Learning to learn
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
I like to think that one of my strengths is my willingness to pro-actively learn new things. Recently I have been trying to learn about learning by reading the excellent Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt of The Pragmatic Programmer fame (which remains one of my favourite books of all time).
A lot of the content in PTL wasn’t that new to me, as I have previously read several of the books that Andy has read and references from the text. That said, I definitely learned new things and deepened my understanding about certain areas.
Constant learning is definitely a incredibly valuable thing, I look for it in every potential new hire I interview. But continually learning in the same habitual way may not be the optimal strategy. If you apply the agile development approaches to how we learn it suggests that you should retrospect at what works, what doesn’t and that we should be prepared to try different things to see if they work better (rinse and repeat).
Though I’m not a novice at learning, I am a novice at learning using new tools and techniques: when was the last time you learned how to learn in a new way? So how do I move froward from here? According to the book, what I need is some novice/advanced beginner handrails to hold whilst I improve. Different to the other books that I have read around this subject, PTL brings a consolidated set of next-steps in the context of the life of a software developer.
This is the initial list of things I am going to start:
- Read more deliberately using the SQR3 technique, then blog about what I have learned.
- Read PTL again, this time, read it deliberately.
- Re-read Domain-Driven Design deliberately.
- Increase my blogging frequency - hopefully doing more often will make me quicker.
- Review my blog posts once in a while - do I still agree? what have I learned since?
- Try mindmaps again having deepened my understanding about how they might help me learn/understand.
- Redraw mindmaps every now and then - let some mental mushing happen - see what my brain has subconsciously come up with.
Ever more things will come up as I continually learn and continually learn to learn. I’m still on that journey that started the best part of 33 years ago and one that I hope doesn’t stop for a very long time yet.