champion for each. Ask for a wide variety of topics: some tech-
8.
Improving Quality and Productivity in Training: A New Model for the High-Tech Learning Environment [RW98].
9.
For even more on this subject, see Knowledge Hydrant: A Pattern Language for Study Groups [Ker99].
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WORK TOGETHER, STUDY TOGETHER
175
Keys to Adult Learning
Adult learners are a different breed from either children or
college students. Malcolm Knowles, in The Adult Learner: a
Neglected Species [Kno90], identifies these characteristics
of the adult learner and their learning environment:
• The adult learner is motivated to learn if learning will
satisfy their own interests and needs.
• Units studied should be real-life situations, not just iso-
lated subjects.
• Analysis of the learner’s experience is the core
method employed.
• Adults need self-direction; the instructor should help
them engage in mutual inquiry.
• The instructor must allow for differences in style, time,
place, and pace.
Notice that these ideas line up very nicely with a
study/reading group made up of your peers. By its very
nature, a reading group is aligned with the needs and
goals of the adult learner.
nical and some on soft skills or on technology you’re already
using or on technology you hope to use.
Select a proposal—and a leader
You need someone to lead the study group for this particular
subject. They don’t have to be expert in the topic but do need
to be passionate about the topic and about learning it.
Buy books
The company buys books for all participants. Most publish-
ers (including the Pragmatic Bookshelf) provide volume dis-
counts, so be sure to check.
Schedule lunch meetings
The company provides lunch if they can, or you can brown-
bag it. Reading itself should be done on your own time, but
schedule the meeting for lunch, and plan on a longish lunch
of ninety minutes.
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USE ENHANCED LEARNING TECHNIQUES
176
In the meeting itself, plan on spending the first half hour eating,
socializing, and in informal conversation. Then, start the meeting
proper. Have one person summarize the chapter or sections that
everyone read. Rotate through, by topic or by chapter, so it’s not
always the same person. Then talk about it: ask questions, give
opinions. For inspiration, you can look at questions at the end of
chapters, any explicit study guide questions, or the next actions
that I’ve provided here.
TIP 28
Form study groups to learn and teach.
Try to keep each group to no more than eight to ten people or so.
If you have larger teams, maybe split them up into smaller groups
for discussion.
Beside the incredible education benefits, it’s a great way to help
jell a team. The team that studies together learns together, teaches
each other, and learns more effectively.
6.6 Use Enhanced Learning Techniques
Now that we’ve established a good framework for deliberate learn-
ing, we need to look at learning itself. In the rest of this chapter,
we’ll look at some specific techniques to help you learn faster and
better. We’ll be looking at the following:
• Better ways to deliberately read and summarize written
material
• Using mind maps to explore and find patterns and
relationships
• Learning by teaching
Any one of these techniques, by itself, can be a great help. Taken
together, they can turn you into an efficient learning machine. But
everyone is different, and everyone’s best method of learning is dif-
ferent. As a result, you may find some of these techniques more
effective than others—remember that one size never fits all.
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READ DELIBERATELY WITH SQ3R
177
6.7 Read Deliberately with SQ3R
It’s an unfortunate truth that written
instructions are generally considered to be Written instruction is the
the least efficient. Many of the parts of the least efficient.
brain and body that you want to train or
educate aren’t the parts that process language. Remember from
our brain discussion that the portion of your brain that processes
language is relatively small. The entire rest of your brain and body
doesn’t do language.
As a result, it seems that we learn best from observation. We are
natural mimics, and the best, most effective way to learn is by
observing and mimicking someone else. We’ll look at this phe-
nomenon again a little later, but in the meantime, we have a bit
of a problem.
Right now, you are reading this book. Over the course of your life-
time, you’ve probably read a lot more books than you have attended
seminars or lectures. But reading is the least effective means of
learning, compared to any sort of experiential learning.
One way to make reading more effective is to approach it a little
more deliberately than just picking up a book and plowing ahead.
There are a number of popular techniques in use; we will look at
one in detail here, but this is just one of many that work along
similar lines.
