Learning is hard work

We don’t actually learn according to the dictates of schedule

Repetition

Serves two masters: aligning cognitive information architecture, and developing memory. 

Easy to leverage on mass scale to sway minds.

Memory

Its primary goal is speed of getting things done and right.

Memory is efficiency. It also used to be our only constant access to information.

Pattern building

Insights come from patterns. If progress is a goal, patterns are a good foundation for studying, testing, and sharing.

People like patterns and can find them anywhere – like finding forms in clouds.

Process

Cognition that depends on the fluidity of change over time, and that by identifying key process points an outcome can be replicated.

When combined with memory, they can form a static, brittle edifice.

Personalization

Be able to visualize yourself in the midst of a problem and solving it – or actual experience. It helps to align it to your personal processing chain.

Our stories matter: the characteristics that lead to success, the metrics of what counts for success, and who that looks like.

Physicalize

Bringing what you learn from abstract to used aligns it with material and substance, providing more nuance.

Feels like the dangerous part to many people – bombs are physical, physics is abstract.

Time

To really learn something takes the initial ingestion, repetition, confirmation and contrast, and testing it for yourself in some way. Real learning does not require trust, which is paramount in our primary current educational system.

Time is not efficient, but is incredibly productive.

We each of us learn at our own pace. It takes time to learn, and how we learn varies from person to person.

Many of our tests to confer expertise are primarily looking for memorization, not cognition or critical thinking.  Memory just makes getting from A to Z faster: no need to look up information.

Facts do not equal critical thinking. Memory does not equate to understanding, and memory without understanding can lead to all sorts of confoundedness.  There are so many cognitive biases surrounding memory. 

Memory is simply the most frequently referred tool for learning. But in reality, it is one way of many potential ways, all of which we leverage based on context, preferences, and a balance of how much time you have and the depth of understanding required.

The primary discipline is education, with one caveat. I found it infinitely more helpful to focus on the perceptions of student learning over the procedural standards of education. When something becomes procedural, there is a strong potential for wishes to supersede actual usefulness and traction.

Oddly enough, I have found a great deal of useful information in reading about people management, with the caveat that there are materials out there that basically espouse dark triad behavior. Stay away from those, and there are significant insights to be found.

learning:
cognitive bias, cognitive IA, connectome, garbage-in, memory, processing chain