Meaningful research....meaningful life



Meaningful conversation

 This is going to be one of those posts that might be viewed as morbid or backwards for some. I am going to write about something that is very close to my heart. For quite sometime now, I have been wrestling with directions of research, purpose of research, purpose of life etc. As a muslim I cannot get away from the fact that what I do now will be questioned in the hereafter. I knew about this ever since I was old enough to understand about religion and life. However the gravity of the issue just hit me only recently. As muslims we believe that when we die (all of us will, eventually), there will only be three things that will be of benefit to us: 1. Pious (soleh) children that will pray for the parents, 2. Meaningful knowledge 3. Our charity ( I hope I translated those correctly) . Since we are on the subject of research I am only going to elaborate on number 2. Knowledge can be so many things. It can be as simple as a cooking recipe shared with others so that they can also savour yummy dishes or it can be as complex as the theory of relativity (which looked simple on paper) and the discovery of DNA. Meaningful knowledge (which are results of meaningful research), however must be viewed and evaluated with respect to a certain framework. Examining it from the islamic point of view (as I must, because after all I am muslim) knowlege or research must be meaningful in the islamic way. This means that I must ask questions like: Is the knowledge or research beneficial to the ummah? How can we make it beneficial to the ummah? How can we share (among us and the rest of the population) the knowledge? Will it bring us back ultimately to Allah? The last question is important because I really believe that knowledge seeked and gained through meaningful research will and should lead us back to Allah. It should increase our iman and takwa. It will make us realize how great the Almighty is and it will make us realize that we are just humble servants always seeking Allah's grace and mercy.

I will end this with a beautiful doa taken from Nazul's blog http://www.ipteknikkeukm.blogspot.com/. I hope Nazul won't mind :-)

Ya Allah sesungguhnya apa jua yang dilangit dan dibumi serta di antara keduanya milikmu yang abadi. Aku bersyukur di atas segala nikmat yang kau pinjamkan pada ku, keluargaku dan seluruh kaum kerabatku. Di atas keberkatan mu, rahmatmu, pemurahmu, kasihmu dan sayangmu, aku memohon agar kau sempurnakan penyelidikanku ini dengan ilmu yang manfaat untuk aku sebarkan bagi memperkasakan Islam dan menyelamatkan umat Muhammad yang lain. Berikan kejayaan dalam pengajian untuk ku, rakan-rakan yang seperjuangan denganku. Peliharakanlah kesejahteraan keluargaku, rakan taulanku, pensyarah-pensyarah yang membimbingku, limpah kurniakan segala kemurahan rezekimu kepada kami semua, dan jadikan kami terus bertaqwa padamu mengikut sunnah Rasulmu.Amin Ya Rabbal Aalamin"

Amin.

( I am sorry I cannot translate the doa ...I might not do justice to it)

Writing and research

Writing is obviously harder than reading. That is the reason why some students do get caught in the reading process and read loads of literature with nothing to show for. However, I have read somewhere that, in life  we sometimes have to choose to do the harder thing as opposed to the easier alternative ( you know, like sleeping is easier than waking up and coming to 8 o'clock lectures : -) ). So, as a research student we have to start to write. Writing is important because the act of writing itself requires us to think. It also requires a lot of practice just like any other skill. We have to decide on the message, structure our points and then string one sentence after another so that it makes some sense.

Actually, writing and research are like two sides of the same coin. Personally for me, I will write a little piece everytime I finished reading a few articles. The piece of writing is usually for my own consumption, not to be confused with writing for jounals or conferences (that requires a different level of detail and the objectives are different). For me writing gave me

i. Clarity on the issues presented by the authors

ii. An indicator of whether I understood the papers that I read

iii. A collection of anecdotes/ideas/summary to fall on when I want to write the literature review (which will also come in handy once we decided to write papers)

iv. A record of the trail of ideas that I had during the whole research process (which can become starting points for discussions with supervisors)

I have my PhD supervisor to thank for this habit, because he was the person who urged me to keep a notebook ( the paper one---not the electronic one) of the ideas, summary of papers etc during my PhD journey. It was very useful and the method worked for me ( caution here: it might not work for someone else---value in context (?) )