This technique of studying a book or other printed matter is known
as SQ3R; that’s an acronym for the steps you need to take.10
• Survey: Scan the table of contents and chapter summaries for
an overview.
• Question: Note any questions you have.
• Read: Read in its entirety.
• Recite: Summarize, take notes, and put in your own words.
• Review: Reread, expand notes, and discuss with colleagues.
10. Described in Effective Study [Rob70].
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READ DELIBERATELY WITH SQ3R
178
The first helpful aspect of this technique is that it is deliberate.
Instead of randomly picking up a book, reading it, and maybe or
maybe not remembering much of it, this is a much more thought-
ful, conscious, and aware approach.
The Process
To begin with, you survey the work in question.
Look over the table of contents, chapter introduc-
tions and summaries, and any other high-level
landmarks the author has left for you. You want
to get a good overview of the book without delving into any details
just yet.
Next, write down any questions you want answered. H
ow does this
technology solve this problem? Will I learn how to do this one thing,
or will this point to another source? Rephrase the chapter and sec-
tion heads as questions; these are all questions that you expect the
book will answer.
Now you can read the book in its entirety. If you can, carry the
book with you so you can get some reading time squeezed in while
waiting for a meeting or appointment, while on a train or airplane,
or wherever you may find yourself with a little spare time. Slow
down on the difficult parts, and reread sections as needed if the
material isn’t clear.
As you go along, recite, recall, and rephrase the most important
bits from the book in your own words. What were the key points?
Take some initial notes on these ideas. Invent acronyms to help
you remember lists and such. Really play with the information;
use your R-mode, synesthetic11 constructs and more. What would
this topic look like as a movie? A cartoon?
Finally, begin to review the material. Reread portions as necessary,
and expand on your notes as you rediscover interesting parts (we’ll
look at an excellent method of taking this style of notes in Sec-
tion 6.8, Visualize Insight with Mind Maps, on page 181).
11. Crossing senses, imagining that numbers have colors, words smell a certain way, and so on.
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READ DELIBERATELY WITH SQ3R
179
An Example
For example, suppose I’m reading a book on a new programming
language—D, Erlang, or Ruby, for example. I’ll flip through the
table of contents and see where the book is going. Ah, an introduc-
tion to some syntax, a few toy projects, advanced features that I’m
not interested in yet. Hmm. Is it single or multiple inheritance or
mixins? I wonder what iterators look like in this language? How do
you create and manage packages or modules? What’s the runtime
performance like? Next comes the reading itself—in large doses
when I can, in small doses if needed.
Next comes recite/rephrase. It’s easy to fool yourself and think,
“Oh sure, I remember all of that.” But it’s not that easy (see the
sidebar on the following page).
Try to use the information from the book: try to write a program
in that language from scratch (different from any of the exercises
or toy programs in the book itself). Hmm. Now how did that work
again? Time to review that section or two. I’ll make some notes on
common bits that I know I’ll have to refer to again and maybe put
some sticky note flags on key tables or figures or a quick doodle
on the whiteboard to help me remember what’s where. Now is a
good time to talk it over with friends or participate in mailing list
discussions.
TIP 29
Read deliberately.
Does this flow of events sound at all familiar? I think it clearly
echoes the R-mode to L-mode shift. Like the rock-climbing experi-
ence, this starts with a holistic, shallow, but wide survey; narrows
down to traditional L-mode activities; and broadens out with
multisensory exposure (discussion, notes, pictures, metaphors,
and so on).
It may be that the “normal” notes you’ve probably always taken
are pretty tame, in terms of brain stimulus. Fortunately, a great
technique can help with that and take average, boring note-taking
and exploratory thinking up to a whole new level.
You need more than notes; you need a mind map.
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READ DELIBERATELY WITH SQ3R
180
Test-Driven Learning
Reading the same material over and over, or studying the
same notes over and over, doesn’t help you remember the
material. Instead of studying, try testing.
