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I use Bloglines to keep up with the many blogs and other stuff I scan every day, and one of the nice features is the ability to “clip” something into a clip file for later use. I’m always stuffing things in there when I find even so much as a link to a blog-able idea. But alas, sometimes I never really get around to actually writing about it, so once a month or so I dump out the file in the recurring feature called “File Cabinet”.

Every now and then I’ll keep an article for quite a while because sometimes it just takes a while to finally crystallize a few thoughts on it. What with vacation, the move, an unusually heavy work load, etc. I never got around to actually writing about it. Or, maybe I’m just a slow thinker.

Hence today’s post.

An Oct. 24th post written by Shawn on Anecdote called “What I believe about learning” has finally percolated enough in the ol’ gray matter to generate a thought or two. It’s not one of those earth-moving subjects, or even filled with radical thinking for that matter, but just the same it struck a chord with me.

Please read the article – it’s short and sweet – but his points I’ll list here, along with my thoughts and additional comments, if any.

People don’t think they’ve learned anything until they reflect on what happened. The goal for any teacher is to get their students to think about (reflect) on what they’ve learned. Otherwise it just goes in one ear and out the other. That’s why immersive learning (OJT and other hands-on learning techniques) result in so much better knowledge retention. (It’s sortof like being a Borg: it must be assimilated.) Where learning is the process of gaining knowledge, assimilation is the process of making it real. (No offense, Shawn – perhaps just I’m splitting hairs with word definitions? Not that there’s many hairs left, you understand.)

Learning is social – it benefits from conversations. It’s very well to learn on your own, but sometimes a person can make astonishing leaps from focusing on a challenge or thought-problem. But what if that person has made a false assumption somewhere, and everything that follows is built on it? That’s where social interaction can make the difference. It’s a check-and-balance system that can lend valuable aid in the learning/assimilation process.

We learn through experience, and experience is shared through stories. Backing up my thoughts on point one, assimilation is facilitated through stories and personal experience. I remember a medical-student friend telling me it was a great shock to discover upon viewing a real human body that the organs weren’t colored like in the illustrations!

We learn best when there is a reason to learn… This one is, IMHO, the best point of the lot, which I can illustrate from my own experience.

While in high school, everyone, including myself, simply assumed I would go to college. I applied to Texas A&M University (gig ‘em, Aggies! – whatever that means) and was accepted, completing most of two years easily. But then it came time to pick a major, and here’s where I floundered badly. The problem was, as I discovered later, I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up. It’s not that I was unintelligent (that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!), but that I was never really motivated to learn. My motivation was severely hampered because I didn’t know what I was learning for.

So after a short holding pattern doing odd jobs (while in school I was blessed with my parents’ resources, but on my own it was a shock to encounter the real world of living expenses and food costs), I went to work for an engineering firm as a draftsman and to my surprise discovered that I had an interest and knack for mechanical design. Twenty years later I went back to school, but this time I knew what I wanted: an engineering degree.

Over the next ten years, I not only completed my Bachelor of Science in Engineering, by then I was so in love with learning I went on to complete a Master’s in Engineering Management and a Doctorate in Business Administration. All of which I completed while married and working full time (and with Mrs. MZM’s full encouragement and support, God bless her)!

Having a reason to learn made all the difference.

A message for all you speakers/teachers/sharers of knowledge: If you can instill your students/listeners with that kind of passion and love of learning, they will never look back. Who knows, you may have just done your part to change the world!

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