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Yesterday’s newsletter was called “You don’t need a vision,” and seemed to be a big hit with some folks. (A few people told me this was their favorite letter.) Took me a few hours to read and respond to all the comments.
In the letter, I suggest that instead of worrying about some grand vision for your life, you focus on practice:
Establish a daily practice and use it as a way of getting through your days. Sometimes creative work really is just going through the motions. You don’t necessarily need a vision. Stick to your practice, and things will appear.
There’s a Sex Pistols song with the lyric, “Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it.”
That’s where I am. I don’t have a grand vision for the future… but I have a practice, and I am curious to see what turns up, and that’s why I get up in the morning.
I’ve had fun lately posting “rough drafts” — little mind maps — of the newsletter online as a kind of #showyourwork style tease.
On a micro level, I rarely have a “vision” for the Tuesday newsletter — I think about it often throughout the week, and I keep a list of potential topics, but I wait for Monday morning to wake up, do some kind of exercise, and then work on it most of the day. (I block off all of Monday on my calendar to write.)
Read the newsletter here.
Coming off of Reclaim Open, one of the things I’m thinking about is online resources for self-teaching beginners. When we were interviewing people for the documentary, we asked people what they were glad the internet had now, in the present, that it hadn’t had in the past. And a lot of people — not everyone, but a lot — talked about how there’s a plethora of learning resources for beginners on just about any subject. Which got me thinking about the learning resources that I’ve used and the tutorials I’ve tried to follow.
There are so many things that I want to learn. I’ve got a post in the works about teaching myself to draw. About a month ago, I hit a milestone on my Duolingo streak (800 days!). I used to practice guitar, though I’ve fallen out of that habit in the past year. For a while I was experimenting with some of the beginner guides to Unity. I have an abundance of tutorials and resources on various topics bookmarked — a beginner’s guide to Ruby on Rails, Codecademy, HackerRank, etc. — which I’ve used… at some point in the past. I keep a list of topics to research that only gets longer and longer.
All this, and I still feel like a dabbler in everything. Part of it is that I’ve put aside topics for long periods of time (almost everything except Duolingo, honestly). That’s naturally led to skill atrophy and forgetting what I was doing, which means difficulty picking up where I left off. But for the one thing I have stuck with, I don’t feel like I’m getting any better — my Italian is beginner-level at best, with a poor grasp of grammar and difficulty remembering vocabulary when I need it.
So I’m thinking: what are the differences in the resources I’ve looked at? What do they require? Where do they go together, and where do they fall short?
The framework I’ve got in my head right now for self-teaching is structured vs unstructured learning resources.
Structured resources are things like Duolingo or Codecademy, a series of tutorials designed to build on each other. Unstructured resources are more like the Youtube video tutorials that exist for drawing or guitar, and their related practice tools (guitar tab websites, figure drawing photo banks).
Structured resources are designed methodically by one group in a way that emphasizes logical progress from point A to point B to point C. There’s a general focus on fundamentals first, then building up to more advanced concepts, with exercises designed to practice each new topic. The exercises are usually short and easy enough that lessons can be completed in 5-10 minutes max, to encourage making learning a routine and habitual practice. The focus is on progressing through the course.
Unstructured resources means that there’s a wide range of sources from various unconnected groups, which all specialize in different topics. Learning is self-directed, since there’s no clear path connecting everything, and there are few if any pre-built exercises (a given resource might have 2 or 3, but none of them hang together). Learners can focus their studying in their weakest areas, or specialize in the topics that most interest them, and the lack of pre-built exercises means that their learning goals shape what they’re working on — which means that there’s more intrinsic motivation to learn, since they’re tailoring their practice to their own interests. The most common advice I hear for people who want to learn guitar is “Pick a song you like, and learn to play it.” There’s simplified versions of just about every song out there so beginners can learn the most basic version, and once they have that, they can try something more advanced. It’s learning by doing.
With structured learning, there’s issues of pacing, attention span and motivation. Short, easy lessons are designed to keep attention and build routine, so you can do a little bit every day, but if you do only a little bit every day it might feel like you’re taking months or years to get anywhere. That damages motivation, which is doubly bad because you’re working towards proficiency but not a specific intrinsic goal; that makes it extra-hard to measure progress.
Curated and designed exercises may also not be right for all learners, or self-structured online learning may create certain pitfalls. For example, one major issue I have with Duolingo is that because of the way its lessons are structured, there’s no way to have exercises strengthening true composition (written or spoken). There’s options for translating back and forth between your native language and your target language, but there’s nothing along the lines of “Write a paragraph about your favorite book” or “Talk about your most recent vacation”. That’s a major barrier to fluency, since being able to read and listen in your target language is only one half of communication, and it’s the less challenging half.
With unstructured learning, though, you still get pacing, attention span and motivation issues. This time the issue is that it’s hard to know how much time to spend on certain topics, and where to start or how to build on them. Dumping time into something while feeling like you’re stumbling in the dark trying to figure out what you need to do next is a sure way to damage motivation, which can in turn make your attention focus elsewhere.
Exercises for unstructured learning can also feel repetitive, since your resources only give you a few. Everyone says the way to get good at drawing is to practice figure drawing, which is true — I have definitely improved as a result — but I don’t know how to vary it up to keep learning fresh or which details to pay attention to in order to practice most effectively. And if it’s not repetitive, it’s chaotic — everyone has an opinion, and everyone disagrees. Who do you listen to, and how do you cut through the noise and really decide how to spend your time?
This is a long way of saying: I’ve never learned to teach, and I don’t know how to learn to learn. Because self-structured learning is way different than learning in a classroom, or in a group, or with a mentor. There’s no external framework to keep you accountable, or to provide feedback, or to provide any of the other benefits that come with a learning community.
When it comes to self-directed learning, there’s so many principles I keep hearing about — resilience, goal-setting, failing forward, varying your practice, etc. — but all the resources I’ve found assume learners are coming to them with those principles already well-developed, and that all that’s left is the skill-building section.
Which makes sense! Teaching your learners how to self-teach before teaching them what they actually came to learn, is an absurd thing to ask. But for pretty much everything I learned in school, I learned from other people; I almost never got practice teaching myself.
So there’s a lot of beginner-friendly resources out there. And they’re great for if you have one or two specific things you need to learn. But for people starting in total ignorance who want to work their way up to overarching mastery, how beginner-friendly are they really?
“Bresee helps the youth and those who are most disadvantaged. Serving Koreatown, a primarily Hispanic community, and advocate for the need of bringing peace to our community. By focusing on the youth, Bresee is able to build a better future where everyone is given equal opportunities and leads them to a successful future.” – Youth... Read more »
The post A Holistic College and Career Readiness Practice appeared first on Connected Learning Alliance.
The positive benefits of youth interacting with technology are often ignored while the negatives are emphasized. It’s time for that to change. In a commitment to this effort, the Connected Learning Alliance, along with the Connected Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine, are excited to share the new Connected Wellbeing Initiative with the... Read more »
The post The Connected Wellbeing Initiative: Building Understanding and Action Regarding Teens’ Technology Use and Their Mental Health appeared first on Connected Learning Alliance.
Image: Portland State University, Oregon MESA InventTeams In 2019 I stumbled upon the field of invention education when I joined a Lemelson-MIT (LMIT) research project examining how high school teams were using computer science to create technological solutions that would improve the lives of others. As part of the research, I attended EurekaFest, where I... Read more »
The post When Learning is Irresistible: An Invitation to Foster Inventive Mindsets appeared first on Connected Learning Alliance.
On behalf of the Connected Learning Summit Conference Committee, we are pleased to announce the publication of the Proceedings of the 2022 Connected Learning Summit. It is our honor to share with you a proceedings that celebrates participatory, playful, and transformative learning. In 2021, the Connected Learning Summit became a fully online event, supporting inclusive,... Read more »
The post Proceedings of the 2022 Connected Learning Summit Released appeared first on Connected Learning Alliance.
They’re coming to us, without any work experience because of discrimination and lack of opportunities. Or with having had some work experience, but having struggled to successfully retain the job because of hostile employment settings. Or having experienced racism on the job and negotiating professional standards that are unwritten but expected. – Maddie Deegan Davenport,... Read more »
The post Responding to Race in Youth Career Development Practice appeared first on Connected Learning Alliance.
As the lines between our physical and digital surroundings continue to blur, it’s more important than ever to design usable and accessible content for our ever-expanding array of contexts.
In 2021, A Book Apart and I were delighted to bring you Preston So’s Voice Content and Usability, the definitive book on voice content, and A Book Apart’s first voice title.
Now, in 2023, we’re thrilled to present Preston’s brilliant follow-up, Immersive Content and Usability, coming April 18.
Armed with this book, you’ll create incisive and inclusive user-centered experiences across augmented, extended, and virtual realities, transforming the physical world into an exciting new canvas for content.
Pre-order now! https://abookapart.com/products/immersive-content-and-usability
The post Immersive Content and Usability appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
The first and second authors of this blog post were teens in the the middle 2010s and the early 2000s, respectively. We experienced a media landscape vastly different from each other as well as the present day. Media devices were more limited, Internet connections were constrained; user-generated content or social media was barely on the... Read more »
The post Mobilizing Teen-Centered Research Findings for Teen-Oriented Storytelling appeared first on Connected Learning Alliance.
