Tools for Learning Part 2

I guess I could probably talk about being mentally prepared to learn for an extremely long time, but we did cover attitude and how important it is for learning in my last blog. It's the old adage of “you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink”. So I'm going to bypass any more of my thoughts on the subject of having a good attitude for learning versus the attitude we grow into having as adults.

Now in the next part of my blog on learning I'm going to talk about physical tools for learning and how things have changed from when I was in school. When the teacher gave me a subject such as navigation and its importance to modern civilization I had four places that I could go to for research, our textbooks  first, which were very lacking in any information other than the obvious. I think maybe we should take a closer look or ask questions about what information can be gained from a textbook that only has the basic information about navigation and its importance to modern civilization. If it does give us the basic information, it would probably give us the names of either the inventors or names of people that helped research and develop what people needed to make successful navigation possible. These names are important so we come to the second physical tool that we're going to need to help us learn even though it will be two physical tools. I combined these two into one and they are pen and paper and their necessity in learning is to copy down anything that would help us research the subject which we are investigating. The reason for pen and paper rather than typing it into the computer is so that it can be spontaneous and easy to edit on the fly. The textbook would probably also give us dates in which important events, observations or inventions for navigation came about. Copying these things down from our first learning tool and, rather than calling it a textbook, let's call it our subjects basic information because many times the information won’t be coming from a textbook at any given time.

Research is the major tool that we will need to use in our exercise of learning. Back in the day it wasn't quite as easy as it is today to do research. The school library, even as good as a lot of our schools back then were,  those libraries were limited on information on some given subjects. They would have some of the best encyclopedias and reference materials available at that time. Encyclopedias and other research materials are just as limited as our textbooks were so it meant a trip to our larger community libraries. Our community libraries sometimes could be a long distance from where we lived and, if our family was unable to transport us to the library, that meant taking long bus rides and doing such things as riding the bus for a long day at the library doing research meant that it would probably have to be done on a weekend or not on a school day, so that we could give the proper time and effort in finding more information about our subject. As you can see this prospect was not the greatest environment for expanding our knowledge of our subject matter.  In those days this would have been what we would've needed to do to go beyond our normal memorizing of names and dates and trying to learn in depth about our subject we were given.

A person living in the 21st century however generally has at his fingertips one of the greatest devices ever conceived for doing research and it is the Internet. It can be accessed from a multitude of devices, from smart phones and tablets to laptop computers or larger desktop computers. If someone did not have access to a computer at home, most school libraries and community and city libraries have computers that can be accessed by anyone for a limited amount of time but in that limited amount of time a person can find more information faster and more in depth than we could in the early to middle 20th century.

Gather up all of the information we have collected either from books, newspaper articles, periodicals, blogs and any pertinent documents available. Read these research materials and find out the questions of who, what, where, when and why.

Make sure that we have researched each person that was involved with our subject even if it means researching each name independently of the subject, which can give us a more in depth look into why each one of these people got involved with our subject.

Take a look at each event that happened as our subject comes to its conclusion. It also may be of help to look at the dates in time that these events happened to see what impact or why our subject was affected by a particular date in time. This can also make us understand why the date might be of particular interest to our subject matter. Anything that can be added to the knowledge of our subject is fair game.

Be careful though not to get overly indulgent in obscure facts if you are on a time line that you have to meet, because doing research can sometimes become addictive and take more time than you have, so alot yourself the proper amount of time for research and then reading of your research materials so as not to get off track or get behind with the conclusion of your paper or work toward your subject.

In our next installment we will talk about writing a paper with our findings, conclusions and thoughts. This does not mean that writing a paper is important. Doing all the research and reading about the subject would probably be sufficient for just learning, but I have found writing a paper gives me an edge on remembering all that I have learned, which is, of course, what we are after, retaining knowledge, which is learning.