Thinking Skills Workshop : Professor Dr Milan Pandya As A Key Resource Person & My Experience Throughout The Two-Day-Workshop

Introduction : This blog is written as a reflection to the academic workshop on Thinking Skills held on between 13th August, 2022 to 14th August, 2022 with the help of the head of the department of English Dr Dilip Barad at the Department of English - Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University. The keynote professor and expert is Dr Milan Pandya who has been a prolific teacher as well as educator and an accomplished expert of argumentative skills in field of life skills.

☆ My Highlights During The 2-Day-Workshop :

In this marvellous journey of two-day-workshop, we underwent indeed various rigorous thinking activities wherein all the students had to but utilize most out of their frontal lobs. Since the very first day of the workshop, thought-provocation has been observed throughout and initiated in our psyche as well. There we got introduced with some thinking activity devices like trolleyology, random image thinking and so on and so forth. During the classroom-course, we had some keynote lessons to be learnt and applied in our academic as well as personal life which were practically and with practice taught by Milan sir. Indeed the days were lushing with knowledge more off-academics but life-related. Let us have a glimpse of some of the most important lessons we imbibed from Milan sir within this knowledge-nourishing two-day-workshop.

1 : Difference Between Plausible and Plausible :

In this activity, we were asked to opine on the difference between plausibility and possibility, my opinion was like that possibility goes with imagination - majorly divested of logical structure under it, rarely with few logical appeal - and plausibility goes with extreme realism and bases its existence on logical conformity.

2 : Post-Truth & Media Study :

In this task, students were asked to identify the hidden truth behind one of the images which was of the soldier sleeping in -50° temperature displayed by the prolocutor, but the image shown was actually that of the Russian soldier's as in following picture is seen :

3 : Ethical Algorithms in Driverless Vehicles :

Here in this activity, we were asked Trolley Problem question, and our answers were quite subjective and individually distinct from all amongst us, then the prolocutor mentioned that whatever we do, we cannot save all of them, so the person wanting to save if he could at least one person on the railway-track, the person will not touch the gear to shift the course of the rushing train because the action of gear-shifting involves touch of the person and the touching is deeply engaged to the psyche of an individual, then from saving one's self from the guilt of having killed two on cost of at least having saved one, the person will refrain from touching gear and let the incident happen the way it is going to happen.

Another question was raised by the prolocutor in concern of the digital humanities was that what if the driverless car is put in a situation where it must kill one of the three people where first is the driver him/herself, second is the person who has accidently walking the way of the car, and third one is the car-driver on the next side of the road, so the answer was very critical and thus the concern for something new innovation in existing car technology was arisen.

Apart from all of these aforementioned activities, there were many other thought-provoking activities such as Connecting the Dots, Image-Story Making, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, etc. which all enriched the students' thinking skills with delightful transactions of the thoughts throughout the workshop.

Conclusion : These two days have been the red-letter days for me for during these days we were introduced many novel ideals in field of humanities and cultural studies. Gratitude to all who organized and special thanks to Professor Dr Milan Pandya who shared his experiences with us.

Thank you!