Learning to learn
How to learn, make it stick in an increasingly monetized, distraction-filled, viral, and ephemeral world?
This is an ongoing topic on notetaking, education methods, digital detox, and using the internet responsibly. For most there will be a strong focus on analog (print flashcards, textbooks, whiteboarding) and in-person.
Topics
- Online tools are great, but how do we overcome our overreliance on them? How do we make their incentives align with our own?
- Do the creators of your edtech service (profit or non profit) share you values?
- What are the incentives for online tools? Is multiple choice really the best way to assess knowledge or is it just easier to monetize? It costs more to assess students in essay form.
- How to make connections between tech and the arts in your learning?
- Is teaching really the best way to learn or is it just another way to force us to tear ourselves away from the computer, be able to explain things in great detail and visualize material?
- What can we learn from past textbooks? past ways of learning?
- How can we learn from each other?
Notes
A compilation of notes and links from members.
1 - Knowledge Acquisition - how do we acquire new knowledge, how do different people acquire knowledge differently - inquiry/discovery vs guided learning (ie conventional school) and tradeoffs of each, how to structure projects effectively
- feedback loops and knowledge scaffolding - knowing what you know vs reading what someone else knows (learning is contextual)
2 - Offline Learning / Learning in the Age of Noise - the internet gives access to almost unlimited pool of knowledge, but makes it very hard for new learners to figure out where to start - distractions are two fold: 1) being distracted by other applications/notifications while online and 2) going into "rabbit holes" which may fee productive, especially if they provide new knowledge, but easily derail the original objective ("I just want to understand X works and now I find myself watching 5 videos on adjacent topics Y and Z")
How do we develop space/time for our own "attention cottage"? https://blog.ayjay.org/the-attention-cottage/
3 - Leveraging Tools/Technology in the Digital Age
This one is last because it is necessary to have an understanding of your goals and style of learning before jumping into the barrage of tools, which can counterproductively introduce more noise and complexity into the learning process
- how to organize information for quick retrieval (tagging vs folders, library cataloguing systems etc) - personal wiki - capture and review systems: digital inbox, - "friction by design" (make it difficult to capture things so that only important stuff makes it through) vs "capture everything" - AI as a learning copilot to tailor learning to the individual's context via on-the-fly synthetic media, etc (pipe dream or near future, only time will tell)
Related reading: - https://andymatuschak.org/hmwl/ - gives background on learning styles and then goes into what a learning copilot could look like - https://www.bramadams.dev/issue-54/amp/ Personal Library Science is defined as: the discipline concerned with the organization, retrieval, and transformationof an individual's data.