81–90 of 91 posts
The next best thing is explaining the topic to someone who has no idea about it.
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All learning is self-learning. Professors, trainers, and all teachers just organize and present the material to be learned. They don't teach it to you. You learn it. You're the one who actually absorbs, understands, and assimilates the knowledge by listening to the lectures, reading, thinking, solving problems, and other activities. Self-learning is a natural, human quality. While most of you have used this method in the past, you may want to do it on a more formal basis to speed up and fine-tune your methods. Here's a suggested approach (and trust me on this, you must write it down):
- Clearly identify what you want to learn. Write it out.
- Write some learning objectives for yourself. These statements clearly identify what you want to know and be able to do. For example, you should write something like "When I complete this learning assignment, I will be able to design and program an FIR DSP filter." The objectives should be expressed in "behavioral" terms, that is, using words that state some measurable outcome.
- Identify some initial resources. Start with books at the local bookstore or go to www.Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble at www.barnesandnoble.com. Most cities don't have good technical bookstores, and it's tough to find anything at regular bookstores. Consider yourself lucky if you have a good technical bookstore or a good college bookstore. Plan to get multiple books to give you greater breadth of coverage with multiple explanations, examples, and perspectives. Don't forget to look through your stack of magazine back issues.
- Check out online sources. Do one or more Web searches, or go to relevant company Web sites. You may run across an appropriate tutorial, white paper, or application note that will give you what you need. The large semiconductor and equipment manufacturers have tons of stuff on their Web sites, so start digging. Also check out the professional societies and other sources listed in the tables and sidebars.
- Watch out for any conferences or seminars on this topic. Usually, such events never occur when you need them, but you might get lucky. If you find one, attend because it will provide a big head start for your own learning.
- Organize your materials. Lay them out, mark them up, and then make an outline based on your objectives. See what you have and what you lack, and make an initial list of things to do.
- Dig in. Set aside an hour a day or whatever you can to go through the materials. Turn off the radio, CD player, and television. Make a habit of finding some quiet time to read and learn.
- Look for a human tutor. You could be working just down the hall from an expert on the very subject you're trying to learn. Pick his or her brain. Ask this person if he/she will help you understand and learn. Take this person to lunch or offer to pay for lessons. Most people will gladly share what they know, if you aren't too proud to ask. The best way to do this is to learn as much as you can on your own. Then, go for the professional, personal help with tough questions or when you get stuck.
- Include some hands-on. Is there any hardware you can buy or put together to help you learn it? Maybe there's some software that will help. Buy it or have your employer buy it.
- Write a paper or article or teach what you have learned. You have to know it to write it or teach it. There's no better way to learn for yourself than to have to explain it to others.
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[0] https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/dsps/article/2...
This might sound kind of bizarre, but I don't really try to learn. I think I have a minor learning disability where I have a very hard time remembering things that I deem (consciously or not) as unimportant in the long term. Instead, I try to focus on extracting the nature and patterns of relationships, instead of the specific details. An example might be: learning the purpose of a wristwatch and its power source, ve…
Learning is an exercise in creating space in your mind to represent a new map of interrelated symbols. When you start something new, all the symbols are "too close together" and it takes time and repetition to increase the "resolution" on that map so that you can put the symbols into position with more precision and not have them confused with one another. You don't yet have a good intuition for the significance of e…
> Learning is an exercise in creating space in your mind to represent a new map of interrelated symbols. That might be how you learn, which is a good thing to know, but the presentation of your personal understanding of yourself come off like “this is the way for all”, which gives me the yucks. For me I need to re-formulate things in my own words (or my own code) until I understand which parts of a system I have blin…
I recently wrote about my learning strategy under a post called “How Learning Works: Components, Loops, Systems”: https://romandesign.co/how-learning-works-components-systems... > It's like Charlie Munger once said about mental models: “All this stuff is really quite obvious and yet most people don’t really know it in a way where they can use it.” The long and short of it is that you go through a cycle of Knowing, Do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I try to focus on extracting the nature and patterns of relationships, instead of the specific details. You're a mapper , like me. The only reason I ever want to learn details is if they are important corner cases. >In tech this can be an obstacle when communicating because many engineers have an extremely fine-grained memory, seemingly all the time. Those folks are packers , they know all the corner cases, and worr…
Interesting but there are never just two kinds of thinking. I bet many people fall into other categories that may not even have a name or a description at this point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> spaced repetition is for memorization; I'm not trying to memorize Only if you use it as such. SRS is a scheduler to help you optimize your time, to not spend time on things you probably don't need to refresh. The actual memory/learning part is orthogonal. I use SRS to plan different practices of things (in my case programming languages or concepts). If I consider that I did one of them well, I mark it as such and w…
This is accurate and interesting. I initially thought this was incorrect from strong association with it as a flashcard system, though your technique is consistent with the definition provided on this wiki created by community members [0]. I’m curious. If you would be willing to share, could you demonstrate an example of a prompt? My learning items have almost always been questions and answers, and occasionally image…
For the tech things, the prompts are things like:
"Do an exercism.io exercise in " where language is one of the programming languages I'm studying or want to keep "fresh"
"Write the basic 'counter' in React. With class compoments" or "... with functional components".
Things of that nature. Stuff I can get done in a half hour or less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I try to focus on extracting the nature and patterns of relationships, instead of the specific details. You're a mapper , like me. The only reason I ever want to learn details is if they are important corner cases. >In tech this can be an obstacle when communicating because many engineers have an extremely fine-grained memory, seemingly all the time. Those folks are packers , they know all the corner cases, and worr…
Interesting but there are never just two kinds of thinking. I bet many people fall into other categories that may not even have a name or a description at this point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is accurate and interesting. I initially thought this was incorrect from strong association with it as a flashcard system, though your technique is consistent with the definition provided on this wiki created by community members [0]. I’m curious. If you would be willing to share, could you demonstrate an example of a prompt? My learning items have almost always been questions and answers, and occasionally image…
I have several non-memorization type things. Some personal "get better" things, like... "I tell stories badly. I should avoid them." where I rate it a "2" for a "yeah, I did ok this week" or "1" if I transgressed. I put that into a deck that has a maximum review time of a week. I have other decks with similar things that expire in no more than a month, or a quarter. For the tech things, the prompts are things like: "…
I thought I was the only one that did this.