All projects are forms of learning. I find that much of my learning time is consumed by two related tasks:
Familiarizing myself with the reference materials. Examples: reading the textbook, taking notes on a lecture, asking questions during a lecture.
Creating a personalized meta-reference to distill and organize the reference materials so that it’ll be faster and easier to re-teach myself in the future. Examples: highlighting textbook material that I expect I won’t remember and crossing out explanations I no longer need, re-formatting concepts learned in a math class into a unified presentation format, deciding which concepts need to be made into flash cards.
Those steps seem related to the challenges and strategies you encountered in this project.
We know that students forget much of what they learn, despite their best efforts. I think it’s wiser not to try hard to remember everything, but instead to “plan to forget” and create personalized references so that it’s easy to re-teach yourself later when the need arises.
I wish that skill were more emphasized in the school system. I think we put too much emphasis on trying to make students work harder and memorize better and “de-stress,” and too little on helping students create a carefully thought-out system of notes and references and practice material that will be useful to them later on.
The process of creating really good notes will also serve as a useful form of practice and a motivating tool. I find myself much more inclined to study if I’ve done this work, and I do in fact retain concepts much better if I’ve put in this work.
Your project sounds like an interesting approach to tackle a related challenge. I’d be especially interested to hear about any efforts you make to tease out the differences between work that’s divided between different people, and work that’s divided between different “versions of you” at different times.
Thanks for that thorough answer!
All projects are forms of learning. I find that much of my learning time is consumed by two related tasks:
Familiarizing myself with the reference materials. Examples: reading the textbook, taking notes on a lecture, asking questions during a lecture.
Creating a personalized meta-reference to distill and organize the reference materials so that it’ll be faster and easier to re-teach myself in the future. Examples: highlighting textbook material that I expect I won’t remember and crossing out explanations I no longer need, re-formatting concepts learned in a math class into a unified presentation format, deciding which concepts need to be made into flash cards.
Those steps seem related to the challenges and strategies you encountered in this project.
We know that students forget much of what they learn, despite their best efforts. I think it’s wiser not to try hard to remember everything, but instead to “plan to forget” and create personalized references so that it’s easy to re-teach yourself later when the need arises.
I wish that skill were more emphasized in the school system. I think we put too much emphasis on trying to make students work harder and memorize better and “de-stress,” and too little on helping students create a carefully thought-out system of notes and references and practice material that will be useful to them later on.
The process of creating really good notes will also serve as a useful form of practice and a motivating tool. I find myself much more inclined to study if I’ve done this work, and I do in fact retain concepts much better if I’ve put in this work.
Your project sounds like an interesting approach to tackle a related challenge. I’d be especially interested to hear about any efforts you make to tease out the differences between work that’s divided between different people, and work that’s divided between different “versions of you” at different times.