In order to do a better job putting together my thoughts and knowledge on the subject, I precommitted myself to giving a presentation on learning. My specific goal for the presentation is to inform audience members about how humans actually learn and teach them how to leverage this knowledge to efficiently learn and maintain factual and procedural knowledge and create desired habits.
I will be focusing a little on background neuroscience, borrowing especially from A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation. I will heavily discuss spaced repetition, and I will also talk about the relevance of System 1 and System 2 thinking. I will not be talking about research, or about how to discover what to learn; for the purposes of my presentation, people already know what they want or need to learn, and have a fairly accurate picture of what that knowledge or those behaviors look like.
Given that I will only have an hour to speak, I will be unable to explore everything I might like to in depth. Less Wrong (both the site and the community) are my most valuable resource here, so I am asking two things:
In one hour, what would you cover if you earnestly wanted to improve people’s ability to learn?
What background material do I need to ensure fluency with? This should be material that I need to have adequate familiarity with or else risk presenting an error, even if I don’t need to present the material itself in any depth.
The audience will be students and faculty in a Computer Science department. In decreasing order of number of members, the audience will be Masters students, seniors, Ph.D candidates, professors; no Junior or lower-level undergraduates, so I will probably use computing analogies that wouldn’t make sense in other contexts. Because of the audience, I’m also comfortable giving a fairly information-dense presentation, but since I intend to persuade as well as inform the presentation will not be a report.
Presentation on Learning
In order to do a better job putting together my thoughts and knowledge on the subject, I precommitted myself to giving a presentation on learning. My specific goal for the presentation is to inform audience members about how humans actually learn and teach them how to leverage this knowledge to efficiently learn and maintain factual and procedural knowledge and create desired habits.
I will be focusing a little on background neuroscience, borrowing especially from A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation. I will heavily discuss spaced repetition, and I will also talk about the relevance of System 1 and System 2 thinking. I will not be talking about research, or about how to discover what to learn; for the purposes of my presentation, people already know what they want or need to learn, and have a fairly accurate picture of what that knowledge or those behaviors look like.
Given that I will only have an hour to speak, I will be unable to explore everything I might like to in depth. Less Wrong (both the site and the community) are my most valuable resource here, so I am asking two things:
In one hour, what would you cover if you earnestly wanted to improve people’s ability to learn?
What background material do I need to ensure fluency with? This should be material that I need to have adequate familiarity with or else risk presenting an error, even if I don’t need to present the material itself in any depth.