Right now, I'm sitting in the library procrastinating putting my presentation together for my thesis next Thursday, April 11th, which will be a day that goes down in infamy. Basically it just determines if I graduate or not, no big deal. I also decided to see what other good or potentially heinous things happened on April 11th in history. Apparently, the river ferry, "Princess Victoria" sank in the Thames River in Ontario and killed 180 people. I know that sounds gruesome and horrible, because it is. I chose this specific event to relate it to how my future could also go on April 11th. I could also be a river ferry that sinks in the TLU river. Who knows? We'll find out in nine days though, don't worry.
On a much brighter note, the whole point of this particular blog post is to discuss my recent discoveries that I've made regarding my thesis. I'm not sure if 'discovery' is a good word, but I've essentially found a much better way of describing my thesis with some new sources. Thanks to the help of Dr. Vrooman and his book that I should have read a long time ago (Freshman year), I was able to read about the Elaboration Likelihood Model, which discusses how we process information that we are being given. There are two different ways that that happens. One is the peripheral way, which is shortcuts that our brain takes. I like to think of it as the feeder roads to the freeways. That being said, the central way of processing, which is the important things we need to go home with, is the freeway in this example.
My thesis as of yesterday had just been that face-to-face training was more effective than online training and I kind of had an understanding as to why, but it was way too broad of a thesis to try and argue coherently without getting off topic. With my thesis, which more or less a few scholarly words is: The online training course, Think About It, is less effective than the face-to-face training because there is no facilitator to bring the audience back from peripheral processing to central processing.
So, if you're still following along, this is what's going on in my brain right now as far as how I plan to elaborate on this more. Back to the freeway analogy. If you drive on the feeder roads instead of the highway, what happens? You have more stoplights, people to merge with, and potential backups at entrances and exits to the freeway. When you take the freeway, you have everything in front of you. You can go to whichever lane you need to be, there are some backups that occur, but realistically those won't last the entire time anyway. When you do the freeway you're getting the most bang for your buck because even though you may end up in the same place, you get slowed down by so many obstacles by taking the feeder road. This is what happens when we process information. In our peripheral, there are distractions that are holding us back from fully gaining all of the information handed to us. With central processing, we still get the same information but we are more cognitive and aware of what's going on because you have to when cars are going 75+ miles per hour.
Okay, I know that was a lot. I'm kind of typing word vomit right now just trying to get some ideas going through my head as I prepare to go more into detail of my analysis with my new thesis. I hope this all makes sense in the end, and hopefully you continue with life taking the freeway all the way down I-35 instead of the feeder roads because they will back you up even farther. So my next steps from here in terms of feedback and the paper: Dr. Bisha will give feedback for our paper, and then after we present we get feedback on the presentation. From there, we continue to make changes to our paper as we need to. So stay tuned for updates throughout that process as well.
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