Fluid Learning for Research Topics & Career Planning

I've said before that I consider myself a "fluid learner"--a phrase I coined to describe someone who thinks outside of normal parameters, and one that I feel more accurately describes the new generation of children who are not bound by traditional methods of teaching. With that in mind, I'll use the example of the 4 Elements (above) as a lesson in discerning how to narrow down a topic for research, as well as how to focus more specifically on a subject for academic or professional means.  

In this example, someone has just asked me to help them find an idea for an assignment--or they have just graduated from college and are trying to identify their career plans and goals.  The mention of "environmental studies" is the key.

My first response to this individual: "Let's use the 4 Elements as guiding points to help you identify where your interests are, and which one best suits your answer." After that is established, I then take each element and its nature, then apply a range of ideas that may be suitable.  For example:

Air: (Air) pollution - management of hazardous waste gases; quality of air control in residential or commercial locations

Water: Potable water supply and management; ocean pollution and recovery; oil & natural gas spillage-recovery

Fire: Recycling garbage for fuels

Earth: Alternative fuel sources; landfill management and soil reclamation; ecosystem preservation and recovery; animal and wilderness preservation

Do you have a subject or topic you'd like to see mixed-and-matched with the 4 Elements? Try Fluid Learning techniques and methods--or if you're in need of something different, write and ask me!

Fluid Learning as a way of creative thinking-organizing

 

I am a Fluid Thinker and Learner; this is my style of Intelligence. It's a phrase I've coined to identify how I think out-of-the-box; to be creatively original and yet be very detail-oriented and analytical. It's the upside of ADD, and it does work well for those who are very active up to hyperactive. It may also involve abundant mental and physical energy and ambidextrous abilities.

It is not one of the standard measurement systems; my intellect is extraordinarily higher than most people, but I don't test well. Yet I have an encyclopedic-photographic memory. I consume information with a left-brain format, but I'm very Creative & Quick with words, wit, and sound-images. 

 Fluid Thinkers use tangible and intangible ideas together in ways that are not always bound by structure: we extrapolate and juxtapose. This also reflects the dual-brain at work; with theatrical personalities that pop up in teaching skits. Teaching on multiple levels at once comes up with different ideas. For a demonstration, listen to the post with guitarist-military advisor Jeff "Skunk" Baxter on this site. (He is a legendary musician as well as a consultant to the Pentagon on missile defense.)

Jung would say I'm an Action-Intuitive, and I am very ethereal and empathic. I'm a medium (the ability to communicate with deceased entities; no, not "psychic"): sometimes when I've read heavily from an author and then start to mentally mimic his/her style. It gets complicated when I've found via reading that writers who passed away use my mediumship to get through ideas in writing. Some comics have also borrowed me: Groucho Marx, for one. O. Henry and Mark Twain--and Oscar Wilde, by birth claim of mine from a VERY recognized-by-friends past life association--have "taught" with me.

Not every Fluid Thinker is understood in his/her own land or time. It's because we can mentally travel in time. H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Ray Bradbury, among others, yes? Want a really wild and twisted great book: The Man Who Folded Himself. Wait until you meet time travel with yourself--as both male and female.

    

     I think with images and sound too; as a music journalist for classic blues, rock, jazz, and other styles, I wrote reviews that were filled with similes and metaphors that evoke the imagination. And I teach psychological astrology because the symbols are visual words that I can understand: like chess pieces that carry energy dynamics in their exchanges with personality and the psyche, and the board is the chart wheel.

    

     We're the New Students many of you are meeting in the classroom now--and our way of responding to and exchanging our awareness of ideas will be exciting and unique. We are Fluid Learners & Thinkers--and we are ready to share new methods of Understanding and Teaching with the world. We're Fluid Learners.

Jeff "Skunk" Baxter - ASYMMETRICAL THINKING IN A CONVENTIONAL WORLD.

This is for the higher education visitors--and that also goes for the online MBA students whom I have recently taught. When I tell you to think outside the box, I mean the box doesn't necessarily have to be a square. Try a trapezoid box--or even better, a box that's octagonal--and then give it the opportunity to take on other shapes. At least, my mind goes in places that the traditional thinker may not go--but I find it comfortable.

Oh. He said, "At a high delta-V, in the exo-atmospheric interception using an S-Ban radar, how do you guarantee a high PK in a threat cloud?" Want to figure out what that means? Just listen: YOU're an out-of-the-box thinking manager, right? Let me try: "At a high velocity {delta speed range} in the upper atmosphere range of interception using a specific missile defense radar system, how do you guarantee a confirmed {high-rate} percentage rate of destroying the target (PK or 'kill percent rate') in a scenario where the warhead is also accompanied by the flying junk pile of debris created by launching a missile as well as by decoys or other countermeasures designed to complicate the missile defense job. All of these objects move together through space as part of a threat cloud."

You're welcome.