Learning, Practice, Mastery

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.

Froebel’s Gifts were meant to be given in a particular order, growing more complex over time and teaching different lessons about shape, structure and perception along the way. A soft knitted ball could be given to a child just six weeks old, followed by a wooden ball and then a cube, illustrating similarities and differences in shapes and materials. Then kids would get a cylinder (which combines elements of both the ball and the cube) and it would blow their little minds. Some objects were pierced by strings or rods so kids could spin them and see how one shapes morphs into another when set into motion. Later came cubes made up of smaller cubes and other hybrids, showing children how parts relate to a whole through deconstruction and reassembly.

These perception-oriented “Gifts” would then give way to construction-oriented “Occupations.” Kids would be told to build things out of materials like paper, string, wire, or little sticks and peas that could be connected and stacked into structures.

I wonder how many things we're all going around doing badly because the idea of not knowing how to do them well seems too ridiculous to admit to.

...You've probably never been taught to have a conversation. I've had exactly one class on it and it was in the last six months. I know damn well that many people have not self-taught this well... In general there's this entire class of implicit skills that we mostly don't think of as skills, that we're entirely self-taught on, and that we practice sufficiently non-demonstratively that we can't easily watch what other people do. The result is a very personal skill idiolect.

Besides being unlikely to work for you even if someone is able to describe what makes their writing tick, most advice is written by people who don't understand how their writing works. This may be difficult to see for writing if you haven't spent a lot of time analyzing writing, but it's easy to see this is true if you've taken a bunch of dance classes or had sports instruction that isn't from a very good coach. If you watch, for example, the median dance instructor and listen to their instructions, you'll see that their instructions are quite different from what they actually do. People who listen and follow instructions instead of attempting to copy what the instructor is doing will end up doing the thing completely wrong. Most writing advice similarly fails to capture what's important.

Students traditionally learn art and design by studying the masters, analyzing, sketching and interpreting the grand visions of the past. In doing this, they get to understand the ideas, concepts and motivations behind the visual form.

In user interface design, this practice is curiously absent.

A rule of thumb is that the importance of a blog in your feed reader is inversely proportional to their posting cadence. Prioritise the blogs that post only once a month or every couple of weeks over those that post every day or multiple times a day...Building up a large library of sporadically updated blogs is much more useful and much easier to keep up with than trying to keep up with a handful of aggregation sites every day.

While being an extremely broad generalist can work, it's gotten much harder to "know a bit of everything" and be effective because there's more of everything over time (in terms of both breadth and depth).

...If you watch an anime or a TV series "about" fighting, people often improve by increasing the number of techniques they know because that's an easy thing to depict but, in real life, getting better at techniques you already know is often more effective than having a portfolio of hundreds of "moves". I've personally found this to be true in a variety of disciplines.

He was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor.

Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.

In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable.

Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.

What I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively.

If you focus on:

• learning how you best learn, and
• practicing effectively communicating the things you've learned
  you can't go wrong.

Even with all the features and plugins, Canvas presumes certain ways of organizing classes that might not be universal, just typical. And if (like me) you’re an atypical user, you have to choose between constantly fighting with the system or gradually doing more and more things the way Canvas wants you to do them. This, by the way, is why it’s never true to say that technologies are neutral and what matters is how you use them: every technology without exception has affordances, certain actions that it makes easy, and other actions that it makes difficult or impossible. A technology whose affordances run contrary to your convictions can rob you of your independence — and any technology deployed on the scale of Canvas will inevitably do that. It will turn every teacher into an obedient Canvas-user. I don’t want to be an obedient Canvas-user.

Universities are often too large, dulling the student-educator relationship. Internships are often transitory and involve large volumes of work without context or learning: building web pages or presentations from pre-built components to meet a deadline, for example. It’s work that people need to do, but it doesn’t require learning or understanding the client or the project. Thankfully, there is a middle ground that we seem to have forgotten about in tech: the apprenticeship.

If children started school at six months old and their teachers gave them walking lessons, within a single generation people would come to believe that humans couldn't learn to walk without going to school.

One of the major principles of extensive reading is that if a learner can comprehend material at 98% comprehension, she will acquire new words in context, in a painless, enjoyable way. But what is 98% comprehension?

In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill.

1. Unconscious incompetence
2. Conscious incompetence
3. Conscious competence
4. Unconscious competence

1. Pause at the end of each chapter and try to recall it (Recall)
2. Highlight relevant passages for later comparative reading
3. Analyze the book once I’m finished
4. Explain it to unfamiliar audiences (The Feynman technique)
5. Review topics I care about at regular intervals (Space repetition)

This talk centered on Hamming's observations and research on the question "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run?"

Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes.

• Evergreen notes should be atomic
• Evergreen notes should be concept-oriented
• Evergreen notes should be densely linked
• Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies