101–110 of 152 posts
There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applyin…
On learning, what I have learnt without effort, but with the lesson of time and painless observation: it is harder to unlearn.
And since content is virtually infinite - far more content was produced today than anyone could consume in 20 lives - it is crutial to currate. Given the amount of noise out there? Sharpen great and fast information filters.
If an article makes a statement with little to no clear argument to back it up, I continue to read but faster, parsing only one every two or three words until the end of a section.
If the same statement is made again without any backing, that's potential fallacies to brainwashing. An author dragging its feet for ads revenue or filling its prints doesn't fall into the conscious brainwasher category but still represent the risk to spoil my time at best.
If no decent argument is laid out by the end of the section, to back the initial claim, a beginning of one at least, then I stop reading the piece. There statistically isn't enough value in there to burn time reading. Or worse, fallacies may start to do their magic.
I did take the time to skim through the entirely of this article, just to confirm the conclusion made after reaching the first part, to write this comment
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> Spaced repetition takes effort, and causes pain. It is tedious. So it still fits in with the idea proposed This is not true. Anki is tedious and causes pain. Flashcards are such in general. But dpaced repetition does not requires either.
Can you please expand on that. Is'nt Anki one of the most popular tools for using spaced repitition? By meaning spaced repetition is easier do you mean to refer to some other tools which makes it easy to implement and use?
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Can you please expand on that. Is'nt Anki one of the most popular tools for using spaced repitition? By meaning spaced repetition is easier do you mean to refer to some other tools which makes it easy to implement and use?
Listening to your favorite new song everyday for a week is spaced repetition and very enjoyable, no pain whatsoever. You'll quickly learn the nuances of the song that you didn't pick up in your first few listens. Also a great way to memorize lyrics.
His explanation of how one can feel like they have knowledge on a subject after engaging in some edutainment but you realize how shallow your knowledge is once you try to discuss it with others is something I find for myself a lot. It is one thing I hope AIs can really help with. It is a common belief that you don't understand something until you can explain it to someone else in simple terms. I've tried this method…
They’ll try to coerce any of your (or the model’s) mistakes into the correct answer out of politeness, and when you make a mistake it has zero model of the model you used to produce such a mistake, so it has no idea where to intervene in your knowledge except at which words hit the keyboard.
Idk, I am extremely extremely unimpressed any time I try to quiz it on topics I know. Except for coding, which makes sense since that’s the exercise of pushing as much semantic information into syntactic information as possible.
I recently picked up a delightfully pre-digital habit: read books with a red pen in your hand (or any color different from the print). In the margins of the pages, ask questions, note points of confusion, or challenge the author. Mark sections to revisit (or skip entirely) later. Fidget with the pen to engage your motor neurons. At the end of each chapter, there's usually a mostly-blank page. That's your spot to summ…
I ended up buying a Supernote A5X and it has proven to be one of the best purchases I’ve ever made. The Digest feature is fantastic for the workflow you’re describing. Ripping the DRM from Kindle books is trivial and you can export them with Calibre to include oversized margins if you’d like more space.
There is a field of education, that studies teaching and learning! In fact many of you who attended university and studied at a "school of computer science" would have been in a building next to a "school of education". This post is interesting, but it reads like a layperson (from a teaching point of view) coming up with some fairly good theories of learning (of which there are quite a few) and discussing how applyin…
Well, regarding this, I can’t speak to the theory behind it. But as a general rule, specifically when it comes to programming, I’ve always advocated that when presented with an example, someone should type the code in and not copy paste it. That the act of typing gives you time to briefly consider each element of the text and their relationships to each other, rather than as an opaque blob pasted all at once. Sure, f…
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There's a free course in Coursera called "Learning How to Learn" and it radically changed how I view learning and education in general. I wish I knew about this when I was a teen. If I take a valuable nugget of information about it, is that real learning comes through experience: using the information, recalling it fron memory and manipulating it in some way. This goes from just writing what you hear to a personal pr…
With no qualifications at all, I occasionally fantasize about starting my own school. One of the rules of my imaginary school is that a full 33% of the time, K through 12, is to be spent on meta-cognition. Not simply “study habits”. Mindfulness, physical education, anything that helps bring focus and motivation counts. I find it crazy that the educational system expects children to develop in this axis on their own a…
I think boredom played a huge part in my learning. 1970s and 1980s at home there wasn't much to do. Any new material or idea was like water in a desert. We didn't know it at the time it was just normal.
Even early days of home computers it was all you on your own learning how to fix anything. Even early days of Internet it was just on for a bit and log off even shut down the computer and cover it with a cover. Now it's 24/7/365 stimulation home or outside walking from a fire hose of knowledge.
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Language classes do work, as long as you participate. Children may appear to be picking up languages effortlessly, but consider how much time they spend to do so: take 2 years of a language, and you will be in advance of a 2 year-old native speaker. > our brains have to process language at speeds too fast for the conscious mind to keep up good point for oral communication, but literacy doesn't have to be done in real…
While I agree that adult capabilities for language learning are often underselled, you need to appreciate that a 2 year-old native speaker hasn't got the capabilities to learn the language to the full extent. Yet a 2-year old is likely to have a better phoneme representation – often much better – in their native language than an adult who has studied 2 years in language classes.
I suspect that even a tin-eared adult learner could master those phonemes with enough obsessive repetition, both listening and speaking. I'm reminded of Liam Neeson's character in 'Taken' spending a transatlantic journey listening over and over again to the voice of his daughter's kidnapper just so he could recognise him later on.
That level of obsession requires motivation which I think is highly under-appreciated where learning is concerned.
We often think of small children as possessing magic learning brains without considering how highly motivated they must be. The ability to speak means they can more easily make their basic preferences and problems known to parents and so on. It's hard to imagine what it was like for us back in early childhood.
However, children do have one natural advantage: if you learnt a language when young then it must be harder to forget it, due to Ribot's Law: