Mission to Learn

Here are two things I have learned in the past 30 minutes:

• Stanford now has a YouTube channel
• Oprah Winfrey gave the commencement address at Stanford this year

As it happens, you can find Oprah’s commencement address on the Stanford channel, along with a lot of other great content (nearly 200 videos at this point). One bit of content right up my alley is Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Highlights, featuring business luminaries like Carly Fiorina and Guy Kawasaki.

Speaking of entrepreneurial (or, at least, enterprising)…I’ve been a bit overwhelmed lately and have not been keeping up with the Mission to Learn world all that well. I might not have noticed the Stanford announcement at all if I had not received an e-mail from Stanford about it. I’m always happy to hear about new free learning initiatives (and will be mentioning this one in the next Free Learning Monitor and adding it to More than 100 Free Places to Learn Online), but the e-mail offered a nice extra bit of information. Namely, a “tip” to pass on about using YouTube effectively. Here it is:

It’s much easier to browse through university offerings on YouTube by clicking on “playlist” from the university’s YouTube channel. For example: http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=stanforduniversity http://www.youtube.com/profile_play_list?user=ucberkeley. Unfortunately, many people don’t see or click on “playlist”, so it can be hard to make sense of what a university has on a YouTube site.

So there you have it. And just in time for the weekend.

If, by chance, you finish all the Stanford content or are just looking for something different, friend and blogger David Houle has also recently launched his own Futurist channel on YouTube. And if you are really ambitious, check out Zaid’s University Learning = OCW + OER = FREE! which catalogs more than 200 free online learning destinations.

Have fun.

JTC

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I’ve been thinking about discipline and learning a lot lately. (Feel free to pause and savor the full flavor of “learning” as a gerund.) A recent post from Andrew Sullivan in timesonline, via Nicholas Carr (who inspired Sullivan’s post), prompts me to say a few words about it today. More to come, I’m sure.

Sullivan writes:

In researching a topic [online], or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another. The mental multitasking – a factoid here, a YouTube there, a link over there, an e-mail, an instant message, a new PDF – is both mind-boggling when you look at it from a distance and yet perfectly natural when you’re in mid-blog.

First, let’s take a moment (really) to appreciate that this is even possible. That we can access such a wide array of information so rapidly is fundamentally amazing ( a “small miracle,” Sullivan calls it). I think those who have moved beyond simply being frightened or overwhelmed by the social media revolution often become so absorbed with adding to the information flow (or commenting upon additions to the information flow) that we fail to value fully the bounty from which we might benefit.

But that is not Sullivan’s main point—or the reason that someone like Carr would quote him. He is concerned with the dark side. Whether you are a blogger, or just an ordinary surfer, there are shiny lights everywhere out here on the Web. Distractions. Things that may keep us from completing our thoughts, much less analyzing them, synthesizing them, or forming meaningful judgments. It seems logical to suppose that over time this might change how we think, how we learn—perhaps whether we learn.

I confess I am sorely tempted by the dark side on a daily basis. I sense there is value in going where the clicks take us. Explore. Forge connections. Make mistakes. Everyone’s doing it. But surely this can’t be the whole story for anyone who expects not simply to process information but to learn. We must pause, reflect, dig deeper. As Sullivan puts it:

Shallowness, after all, does not necessarily preclude depth. We just have to find a new equilibrium between the two. We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them.

Amen. Of course, to master the ability to do anything requires discipline. As with anything else in life, the only thing that can keep us from too much of a good thing on the Web is ourselves.

JTC

How strong is your capacity to learn? Can you leap complex concepts with a single bound? Master a new language faster than a speeding locomotive? Roll your eyes at hyperbole without even blinking? Perhaps you are a super learner.

“Secrets of the Super-Learners” is an article from a 1991 Harvard Magazine supplement that I seem to have tucked away in my “read later” file at some unknown point in the past. Somehow I stumbled across it again in the past week and it timeless observations struck me as a nice complement to my last posting on Five Themes for the Web 2.0 Learner.

The author, Craig Lambert, identifies five “secrets” of super learners (I prefer “traits,” as I don’t see anything particularly secret about these):

• Wonder
• Humility
• Synthetic Thinking
• Patience
• Relishing Mistakes

The article, built off of input from an array of Harvard professors, is a short, enjoyable read, so I won’t summarize it here. I will, however, draw a few connections between these five traits and the Web 2.0 themes I suggested in my last posting and/or elsewhere on Mission to Learn:

Wonder
A combination of curiosity and, as one of the teachers quoted in the article puts is “the capacity to be grabbed by something and really want to pursue it.” I view this as akin to the will to learn mentioned in an earlier posting by that title. In the Web 2.0 world, this wonder really needs to be accompanied by a heightened consciousness of both the opportunities and the challenges that the massive flow of information through the Net represents.

Humility
As one teacher puts it, “the student who is a better learner will have a clearer sense of his or her own weaknesses.” And his or her own strengths, as well, I would argue. Know thyself, in other words. I think the importance of this trait—Self Knowledge in the Web 2.0 learner themes post—increases significantly for the independent learner who must set her own priorities and self correct.

Synthetic Thinking
“Super-learners aren’t passive; they don’t simply absorb information but actively reconstitute it into meaningful patterns.” This trait aligns with both Insight and Connection in the themes posting. In the Web 2.0 world, learning is characterized by being to “read” and think synthetically in the context of a growing, changing, and diverse network

Patience
The article quotes Howard Gardner: “…successful learners believe—from experience—that there is a high, if not complete, correlation between amount of sustained effort and ultimate performance.” I don’t really touch on this trait in the themes posting, mostly because I am not sure Web 2.0 has changed anything in this area. If you want to get to Carnegie Hall, it still takes practice, practice, practice, just like it always has. But it occurs to me that patience, and perhaps more importantly, persistence is essential for building truly valuable, diverse, and reliable connections over time.

Relishing Mistakes
“Good learners make lots of mistakes, just as poor learners do. But they learn from their mistakes.” Again, this is something that does not seem all that different in a Web 2.0 world, though perhaps there are more opportunities for trying things and making mistakes without significant consequences. One comment on the themes post suggested that “application” should be one of the themes. I’m still thinking about that, but if I were to add it, I would probably do so on the basis of this “mistake-friendly” characteristic of Web 2.0.

What do you think? Other “secrets” you would suggest? How do these relate to your learning efforts in a Web 2.0 world? I welcome your thoughts.

JTC

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