Resources for Learning to Learn
Embarking on the journey of self-education? Discover the power of 'learning to learn'. Unearth a treasure trove of resources that can transform your approach to acquiring knowledge and skills. Let's delve into the world of effective learning strategies.
Learning is a critical skill for everyone
Possessing an understanding of what is learning and how our memory works will help you understand why certain learning techniques work and how to adapt your lifestyle and health towards improved learning, thinking and creativity.
- Elucidation forces you to engage with a topic, figure out gaps in your knowledge, connect it to what you know, and put it into a meaningful ordr or story
- Learning how to learn is a meta-skill
Conclusion
The optimal process for learning something remains an open question
- We should definitely aim to follow the recommended learning techniques like elaboration, self-explanation, and testing
- Many open questions remain on how we learn and how we might quantify it
- Tracking learning and providing great feedback to learners is one of the most important goals we should work on in education
Why You Should Learn to Learn
You can discover what doesn’t work well for learning, you can know what are the most effective techniques that do work for learning and you can become aware of how important lifestyle factors are for our memory.
- Learning is about recall, so forcing yourself to recall (like with flashcards), elaborate, or take tests prove effective since that’s how our minds work.
Chunking and Getting the Big Picture: Two Oscillating Steps When Learning
Top-Down Learning: Understanding the big picture
- Bottom-Up Learning: Learning when you learn a more specific or focused concept
- Chunks are pieces of information that bound together through meaning or use
- Learning is a two-way street where you should consider both the context or big picture where things fit and the bottom up where chunks fit into the context
Focused and Diffuse Mode of Thinking and Learning
Focused: brings together related concepts into a unit, called a chunk.
- Diffuse: operates through a wider net of connecting distant ideas.
- Used while sleep, exercises, and daydreaming. Both modes are important for how we pull concepts together into bigger units and eventually relate them to various other concepts in our minds.
Connections are the key to learning both in a practice sense and a biological one
Multiple studies show how exercise and sleep are just as important as the actual learning time itself
- Without sleep, we are limited to what is stored in our working memory and are hindered from adding more memory and strengthening memories we have
- The importance and cost of a complex network also points us towards the reasoning why certain learning techniques work and others don’t
What is learning?
Learning is hard and takes effort.
- Anyone who tries to tell you that their unique learning method is quick and easy is selling you what you want to hear, but not the reality on learning itself
- The effort to learn is a question of the time we put into learning itself and the underlying actions going on in our minds
Brain Biology of Learning
Learning is a sophisticated biological process. It requires effort on both a personal level of effort and attention and on level of physiological energy usage.
- While we often think of learning as an active, wakeful process, most of what we call learning actually occurs while we sleep.
- Before a full night sleep or even a nap, we fetch recently learned information from our hypo-campus and move it into our long-term memories in the neocortex.