An Advent series - Are you learning the right way?

How do you learn new things? Do you organise a course and spend a long day in front of a blackboard? Do you prefer to get a book and read to learn or spend your commute listening to audiobooks and podcasts? Or do you prefer to delve in to new ideas yourself and explore through doing?

In Daniel Levitin's great book The Organised Mind, he talks about three types of learning:

• Explicit learning - the most well known type where you actively try and learn, such as at school
• Implicit learning - being exposed to something such as a language while in a foreigh country
• Learning through self-discovery

Daniel notes that recent studies have suggested learning through self discovery helps you to learn better and for longer than the more traditional ways. In practice, this means exploring ideas, thinking through theories yourself and not just accepting the way things are.

Is this the end of books and courses then?

My first thought is that if it is working for you then don't change things. For many people, explicit learning works well and in certain circumstances, it fits much better. In 1991, this study found that there was a wider range of results for explicit learning compared with implicit but that those with a higher IQ tended to perform better in explicit.

There is also the benefit that sitting in a training course offers to allowing you to consider the topic during the quiet times. Apologies to any Trainers reading this but daydreaming has been shown to allow the brain to process knowledge and let it sink in more effectively. I find courses trigger considerations not just on the topic but how it can be applied as well. They are also the most cost effective way to introduce groups of people to a topic in one go.

So should I sit on my laptop each night and try things out?

Short answer - yes.

Many people (if not most) reading this blog will work in technology in one form or other. You can attend courses but in many organisations, these are hard to arrange and negotiate time out of the office. Exploring technology in your own time is the way to get hands-on experience with new ideas and theories. I would still not have found the pleasure of developing in the SharePoint Framework or realised how helpful that the PnP patterns can be. You shouldn't shun your family or cats while doing it but make the most of your time to understand outside your day to day.

This can be supplemented with implicit learning by joining user groups and attending conferences. Being immersed in new ideas that you try out and explore further establishes better engagement with the topics and builds contacts to help you along the way as well.

Finding time

The challenge with these are finding the time to think. Find a quiet time with either no music or focused music and allow the thoughts to flow. Back to Daniel Levitin's book and a study by Angeline Lillard and Jennifer Peterson of the University of Virginia studied the difference in four year olds watching the fast paced Spongebob Squarepants vs the the slower Caillou. The fast moving Spongebob had impacts on the children's executive function, causing problems with attention, working memory and problem solving. The slower show allowed the children to build pathways in their brain and think through the ideas to completion.

So to learn better and perform better, it's time to be less SpongeBob and more Caillou.