Some observations about learning about learning

This is week five of the IRLS 672 summer 2010 course and the learning curve continues to be fairly steep. There was a lot of dense material to cover, and in addition to looking at the material on the "The Networked Environment," we were asked to take a look at our own learning style to see how we might be leverage the resources available. It's really a valuable question, given that we all have limited time and energy to expend on trying to learn. Learning take a lot of time and effort, so becoming more adept at finding better ways to learn material obviously offers important benefits.

The suggested reading "Learning Styles and Strategies" had some very familiar concepts to me. A lot of it seems to be based on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), much of which is based on the work of Carl Jung, one of the 20th Century's great minds, in my opinion. Taking the MBTI has been a great help to me and countless others. It's well worth the time and minimal cost to take it.

It comes as no surprise to me that I am drawn to the video and other visual resources offered. Unfortunately, there weren't all that many, but compared to just a few years ago there is an explosion of audio-visual resources thanks to the topic we are studying - the NET! I especially appreciated the video about The Warriors of the Net. It is also interesting that the site is so clearly trying to find a way to pay for the much greater amount of time and energy required to produce even a relatively primitive computer generated animation such as this one. There will have to be a way to provide incentives to producing content like this. For me, it helps me understand TCP/IP much more easily. I'd be willing to participate in some sort of micropayment system to help keep this kind of thing going, but based on my experience, I may be in the minority when it comes to actually paying creative people for their work online.

I also want to check out the audio podcasts from Harvard University Extension. I briefly looked at the lecture series on Computing 101 and it sounded pretty good. I want to add some of those podcasts to my iPhone and see how well I do just listening to the information and not actually reading it or watching a video.

One thing I do like about Wikipedia is that it allows for non-linear access to information. I can skip around and move faster or slower when accessing content. There are many times when this is by far the most effecient way for me to learn. Video tends to lock one into a linear stream and since I have limited study time, I tend to be pretty choosy about which videos I'm going to watch. On the other had, if I'm really tired, I can watch a video at the end of the day a bit easier than trying to read about LANs, WANs or ARPANET!