B1- Identifying emerging thematic fields and co-initiating

In this phase the individual questions that everyone has made were more discussed and elaborated as follow:

A- Several small groups were made in order to discuss questions/topics that matter,

B- Everyone in the group was supposed to briefly present his/her individual question, while other members of the group were silent and listening. After this short presentation," Core Beliefs" and "Assumptions/Base concepts" regarding the presented questions were made by everyone separately, and at the end everyone in the group was supposed to prioritizes his/her core-belief cards  according to the most interesting one to the least interesting one,

C- All the separated groups gathered together and put the interesting questions/topics with the respectively core beliefs and assumptions cards on a big table and a "semantic map" was created.  Then semantically related concepts were expressed by closeness. And finally, through negotiation and discussion, thematic fields were created,

D- Reduction of the thematic fields to the desired number of “knowledge creation teams” (KCTs). At this phase, each participant assigns him-/herself to a thematic field. Four topics and respectively four knowledge creation groups were created as follow:

KCT 1: Predicting
KCT 2: Environment
KCT 3: Homoeconomicus
KCT 4: Hierarchy

 At the beginning of the session, I was in the group with four other students and the questions within the group were regarding homoeconomicus, ethics in organizational behaviour, future predicting, social awareness activities and environmental issues, which was actually my question. It was very interesting to think about the core beliefs behind any specific questions, it lead me to think more thoroughly about the presented topics and when we entered the phase C, my question of interest was selected as one of the thematic fields , so I made my KCT with three  other people to work on an environment topic.

 M.M

B0- Questions that matter.

The part A of the course is completed by now and the second part of the course, which is the "knowledge creation" part, would be started.

At the first phase of part B, which is called B₀, Each of the students was asked to think individually about the topic that matters to him/her and create a question regarding that topic. The question could have been in any field, like a scientific question or a social or even a personal question. The goal of this phase was to create a basis for establishing common emergent thematic fields.

My question was about environmental issues. That is my question:

"What environmental effects would the development of alternative energies in the future cause, especially considering the growing use of electric power within the car industry?"

The reasoning behind the importance of this topic to me could be summarized as follow:

Pollution is a very hot topic at the moment all around the world. The destruction of the nature has effects on everybody. In some topics, just international solutions are possible, as e.g. air pollution does not stop at borders between nations. The air pollution through the car and goods vehicle industry is rather large, because almost everyone has a car and lots of goods are transported by duty vehicles. Therefore, every litre of gasoline that is saved with a new model of car helps to prevent tons of CO2 and other dangerous substances. The hybrid car technology and the full electronic drive systems are a promising step to the right direction. It substitutes gasoline by electricity, which does not exhaust harmful substances. If this technology can get dominant in the market, then it has good effects on the situation of the nature.

M.M

A2- Group Work

As I mentioned in the previous post, we made a group to work on a small project in the field of foundations of science. The aim of this project was to explore the foundations of science in order to get an insight for the next project, which would be in the field of creating knowledge.

The topic that we chose to work on was called:” Scientific knowledge and reality, from reality to theory (and back) “. The material that we were supposed to read is as follow:

- Chalmers, A.F. (1999). What is this thing called science? (Third Ed.). Berkshire, GB: Open University Press. (Chapters 2-3)

- Popper, K.R. (1959). The logic of scientific discovery. London: Hutchinson.

- Chalmers, A.F. (1999). What is this thing called science? (Third ed.). Berkshire, GB: Open University Press.(Chapters 5-6 (7))

- Okasha, S. (2002). Philosophy of science. Oxford: Oxford University Press.(Chapter 4)

- Godfrey-Smith, P. (2003). Theory and reality. An introduction to the philosophy of science. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press. (pp 155-162)

- Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. (pp 20-38)

These papers are about observation, experiment, Popper & falsification, realism & antirealism, theory-ladenness of observation and finally learning, experience, knowledge, and science. The group prepared a presentation on this topic with the main focus on the role of experiment in learning.

My learning points from this project:

1. First of all I would like to emphasize the important role of group discussion and brainstorming that lead us to achieve a reasonable result at the end. So group work, where everyone is willing to discuss and brainstorm would definitely create great results.

2. Experimental learning is a holistic perspective that combines experience, perception, cognition and behavior. Three models of experimental learning are available out there, which all consider learning as continues process that is grounded in experience. And finally learning is a process of creating knowledge. We can say that Knowledge is the result of the transaction between social knowledge and personal knowledge, and by ”Social Knowledge” means objective accumulation of previous human culture, while the ”Personal Knowledge” means subjective life experiences.

3. The theory-ladenness of observation argument presents a contradictory point of view to the empiricists arguing that observations are biased by theoretical assumptions.

4. Anti-realism tells us to be careful in making theories about the unobservable world and their empirical success.

5. Falsification: A theory can never be said to be true only that it is the best available. For the principle of falsification, a hypothesis must be falsifiable, meaning that there exists a possible observation statement or set of observation statements that are inconsistent with it.Hypotheses that cannot be falsified are therefore not considered as scientific problems. Popper calls them non- or pseudo science. Even for “proven” or obvious hypotheses such as Newton’s gravitation theory or the rise of the sun tomorrow morning there may be observations that would reject them.

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A1- Introduction Session.

On March 1, 2010 I had the first lecture of the course "Philosophy of Science" by Prof. Peschl at the University of Vienna. The session started with an introduction on the contents of the course, course design, learning outcomes, grading system and finally ended up by project group formation.

My first impression after the first session was, that it would be very interesting to learn the process of creating knowledge step by step and professionally. The professor mentioned that some aims of this course would be to explore what science is, what its goals are, what it does, how it works, what its limits are, and what are its basic assumptions about knowledge, methods, the world, etc. As a PhD candidate, who is just at the beginning of her PhD studying, I strongly looking forward to gain a lot of new thoughts and inputs during this course sessions, which could help me to broaden my view on the process of writting my dissertation.

So these are the four main points that came to my mind after the first session:

1.Get crystal clear on my goals of writing a PhD thesis-As I consider myself a new scientist, who is at the very beginning steps of her mission, it is important to exactly know what is my role and how could I create knowledge through familiarity with methods of knowledge creation.

2.Ask myself broad but direct question-What are the questions that matter to me? What do I really want to achieve in writting a dissertation? What is important to me about that?

3.Getting familiar with research methodology techniques-Observations, experiments, generative interview and appreciative interview.

4.Give myself a space to reflect-Reflection process, group discussion and brain storming.

M.M