Learning. Life.

Visual Learners might find this article on mind-mapping interesting. Check out the other articles on the site too, for some graphical representations of different thinking concepts.

Are your poor, unloved possessions lying around the place, with no home to go to?

Look around: if you have piles of “stuff” and you don’t know where to put it … watch out - the SPCC (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Clutter) might be on your tail! Find homes for all that poor stuff now!

Why: stuff without a home will lie on your tables, floors and shelves, begging for attention and cluttering up your home.

How to find your stuff a home in 3 easy steps:

If something is just lying around because you don’t know where to put it -

1. Pick it up.

2. Decide if it is (a) useful or (b) beautiful. If not, give it to a home that loves it. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

3. If it’s useful or beautiful, find a home for it, close to where you use it.

• If you use it often, put it somewhere handy.
• If you hardly ever use it, repeat step 1 then, if you still have it, put it somewhere a bit harder to get at. If you haven’t used it in 6 months’ time, repeat step 1.
• If you think it’s beautiful, display it somewhere. If you have too much to display, repeat step 1. If you still have it, consider storing some things away and rotating what you display.

A note on notes: if you have piles of notes and assignments from old courses, consider carefully whether they will be useful to you in the future. If you think they will, file them away, and review in a year’s time. Next year it may seem basic - or out of date.

For any paperwork, consider going electronic for non-legal documents (for accounting, tax and legal documents keep the original safely).

Happy home hunting!

Disclaimer: this is an obvious suggestion. Feel free to stop reading now. Of course, if you’re not organised, you may want to keep reading …

The best way to get more organised is to spend time organising.

It doesn’t have to be lots of time - just more than you do now. And it’s most effective if you do it regularly.

What I do: Every day when I get home I do Flylady’s “5 minute room rescue“: 5 minutes tidying one room. Unbelievably, such a small thing keeps the house pretty much tidy.

To do this:
1. Choose a regular time - e.g. when you get home or before you go to bed.
2. Set your timer for 5 minutes.
3. Tidy til it beeps. Don’t do anything else, don’t get distracted - just do it.

You’ll be amazed how well it works.

Preparing for an open book test is a bit different to a closed book test. The emphasis isn’t on memorising as much - although it’s still worth doing that - but your main focus is on understanding and preparing notes to take into the test.

1. Understand the materials

Your aim is to have a broad understanding of all topics that are to be covered in the test. Use methods that suit your preferred learning style. Discuss it with others (auditory), draw mind-maps (visual), read background information (read/write), apply it (kinaesthetic).

Make sure you know what topics are in the test - check the course outline and ask your lecturer. Make sure you study all topics that are in the test, and don’t study those that aren’t (if you’re really sure they’re not in the test).

Add background information from the textbook and other places to your study notes. Deep and wide understanding is better here than memorising the few facts you wrote down in class.

Typical questions involve scenarios, which require you to apply the theory to a case study which is completely new to you, compare and contrast questions, which require you to relate topics to each other, and analyse and develop questions, which require you to use the skills taught.

You will not see a lot of questions that ask you to list, describe or explain a topic. These answers would come straight out of your notes, and unless the lecturer is trying to give you an easy time, they’re only going to use these as warm-up questions to help you started.

2. Prepare notes to take into the test

Your aim is to take in only what you need for the test, so that you can find what you need, quickly. You won’t know what you need in advance, so try to get as much information from the tutor as possible.

Identify all the things that might help you, then consider them carefully. Don’t take in too much - the more you have, the more time you’re going to waste moving books around and trying to find what you’re looking for.

Three top tips:

1. Use post-it notes as bookmarks. Use different colours for different topics, and write the topic on the bookmark, so you can find it easily - you don’t have to flick through a whole lot of bookmarks to find the right one.

2. Highlight mercilessly. Key words and the heading of important sections are good things to highlight. Use different colours.

3. Make kick-ass study notes. The more concise your notes are, the easier it will be to find what you need.

If this level of preparation is new to you, here’s a very, very useful hint: you know those people who always do really well in tests and exams? This is what they do for every test. Honest. It makes their study time much more effective and, of course, as they do this preparation they’re learning the stuff, making sense of it, and relating it to other things they’ve learnt - all of which we call deep learning, and which is the key to getting really good grades (and really learning the stuff). Seriously.

Once you’ve got a broad understanding and have prepared your materials, then you can prepare like any other test. When you sit the test, do what you would in any other test, but keep a very careful eye on the time you spend on each question.

Good luck.

Hint: they’re not as easy as you might think.

My Helpdesk students have an open book test coming up (evil laughter … more evil laughter … maniacal laughter).

I hate to tell you, but open book tests aren’t easy.

I thought might help you to know how I think about open book tests, and why I set them in my practical subjects. Remember that your other lecturers might think differently.

I set open book tests for topics which I believe you need to understand, not memorise. For example, in my Database Administration course the final test is to performance tune a large Oracle database (more evil laughter). Anyone who knows Oracle knows how easy that test will be (hint: it’s not).

Memorising the syntax of the “sar” command is not the point. What I really want to know is whether you understand how databases work, how to test database performance, and how to tune the database. So I let you look up the sar command.

Besides, it won’t help you pass the test. If you don’t understand that other stuff, you won’t be able to tune the database properly. So you won’t be able to pass the test. I designed it that way.

Sure, the underlying principles are in your notes too - so you could, possibly, teach yourself how to tune a database while actually in the test. That would be fine by me - you learn it anyway.

But, of course, you won’t have time to use your notes. Not much, anyway. If you have to look up every single step, you won’t finish the test. So if you don’t know most of the stuff anyway, you won’t pass. I designed it that way too.

In the Helpdesk course, we look at writing Helpdesk Proposals and Implementation Plans. If you were actually writing a report, I’d rather you looked up what sections it should contain. I’m really interested in whether you understand what information should go into those sections. So I might give you a scenario, and ask you to write an Implementation Plan. You can get the structure from your notes - that’s fine - but you have to understand what’s needed. The scenario contains issues that you should pick up if you understand the theory - if you’re writing off the top of your head, you probably won’t get good marks. You guessed it - I designed the question that way. I also keep the students very busy in that test, so that if they have to go to their notes for everything, they won’t finish.

I don’t do an open book test as the major assessment component: in both these courses the test is 20% of the final grade. But they’re definitely not easy. In the next post I’ll talk about how to prepare for an open book test and what sorts of questions you might expect to see.