Core professional interests of Ronja Addams-Moring

The contents of this page have last been updated or checked: Mon Mar 27 18:06:32 EEST 2006

Related pages

• my peer-reviewed publications
• my teaching
• my other academic activities
• my rejected scientific papers and what we did in each case

This page describes the philosophy of why I do what I do professionally. For more concrete insight into what results have grown from my core professional interests, please take a look at my related WWW pages, they are listed above.

What I do

I have two major professional interests (focus areas), to which I have been able to attend since the academic year 2003-2004, when I returned from my last maternity leave:

• Research challenge: understanding mobile emergency announcement (MEA) and multi-channel emergency announcement (MCEA) systems, especially their security-related and usability requirements.
• Teaching challenge: the three Rs (Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic) in academia - teaching, guiding and coaching adult learners within higher education, as they develop their habits for systematic thinking, efficient information gathering, critical reading, reflective writing and meaningful and exact calculations.

Why I do it

My life-long passion is for this conundrum/challenge: "Why do some people develop into successful thinkers (good problem-solvers), and how can we make it more likely that more people become skilled in efficiently solving new, unfamiliar problems?"

Today this principal conundrum/challenge translates into two main issues:

1. "How do we teach and guide young adults so that they learn to succeed in every one of their scientific research projects (develop habits of doing things right the first time) and at the same time ensure deep enough learning through non-fatal mistakes?" and
2. "How do we build and operate such mobile emergency announcement (MEA) and multi-channel emergency announcement (MCEA) systems that significantly raise the affected persons' odds for survival and early rescue, both due to the systems' dependability and due to the understandability of the information they deliver?"

I look at these two professional issues mainly from these viewpoints:

1. how do people (university students and emergency victims/survivors in particular) get and select information to create situational awareness and task orientation,
2. sensemaking: how do people analyze and relate to their current context the information they have selected,
3. how do people, based on their situational awareness and sensemaking, decide their course(s) of action, individually or as a group, when they need to combine many-faceted thinking with purposeful action,
4. what are the general and case-specific requirements for various technological systems and human/organizational processes that can optimally support people's functioning in challenging situations, and
5. how do we design and test such supporting technological systems and the human/organizational processes that are connected to them, to ensure that the requirements really have been met and that the combined socio-technical system indeed works appropriately in real situations.

• I am especially interested in how information can be presented so that it significantly aids a person with a "think hard" or "think fast" type of task, when she or he encounters that particular task for the first time (we can call this excellence in preparedness, far-sighted teaching or coaching, proficient organizational learning or efficient replication of memes, depending on our chosen frame of reference).

Examples of such "think hard" or "think fast" task settings that most people will encounter infrequently, yet where the success of the beginner/novice is paramount for good results, include:

• emergencies (fast yet broad enough thinking is required, and one has to manage often intense emotional reactions at the same time, too),
• counseling, especially crisis related (a very broad focus and observation strategy is needed as a base for the counselor's work, yet the client defines/decides what issues (s)he can handle and when)
• scientific research (constant vigilance and professional self-scepticism needs to be maintained, yet one has to be able to proceed with the practical work, too),
• curriculum and course planning (the learner's task needs to be built so that earlier learning efficiently supports the later learning tasks, yet we also need to minimize unnecessary and thus frustrating repetition), and
• learning and teaching of critical thinking and the cognitive multi-skills - habits of mind - that it requires.

Why I find the above listed things important? In my opinion, if humankind and Earth are to survive in the long term (for more than just a couple more human generations), we need to seriously enhance our habits for understanding the extremely complex natural and man-made systems that we are interacting with.

However, there is little in the mainstream Western media of today that markets or praises hard intellectual work. On the contrary, critical thinking is too often equated with either institutionalized cynicism, which is based on the fallacy that knee-jerk opposition would somehow be intellectually superior to knee-jerk support. Alternatively (and just as worrisomely) critical thinking has been equated with a simple, mechanistic format where finding two directly opposite sides of any issue and giving both sides exactly the same amount of coverage is mistakenly believed to guarantee that the resulting report would be thorough, balanced or useful (when it likely is none of these).

If we want our great-grandchildren to thrive and not curse us, we urgently need to give up the view of critical thinking (and especially the scientific method) as one simple formula that can be applied, in standard format, to anything and which will then, almost magically, produce only one, exact and certainly useful answer. We also need to give up the fallacies that purport critical thinking (and especially the scientific method) as socially unaware, ethically and ecologically questionable and coldly rational.

What we need to do, instead, is to make such habits of mind (cognitive memes) that promote efficient, compassionate and ethically and ecologically responsible critical thinking considerably more virulent, i.e. contagious in a positive manner. Thus we should be able to raise our individual and collective odds of survival, both in the short and long term.

...

Looking at the text above, I would chance a guess that I am not likely to run out of meaningful work during my lifetime - to get someone to actually pay for that work, again, may at times prove something of a challenge... ;-)