OPPORTUNISTIC 360'

 
THIS past Thursday , I presented a paper on "Comparing theories of oppression: A comparison of Paulo Freire and Jane Elliot's work"  at a conference on values in medicine , science and technology.

What a 180 degree shift for an engineering major and technology enthusiast like myself ???
 It was not enough , as I also became part of Association for Behavior Analysis International, attended their 40th Annual conference in Chicago. @ABAIEvents , #ABAI2014.
 So you can imagine the whole weekend full of hearing perspectives of people other than technologists view world and its problems.
 
Working in the corporate and technology sector, I hear often "Technology for Good".
 For me this weekend was a way to celebrate "Change for Good".  It tells me to Change my thinking lens for a bigger and better understanding.

As Christian Balady said , the more lenses (perspectives) you have the  better you can see.
 Coming together with different background ,perspectives and education levels. It results in a metric to measure your true value. An empirical way to figure out , what your passion is.

 My major take away from this information overload weekend is: faculties in different disciplines are working together on same challenges faced by technology sector ,education sector or medical sector etc. to say the least;
Still there is a disconnect among the collaboration and efforts among them.
 Lets take an example:
 Tom from Technology board, John from Medical research and Harry from Humanities research are working on learning personalization. However, all three have no collaboration in their efforts, as each one working on one aspect of the system.

Asserting  combing their efforts will result in absolute solution.
 An opportunist in this case must win the case , aggregating all three efforts and coming up with the big picture and applying the results of their research for greater good.

Lesson learned , attitude for today's winner ought to be opportunistic. Rather than running separate efforts one thing at a time. Let's get better at  becoming 'OPPORTUNISTIC 360'.