Learning via school works primarily because of the fixed, predictable and regular schedule dedicated to learning.
Learning French on my own for just 5-10 minutes daily has taught me a few things.
The amount of time spent on a subject is less important than having a predictable schedule.
Here's why this is important. We all read, hear about people who have read tons of books, who spend 5 hours learning daily and want to do the same.
And this is really bad. A recipe for predictable failure. You won't expect to eat five plates of rice because some dude you respect does it would you?
In the past, I would procrastinate when I hit a mental block, or a difficult lesson.
Now, I simply repeat past exercises because sticking with the schedule is more important than learning something new.
To keep things brief, the most important factor to learning on my own is having a reminder because as an adult, my days vanish in a myriad of unpredictable activities.
Without this reminder, i'll hit my head in six months when I remember that I was trying to learn something.
Thank you for this, it resonates with me quite well. When studying for university entrance exams I produced a very detailed and intense study schedule. Proud of myself, I showed it to my teacher who suggested it was too excessive. I don't think I followed that schedule for more than one day and in hindsight the students that studied for a bare minimum of 30 minutes a day after school performed the best, even though the numbers weren't super excessive.
This is a really neat concept. One of the challenges for me for learning is filling in partial knowledge. E.g., when I understand some statistics / AI concepts, but want to fill in some new area of knowledge, it's hard to justify taking an entire class if all the material I need is buried in one or two talks.
I'm building a search engine for lectures (https://www.findlectures) and avoided this problem by focusing on standalone lectures (e.g. conference talks). Their way seems much better, for cases where you need to understand all the pieces of a big problem. Also, kudos for curating data by hand :)
After doing a few moocs, I wished I could just have a form of automated testing for any subject. So I can compete every time I feel I have a new intuition.
That's an interesting idea! Testing is an interesting topic, since the obvious way to do it is multiple choice, but it's tricky to make questions that don't just test your ability to memorize trivia.
This is pretty neat. I have been lurking around this site and stumbled upon "prerequisite tree"s[0]. Is it possible to generate this kind of "prerequisite tree" programmatically?
Really enjoyed the metacognition portion of this article. It seems like the key here is...
1. people overestimate how much they'll remember.
2. this is due in part because in the moment you've learned something, you can recall it easily.
3. switching between things, pushes them out of immediate memory, so you can practice retrieving what you learned from while its less active (and competing with other things you're learning).
I've recently had an idea that I'm really excited about, but it's totally outside of my wheelhouse. It's a biotech idea and I have no training in biology or chemistry. I started watching open courseware lectures but then decided to try using a biology text book instead. I went to a local salvation army and picked up a biology book for $2. It's been working pretty well, but I'm trying to figure how to self sustain my motivation. That's always the hardest part of self learning for me.
Learning via school works primarily because of the fixed, predictable and regular schedule dedicated to learning.
Learning French on my own for just 5-10 minutes daily has taught me a few things.
The amount of time spent on a subject is less important than having a predictable schedule.
Here's why this is important. We all read, hear about people who have read tons of books, who spend 5 hours learning daily and want to do the same.
And this is really bad. A recipe for predictable failure. You won't expect to eat five plates of rice because some dude you respect does it would you?
In the past, I would procrastinate when I hit a mental block, or a difficult lesson.
Now, I simply repeat past exercises because sticking with the schedule is more important than learning something new.
To keep things brief, the most important factor to learning on my own is having a reminder because as an adult, my days vanish in a myriad of unpredictable activities.
Without this reminder, i'll hit my head in six months when I remember that I was trying to learn something.