In my view the most interesting thing about TikTok is the proliferation of subcultural communities that flourish on it – WitchTok, BimboTok, KinkTok, NunTok. The most unfortunate thing about TikTok, conversely – well, aside from the alarming power it gives the Chinese government – is that there is no real way to find these cultures on the platform, you just hear about them on the news. This week, I happened to hear in that way about one such subculture of particular interest to me – and that is MonkTok.
In Cambodia, that is, younger Buddhist monks are now making videos on TikTok and getting famous for them, drawing up to half a million followers. From what little I know about this phenomenon – basically drawn from one article this week – I have mixed feelings about this.
The monks interviewed by the article say they’re doing it to spread the dharma, the Buddha’s teaching. I am, of course, all for spreading the dharma! Getting more people into Buddhism is, in itself, a good thing.
Where I get a bit more nervous is with the means that the monks use: singing, dancing, posing with cash. These are things that, according to the vinaya (monastic code), monks aren’t supposed to do. And I think that there’s reason for that.
I love singing and dancing, and I have little patience for ascetic texts that tell ordinary people, householders, to avoid such activities – which is why I have such a deep dislike for the Sigālovāda Sutta and its injunction against theatre. But monks are a bit of a different story.
The point of being a monk, as far as I can see, is to voluntarily subject oneself to a much more stringent set of rules and restrictions than ordinary people face. Some of those restrictions are just there to maintain the good reputation of the saṅgha (monastic order) – a rationale frequently cited in the Pali texts – but that rationale obscures the more important question of why there should even be a saṅgha in the first place. And that, as far as I can tell, has to do with being more committed to Buddhist practice than laypeople are – voluntarily foregoing both the joys and concerns of household life, from sex and dancing to money-making, in order to focus one’s wandering mind most fully on the quest to liberate and be liberated from suffering. When I went on a ten-day Goenka vipassanā retreat in 2005, I learned more from its monastic restrictions than I did from the meditation sessions themselves.
So, the question then follows, if you’re not going to follow those extra restrictions, should you even be a monk at all? Should you be encouraged, or even required, to leave the order?
The vinaya’s answer to the latter questions is a pretty clear yes, with a full legal code on what should happen to rule-breakers, from public confession of minor violations to expulsion for major ones. In practice, we know that most living monastic traditions don’t actually follow the vinaya all that strictly. (Most notably, the vinaya says monks aren’t supposed to touch money, but in practice they do all the time.)
So too, people’s actual reasons for becoming a monk are not always what they’re supposed to be in the texts either. In Thailand, there’s a social expectation that every young man join the monkhood once temporarily, for one rainy season (three months or so); men who don’t do this are often considered unmarriageable. I’m not sure whether Cambodia now follows the same custom: their traditions are similar and closely related, but things may have taken a different turn after the Khmer Rouge’s horrific repression.
Still, insofar as people are joining an institution devoted to asceticism, it seems reasonable to require a certain amount of asceticism from them. The reason former monks are considered more marriageable in Thailand, as I understand it, is that they’ve learned better to restrain their desires – or at least that’s the theory. Being a monk is supposed to be pleasurable in many ways, but it’s not supposed to be fun. And I would be particularly worried to see young monks parlay their rains retreat into a career as a social-media influencer: that seems rather the opposite of what they’re supposed to be there for.
I don’t know enough about the situation to have a firm opinion or definite answers; I’ve just read the one article. So I don’t want to make any firm pronouncements here about whether this is a good thing. As with so many cases, the devil is in the details. Maybe MonkTok really is a sincere promotion of the dharma, and maybe that’s worth it. It does seem to me that senior monks would do well to at least question the junior monks’ TikTok presence, and perhaps place controls on it if they’re not satisfied that the practice is for the best.
Call for proposals now open for the sixth annual Connected Learning Summit, which will run entirely online from October 26 to 28, 2023. Submissions open: March 6, 2023 Deadline for submissions: June 23, 2023 Notifications: August 2023 We invite submissions of Research Papers and Showcases that focus on digital technologies for learning, educational and commercial... Read more »
The post Call for Proposals Now Open for the Sixth Annual Connected Learning Summit appeared first on Connected Learning Alliance.
Danny Kingsley suggests that research integrity begins with the training researchers receive at university. Achieving Open Research and increasing reproducibility requires systematic research training that focuses specifically on research practice.
The post Guest Post: Start at the Beginning – The Need for ‘Research Practice’ Training appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
This post is just to remind readers about the American Philosophical Association’s Journal Survey site.
The site solicits information from authors about their experiences with journals, and lists the reported acceptance rates, response times, and ratings of reviewer comments and editorial experience. If you haven’t supplied data for it in a while, consider doing so. Check it out here.
Some background on the project is here.
FreshRSS 