However, context aside, I personally believe that if we cannot sit down and articulate what we have in our head onto paper either in the form of diagrams or (own) words then our understanding of the whole thing is suspect. If we do not understand what we read then how can we build upon it and produce new findings? [Of course we can all sit under an apple tree and discover gravity....hmm that is another story ;-) ]

Unlocking value

I had an almost embarassing experience while using microsoft word. I was supposed to prepare a report that involved representation of data collected from a survey. My experience in using microsoft word thus far is just using the editing functions, copying and pasting, changing fonts and paragraphs and maybe inserting mathematical equations. All of which I had learnt on my own, through trial and error. I knew that I had not really deployed the software maximum's ability but I was happy. Up until two days ago, that is. I had to figure out a fast way of inserting graphs and charts directly into the word document  (without going to excel and copying and pasting ----that I knew how to do). Time was running short and I had no choice but use my charm (my operant resource) on my operand resource*, which came in the form of my daughter Sakinah. I knew she had the knowledge ( which is her operant resource*) because I had the opportunity of printing her folio report for school ( one of the things parents do for their children). It was beautifully done complete with bar charts and histograms ( I remembered thinking...how did she do this all on her own? I knew later that it was knowledge that she got from her ICTL class). So, anyway to cut a long story short, I swallowed my pride and asked her to show me how to do "the insert a chart thing, complete with data, percentages, legend, labeling etc".

The whole episode with me and microsoft word and the very easy (as I found out later) task of inserting charts demonstrates an important idea in service science which is known as 'unlocking value'. I was not able to unlock the full value without resorting to available operand and operant resources. It is also interesting to note that in Microsoft Corp. they do have people in charge of finding ways and means of unlocking value of their products as can be seen from this 2007 report in Bloomberg Business Week http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2007/bs20070607_329811.htm

The article reports on the experience of an employee at Microsoft whose job is about unlocking the value of Microsoft office products.

The value of a cake lies in the eating and sharing. Thanks

to my students, it was an experience I will not forget :)

* knowledge is an operant resource as are many other intangilbles like skills etc; operand resource are tangible resource like raw materials, people etc; operand resource  are usually acted upon maybe by operant resource to produce something useful (of value)

Ref: Lusch and Vargo : The service dominant mindset

Student engagement

Student engagement represents both the time and energy students invest in educationally purposeful activities (either academic and/or co-curricular) and the effort institutions devote to using effective educational practices. Looking at the definition, I have a strange feeling that the student engagement level at my faculty is quite low. This is because:

i) Every now and then I will hear grouses from fellow lecturers about their students’ performance and/or attitude in their courses. This state of affairs has escalated over the years almost in tandem with the efforts in designing new ways of instruction (problem based learning, outcome based learning etc.etc). The adage “ you can bring a horse to water, but you cannot force it to drink” always comes to my mind whenever I got to think about students and their lacklustre performance in my courses (and I am not referring to grades only!).

ii) The lack of interest amongst faculty members to get involved in student development activities, especially those that do not have the relevant “KPI points”. And even if they do get involved they are constantly thinking about ways and means of converting it into KPIs!

Research has indicated that low student engagement leads to low performance. This brings to mind the issue of significant learning and its role in student engagement. In his book Fink (2003) iterates that if we want better (significant) student learning, we will require better teaching, faculty’s ability to learn about teaching and also better institutional support (which include a suitable appraisal system). Fink and Ok (2010) also produced a new interactive taxonomy called the significant learning taxonomy which is different from Bloom taxonomy which is hierarchical in nature. In the significant learning taxonomy it is interesting to note that Fink and Ok (2010) incorporates and provides a means for the students and instructors to articulate the value aspects of learning which is obviously absent in the Bloom’s taxonomy. Perhaps if we can adopt this new taxonomy it will create new opportunities for higher student engagement.



L. Dee Fink &Norman, OK (2010): Designing Our Courses for Greater Student Engagement and Better Student Learning

Fink (2003): Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses