Learning to Learn
11 Oct 2012“Don’t let education get in the way of learning.” - Mark Twain
Today I attended my first Learning Lab. These two-hour long weekly workshops hosted by Adam Lupu, resident Learning Architect at Starter League (SL), aim at teaching Starters to be better learners. At first, I was kind of hesitant about going to this event. I mean, what can I learn there that is worth sacrificing two precious hours of coding? I decided I would give it a try and I’m pretty impressed by the result. Here are my four take-aways from this first lab:
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Set goals and constantly review them.
Setting goals is a great way of reflecting on what kind of outcome you want of a certain process. As a student at Starter League I am in a three month programming training process. What do I want out of it? Do I want to be a software developer or do I want to start a business? The answer will greatly affect my time allocation. I better be investing my time towards what I want. As you know, time is a scarce resource.
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Surround yourself with people of all levels.
I feel pretty lucky being taught Ruby & Rails by Jeff Cohen, a PragProg author that is well-known in the Ruby community. But, learning isn’t only about having experts teaching you new concepts. Learning is also about being a teacher and helping other people out. It’s about working with other people sharing complementary skill sets. As part of a learning process you better be surrounding yourself with people of different levels, not only experts, in order to progress.
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Re-shape what you know.
Learning is hard. Unlearning is harder. In order to learn, you need to forget some bad habits. My keyboard typing isn’t great. I’m having a hard time using all of my fingers while typing. For the last weeks, I’ve been trading off my typing speed in order to learn to type the right way.
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Reflecting on learning is time well-invested.
This isn’t limited to learning. Spending time reflecting and getting feedback on any process is time well-invested. This process can either be the development of a product (ever heard of Lean Startup and Customer Development?) or the method you are coding (ever heard of Test-Driven Development?). Do yourself a service. Take a step back and reflect on what you are doing, you won’t regret it.