How to learn? Learning how to learn (Part 1)

Learning definition

Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences

to gain knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience

How do you learn?

Stages:

1. Identify what is it that you want to learn? What is the question? Break it down. Define it clearly. Why do you want to learn this?
2. Find sources to learn from. This can be from sources of information, companies, people who know about this subject.
3. Consume these sources
4. Create content – summarise, argue, recreate.
5. Practice
6. Review / revise.

Let’s go:

1. Identify & Define: Today I am asking the question – “How do you learn”. I am learning how to learn because it is really important to be able to learn and there must be more efficient ways to learning. If we can learn effectively then we can learn more, in less time. It can save so much time and make you more effective. Learning is one of the most important skills, if you can learn any subject effectively then you can basically do anything!
   • What is learning?
   • What are the different types of learning?
     • Memorisation of Data Vs Understanding Concepts
     • How do different people do things differently?
   • How do you learn? How does the brain learn?
   • What do the best learners do differently?
   • What are the barriers to learning?
   • What problems do people have with learning?
   • What are tools / strategies for learning?
   • What should you not do?
   • What is important in learning?
2. Find Sources of Material. What are the best sources to learn how to learn?
   1. People – who are the best learners?
   2. Google search
   3. Learning companies
   4. Courses: Courserea – how to learn
      • This has great reviews https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
      • https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/5950tm/text_i_just_finished_the_online_coursera_course/
3. Consume these sources. Not much to write about here. Making notes is helpful.
4. Create content about it – that is what I’m doing here.
   • Summarising what I’ve learnt.
   • Also I can highlight the different positions and arguments about learning and state where I stand on them
   • Teaching other people how to learn is also a great way to learn the material. Maybe I should make a video about it.
5. Practice – apply what you’ve learnt to different fields and learning different fields.
6. Review and Revise – it would be great to set a timer in the future to come back to this. Also I can find sources of news to read about this topic because its constantly developing. We really don’t know that much about how to learn effectively compared to what we are capable of.

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Notes about learning and some concepts to cover:

• Identifying knowledge and summarising the field that you don’t know much about
• Focus.
• How to find sources of information
• How to learn with the assistance of computers?
• Learning is not linear – knowledge collapse, breakdown and restructuring, lots of gains for beginners
• Exercise and learning
• Whats the 80:20 rule when it comes to learning?
• The learning habit
• Break down learning into smaller part and chunking.
• Memorisation techniques

For me I think the most important think I want to learn and improve at are the following:

1) – New ideas and concepts – how do I expose myself to the new concepts and ideas that I don’t know about that will benefit me. This is about finding and identifying content from multiple sources that I can consume quickly and efficiently – Podcasts, books, people.
2) – How can I understand the most important concepts of certain fields and frameworks and how they work.
Eg., biology, physics, computers, mechanics, languages, cultures, how to learn.
3) – Language Learning – how do I learn new information effectively – eg., Vocabulary for Chinese
4) – Learning with Technology – How should I organise what I know so I can revisit it and how to work with the internet / google to access knowledge when I need it.

The more you learn, the more you realise that there is so much more to learn. So this article is only the beginning, it should probably be re-written and created into different subtopics, so this is just part 1.