As a KM practitioner, have you ever thought about how learning will make sense? What is make sense?
It is difficult to describe. I'll try to put it in a very simple to understand manner. Make sense is a feeling that people find things meaningful in their daily lives. In simple words, how learning will make sense is how these learning are meaningful and practical in real life. This has always been my thinking too in the practice of KM.
Here is a video which I would wish to share, which worth paying attention in order learnings will make sense.
Everything Started from a Question
Eric Mazur is a professor from Harvard University. During a test in one of his class, a student asked him this question:
How should I answer this question ? According to what you taught me, or according to the way I usually think ?
With this question, Professor Mazur's life was changed forever. As one of the best teaching staff in the university, he discovered the difference between education and learning, and finally concluded with the proper way of university education.
Let's watch this 14 minutes video, and see if that also change your life too.
Following are some key points from his video:
- We who already learned, could very often forget the difficulties for the beginning learners. Things we see so obvious, so simple, but we don't understand why people do not understand it.
- The curse of knowledge - Once you understand something, you forget the difficulty of the beginning learner
- The practice of teaching by Questioning.
- He calls this Peer Instruction because students teach each other, and he as an instructor to facilitate. He becomes the coach who guide them from aside.
- It's about the students' mind. You don't learning by listening, you learn by doing.
- Learning is a 2-step process
- Transfer of information
- Make-sense of the information (the crucial part)
- In learning, we need time to think, and when we are thinking, we lose track of what the person says, because people cannot think and listen at the same time.
(Click on the links and it link direct to the relevant part of the video)
More Videos, More Learning
Some Thought Provoking Points
- Do you remember how you became good/successful at what you're good at?
- When the professors teach, are they transferring knowledge or information? Similar question, how do people transform information into knowledge? How does the process happens?
- Can you think at the same time you are listening in a lecture?
- Do you connect your knowledge to your experience while learning?
- What should be the true learning? Unless you can take what you have learned in one context, and apply it to a new context, you have not really learned.
- There is a little game in the middle of the video, and you'll be surprised - how to turn answers into reasoning.
(Click on the links and it link direct to the relevant part of the video)
What has Changed after 4 Years
This 30-minute video is what Prof Mazur presented 4 years later.
What are the Learnings to Us
The learning for different people might be different. For me, I'll list something which seems important to me:
- Learning is, that what people have learned in one context, and apply it in a new or another different context.
- The learning process is important, not just the answer, but how we can turn information into questions and reasoning.
After all, how we can put these learnings and apply them in real life in our own context, probably under different situations or scenarios?
And, well, what have you learned?
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