist, students learn to find important concepts to reorganize and give meaning to what they study, which save time and mental capacity to store key information. Teaching each other will allow students to profess the knowledge they internalized and reaffirm their understanding. A simple formative test will seal the deal.

Learning is all about finding the most effective and efficient strategy to achieve the learning goals. Set goals, find ways to reach it. That is the repeating process of learning.

Cram before Exam

A day before final examination, what are you doing?

I believe this is a dilemma faced by many students. Right before examination, many would forcefully staring at the notes and slides of various subjects. Pounding the materials over and over, they expect a miracle would change the result the next day.

Is it working, at all?

Dale (1969) in his Cone of Experience shows that by reading, students retain the least amount of information in their brain. The study shows that students could not correctly remember what they've read (or write, albeit a slightly better result), which means last minute work is near futile. I highly suspect that the effort at eleventh hour serves to console oneself rather than an actual effective learning activity. What is more, the mounting pressure to succeed would hamper the information intake that students are likely to glance on the notes rather than actively make meaning of what they are reading.

If you realize the shortcomings, naturally you might ask, what is the better way?

Learning, as I have mentioned before, involves teaching. The process of teaching allows students to organize, verify and deliver the knowledge in a systematic way which shows their understanding on the subject. Study and later explain to another individual will greatly increase the knowledge retention of the students.

The next time you are in the final minute before examination, chill. Relax, take it easy, since cramming is not working for anyone. If you like, go get your peers and teach each other what you have learnt. The least you could do is to cover each other!

Value

A product may be a physical item or a service. It is a form of offering which is perceived to create value for the customer. Business Dictionary offers several explanation on the definition, however here we are looking at the value disposition of both tangible and intangible qualities of a product over the priced paid.

People purchase things for various reasons, such as: specific function, price, design, and etc. Value is the perceived intrinsic and extrinsic return which could be derived by owning/consuming the product over the cost of having it. It is far from absolute, since value is often determined through comparison with other similar products and prior experience which creates expectations. A simple case would be, how valuable is a set lunch in McDonalds? Some people would consider it a value buy because they would have to pay more for the similar set at other hours without the discounts, especially in shopping malls where normal food are slightly more expensive and outside food are a little difficult to obtain. Another group would probably value the same lunch lesser when they compared the utility obtained from the McDonalds lunch compared to the cheaper ones at a restaurant next door. Here, the consumers are willing to travel further for a meal as long as they pay less, which makes the McDonalds meal less desirable.

Since user experience is a complex and near incalculable phenomenon, it is impossible to accurately predict user perception of a particular product. However, what makes a product more welcomed than its peer? What makes people buy iPhone, when it is much pricier? And what makes people buy knife and scissors, when they can afford a Swiss army knife which offers both in one package?

Google it with keywords like: Differentiation, Product advantage, niche. You may conjure some possible answers. Discuss it with your friends and think over it.

By identifying the advantage of your product over the competitors, you can find your own customer if you could match your product proposition to their needs. Remember, people who do not buy your product may be an untapped market or potential customer, or they may probably not be the ones you want to sell at all. After all, in a resource scarce world, we cannot sell one thing to everyone.

Write it

We write it because we want to write it

How many times you do something for the sake of doing it, without a purpose or motive?

You are looking at your watch. You can stare onto the dial for so long, but the second someone asked you what time it is, you probably couldn't answer because you didn't pay attention to the hands.

Business is an elusive knowledge because human factor plays an important role in it. Have you ever wonder when sometimes you saw advertisements which you could not comprehend the central message, even though it is packed with bombastic catchphrases and stunning visualizations? Heck, sometimes it is too boring and generic you wonder why it is even shown? Yes, this is probably because companies wanted to advertise for the sake of fulfilling the need to advertise something. Results has been neglected. Automated action has been activated.

Efficiency and effectiveness are always the measures of success. Never forget it because we are living in a resource-scarce world. Sometimes, contrary to your anecdote, the best answer is probably the shortest and most concise.

Hashtag

Today we will look into hastag and how it changes the way we learn.

Hashtat ed from Phillip S

Think and pause

How often do you stop in the middle of reading a passage or article, and think about it?

There are many times when we read and we forget what we are reading. Our mind has a very short attention span, some say 8 seconds. The truth may be closer to that, I think. Just recall your last experience of reading a book (or you can enact the scene now). Did you reread what you've read on the same paragraph because you seem to lost the direction of the writings? It is especially evident when the book is expressing complex ideas, which our mind needs more time and attention to dissect the words into meanings to us.

*speaking of meanings to us: In average, people can not understand something new and complex in a very short time. Our mind requires us to associate new knowledge with existing schemata, and that for each item, we can relate it to a few schemata by different categorization methods, eg. color, shape, size, etc. We can only internalize new information when we separate it into different categories*

Think about Product Differentiation.

What can you think about product differentiation?

Do you have prior knowledge about it, or is this the first time you heard about this term? If it's your first time, perhaps you're googling the phrase and trying to read it in a wikipedia entry of the term. When you read it, take note on your attention span. Where did you pause? Which part did you re-read? Which part you are interested but not sure of, that you highlight it, right click, and search on google? Notice the pause, because that's the moment when you are building new knowledge database in your brain.

We stop when we are unsure. Inside our mind we have a missing linkage where new entry that we've observed on the article could not register quickly into our existing knowledge, and thus we take a pause to further analyze it. Are we going to perform another reduction and understand it from smaller parts? (For example, differentiation is reduced to being different, act of differentiating, etc) Or are we going to employ external information to supplement the current puzzle? (Eg. non-differentiated products, niche market, etc) There are many angles which we could penetrate when we deal with new encounters.

Teach yourself new things, you may be surprise by how much we can learn from even the smallest things in life.

In a lecture

What is learning and what is business?

You can access the book definitions on your fingertips. Flip through the dictionary (who does it anymore nowadays?) or punch the alphabets onto the keyboard in the blank space on Google website, you will see the definition displayed on the search results. It is simple but doesn't mean it is easily understandable.

To understand business and to learn it, one needs to not only reading business books and observing real setup, but also experiencing the trade hands-on. We called this "creating" in education, as you are applying various knowledge and theories to solve an actual situation. You can read more at HERE (Bloom's Synthesis)

As a learner, there is no clear distinction between student and teacher. To me, an ideal learning experience consists of both learning and teaching, as what you've learnt will be verified, modified and rectified when you communicate the message with others. People who are experts in the same field can enhance your input in the subject matter; people from different expertise could expand your tools for the next creation; and finally sharing with people could assist you in reorganizing your thoughts while adding new knowledge to keen listeners.

In a typical lecture session of 1 hour, we can divide it into segments based on sub topics. For each subtopic, it is recommended to allocate 1~2 minutes of break. This key break is to allow students to reflect on the knowledge they imparted with, and to raise questions for further clarifications or application. This is especially important for teachers when conveying business concepts as theories are condensed information formed by past literature and thus students would not have deep understanding on a "synopsis" of previous works by referring to a few slides and 10 minutes of description on the theories.

One more thing to add, and that is every student should conclude the lecture session by writing down the messages delivered throughout the class and the writings are to be checked by the teacher. This is a healthy practice for learners to continuously reflect on the knowledge they receive and perform simple internalization and memory reinforcement in order to be brought forward to the next class and to fill up the big picture (road map) of the entire course.