"I had always heard ‘follow your passions’ but your passions come from what you tend to practice…if you blindly follow your passions you are going to be getting good at something that a lot of people will be good at and it will be hard to differentiate. So do not just follow your passions. Instead, broaden your passions. You should be willing to experiment and push yourself in your learning." - Dr. Barbara Oakley
Here is more on how the MOOC approaches how we learn. It is at three levels:
1) concepts and principles that originate from the relevant sciences
2) illustrations and metaphors that are designed to help us understand grasp these concepts
3) practical tips that we can utilize in our learning endeavors.
Below are a few of the most interesting practical tips that are discussed in the MOOC:
Barbara uses another good metaphor, that of learning how to drive a car. Some people may learn to drive fairly easily, and others may struggle through driver’s education, but virtually every mentally competent adult learns to drive in a short period of time (this actually consists of a highly complex set of skills). Yet, we don’t hear about people who gave it up just after trying because they found “they had no talent for it,” nor people who have been learning to drive “off and on for 10 years, not really making much progress.” It is just something we learn to do because it is important to us! This is the same way we should think about a lot of learning.
Source: https://www.class-central.com/report/coursera-learning-how-to-learn/
I was talking to my children (aged 13 and 15) on this topic and they mentioned that everybody in their class (grade 8 and 10) learn and study while listening to music and that they learn better. I thought that was very weird and impossible.
Here is more on how the MOOC approaches how we learn. It is at three levels:
1) concepts and principles that originate from the relevant sciences
2) illustrations and metaphors that are designed to help us understand grasp these concepts
3) practical tips that we can utilize in our learning endeavors.
Below are a few of the most interesting practical tips that are discussed in the MOOC:
- Get sufficient sleep in order to think well – We often hear the advice that a good night’s rest will help us to think more clearly. The material in the MOOC gives us great animations that help us understand why: when we sleep, our brain cells shrink a little bit, and that allows fluids to wash out the toxins that accumulate in the brain. Thus, if you pull an all-nighter before an exam, you are literally “going in to take a test with a poisoned brain”
- Use the Pomodoro technique to battle procrastination – When we are faced with something that we do not like (e.g., working on a math problem), pain centers in our brain will initially light up. There are two ways we can react: we can quickly shift our attention to something else in order to avoid the feeling of pain (that is, procrastinate), or we can continue to work through the pain—after 15 to 20 minutes, it will fade away. Thus, we need to trick our brains into not taking the easy way out, and just persevere a little bit. A popular technique for helping with this is the Pomodoro Technique in which you set a timer for 25 minutes, work on the task at hand for that time, then take a 5 minute break, at which point you reward yourself.
- Use spaced repetition to help remember key facts – There is a trend to move away from rote memorization to emphasizing engaging learning experiences, like working on real-world problems with your peers, and this is a good trend. However, memorization is still an important part of learning—you need to have a store of relevant information with which to make higher-level connections.
- To test whether you’ve really learned something, try recalling it – When students read textbooks, for example, many try to reinforce what they’ve learned by extensive highlighting or re-reading the information. Dr. Barbara Oakley points to a series of studies that show that these techniques are inferior to simply trying to recall the information—you can create flashcards to test yourself, or simply glance away from a page and recalling what you’ve just read.
- Try learning in different locations – Research shows that you have the best recall of things you’ve learned when you are in the same settings. Thus, if you are a student, one approach might be to do all of your studying in a classroom, which is where you will take the test. But Barbara has a much better suggestion, and that is to vary where you study so that you don’t become attached to any specific environmental factors, thus making your learning more robust.
Barbara uses another good metaphor, that of learning how to drive a car. Some people may learn to drive fairly easily, and others may struggle through driver’s education, but virtually every mentally competent adult learns to drive in a short period of time (this actually consists of a highly complex set of skills). Yet, we don’t hear about people who gave it up just after trying because they found “they had no talent for it,” nor people who have been learning to drive “off and on for 10 years, not really making much progress.” It is just something we learn to do because it is important to us! This is the same way we should think about a lot of learning.
Source: https://www.class-central.com/report/coursera-learning-how-to-learn/
I was talking to my children (aged 13 and 15) on this topic and they mentioned that everybody in their class (grade 8 and 10) learn and study while listening to music and that they learn better. I thought that was very weird and impossible.