Repeatedly testing yourself by trying to recall the material
over and over works much better.∗ Deliberate, repeated
attempts at retrieval consolidate learning and strengthen
the connections in your brain. Repeated input, by itself,
doesn’t do you nearly as much good. Try to write a pro-
gram in that new language you’re studying—you’ll need to
retrieve the key information to do so. Try to explain key parts
of that new methodology to a colleague. Keep at the
retrieval—the testing of your knowledge. You might think
of it as test-driven learning. And when testing yourself, you
can take advantage of the spacing effect.
Cramming, or studying a lot of information in a short
amount of time, is not very effective. We tend to for-
get things along an exponential curve, so spacing out
your quizzing reinforces material much more effectively. For
example, you might plan on retesting yourself along a 2-2-
2-6 schedule: retest after two hours, two days, two weeks,
and six months.
But that’s not the most efficient use of your time, especially
with a large amount of material. Some facts and ideas
will get memorized more easily, and others will need more
work. Trying to keep track of an individual memory-decay
curve for each fact you’re trying to memorize is too hard
to do manually. But, hey, we’ve got this nifty computer that
we can use.
Piotr Wozniak developed an algorithm to take advantage
of the spacing effect, implemented in the commercial
product SuperMemo (an open source implementation is
available at http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/). It’s basically a
souped-up flashcard program that keeps track of your per-
formance and schedules retests according to an individual
decay curve for each item.
It’s a great way to take advantage of the brain’s caching
and archiving algorithms.
∗.
The Critical Importance of Retrieval for Learning [KR08]. Thanks to June
Kim for spotting this one.
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VISUALIZE INSIGHT WITH MIND MAPS
181
6.8 Visualize Insight with Mind Maps
A mind map is a kind of a diagram that shows topics and how they
are connected. Creating a mind map is a widely used creativity-
and productivity-enhancing technique. Invented by British author
Tony Buzan in The Mind Map Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking
to Maximize Your Brain’s Untapped Potential [BB96], similar styles
of diagrams have been around since at least the third century.12
A modern mind map is a sort of two-dimensional, organic, and
holistic outline. The rules for making a mind map are loose, but
they go something like this:
1. Start with a largish piece of unlined paper.
2. Write the subject title in the center of the page, and draw an
enclosing circle around it.
3. F
or the major subject subheadings, draw lines out from this
circle, and add a title to each.
4. Recurse for additional hierarchical nodes.
5. For other individual facts or ideas, draw lines out from the
appropriate heading and label them as well.
Each node should be connected (no free floaters), and the figure
should be hierarchical with a single root, but in general there are
few restrictions. You want to be somewhat playful with the use of
colors, symbols, and anything else that has meaning for you. But
trying to explain this with text doesn’t really convey the result; for
an example, take a look at Figure 6.4, on the next page. This fig-
ure shows the mind map I first created when studying the Dreyfus
model. It’s greatly reduced to fit in the book, so don’t worry about
trying to read the individual labels—just get a sense of the struc-
ture and flow.
A traditional outline has some subtle and troublesome limitations.
For one, regular linear outlines tend to block a creative impulse;
the very nature of the outline implies a hierarchy, and hierarchies
tend to reinforce their own structure. So, a great idea that doesn’t
fit into the structure of the moment might get discarded.
12. Possibly beginning with the Greek philosopher Porphyry of Tyros, according to Wikipedia. Of course, cave drawings go back even further, if you don’t mind bison in your mind map.
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VISUALIZE INSIGHT WITH MIND MAPS
182
Figure 6.4: Original Dreyfus mind map—messy, organic
When creating a mind map, avoid filling in the elements in a clock-
wise manner—that’s just an outline going in circles.13
When I give lectures on this topic, I usually stop here and ask the
audience whether they have ever heard of, or used, mind maps.
The results are very predictable.
In the United States, I’ll maybe get three or four people out of a
hundred who’ve ever even heard of them. But in Europe, I get the
opposite response—virtually everyone in the audience has used
mind maps. I’m told it’s a standard part of their primary educa-
tion, much as making an outline or a topic sentence is here in the
United States.
While mind mapping sounds like a very
Emphasize spatial
basic, elementary technique, it has some
cueing and
subtle properties. It takes advantage of
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning Page 22