User:TobyLightheart/sandbox

This sandbox page is being used to experiment with some learning project drafts.

Learning Project Summary
Course code: TBD

Time investment: TBD

Assessment suggested: TBD

Introduction
People have impressive natural capabilities for learning; however, to become the most effective learners we can, we should seek to understand learning. We can explore and develop theories of learning and processes for learning. This page jumps to the conclusion, introducing a categorisation of learning into two general types:


 * 1) Understanding: recall of information and its relationships. An understanding can have degrees of accuracy and confidence.
 * 2) Skills: actions of motion, perception or cognition. Performing a skill can have a degree of success: the timing and quality of the action outcome.

An important foundation of learning is ability. Your abilities for attention, working-memory, memorisation, visualisation, fine- and gross-motor coordination, sense and perception, can all have a bearing on your capability for understanding and learning skills. Improving abilities and managing disabilities is important for learning. This will be a topic of another page.

A process for developing understanding is outlined in the next section. The process for understanding can then be applied to:


 * itself, the process for understanding;
 * the process for developing skills; and
 * the management of abilities and disabilities.

Learning Processes
A basic process for developing understanding is:

This process should be applied repeatedly to any topic that you want to understand well: set related learning goals, find more sources, identify more relationships, reassess your understanding, and practice by testing your recall and understanding.
 * 1) Aim: choose a topic or concept you want to understand better.
 * 2) Sources: find sources for learning that topic (e.g., books, videos, courses).
 * 3) Connect information: find relationships between concepts.
 * 4) Assess: evaluate sources and the accuracy of your understanding.
 * 5) Practice: regularly test your recall and understanding of the relationships and definitions of concepts.

A similar pattern can be used for developing skills and should incorporate the process for understanding:

Any skill you want to master should also be a topic you want to understand as well as possible. This understanding should inform your practice of the skill which, in turn, develops your first-hand experience, understanding and related abilities.
 * 1) Aim: choose a skill and goal for performance.
 * 2) Apply the understanding process:
 * 3) Aim (to understand the skill).
 * 4) Sources (e.g., videos, guides, tutors, coaches).
 * 5) Connect information (find techniques, procedures and related concepts).
 * 6) Assess (evaluate sources and the accuracy of your understanding).
 * 7) Practice (regularly test your recall and understanding).
 * 8) Feedback: find sources of feedback to measure your performance and adjust procedures and techniques.
 * 9) Practice: regularly test your performance of the skill and incorporate feedback.

Abilities and disabilities can have a significant effect on outcomes of developing understanding and skills. Developing an understanding of your abilities (or disabilities) and how they can be managed or improved can use the same general process for developing skills.


 * 1) Aim: a capability (improvement of ability or management of disability).
 * 2) Apply the understanding process to learn about related ability or disability and techniques for improving capabilities.
 * 3) Feedback: find sources of feedback to assess the results of practicing techniques.
 * 4) Exercise: apply improvement or management techniques and incorporate feedback

Now let's turn the understanding process on itself to expand on each step and understand it better.

The Understanding Process
Each step of the Understanding Process (learning goal, sources, connecting information, assessment, practice) can also be a target for the applying the understanding process. In addition to being an explanation of the steps, each application of the understanding process is an example to learn from.

Aim
The aim of the understanding process picks out a topic or direction for study to improve understanding. Learners reading through this learning project might aim to understand the understanding process. The aim of this section specific section is to help learners understand how to choose aims for learning better understanding. To facilitate the following steps in the understanding process, it is important to have some aim however specific or vague it may be.

If you are a student or school or university, your courses will often have learning aims as part of their curricula. You can adopt these aims as your own. You could also adapt them or add your own aims to focus on aspects of the courses that you find more interesting or want to understand better.

General advice about aims and goals apply to this step. The S.M.A.R.T. acronym (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) is a common guide for developing goals and aims; however, learning aims and goals do not need to adhere to strictly the SMART guidance as long as you are still satisfying external requirements. Understanding is about finding relationships between concepts. Allowing undirected exploration and diversions gives opportunities to make unexpected and novel connections.

Ideally, your learning aims are closely related to your learning interests. Motivation, procrastination and other Supplementary topics explore the motivation and motivations for learning.

Connect Information
The connecting of information is where the magic of understanding occurs. Simply reciting facts is insufficient for understanding. To understand a topic, you must become aware of the relationship between concepts. Techniques for connecting information will be developed in detail in another page; however, a summary of important aspects of connecting information is provided here.

While examining your sources, ones developed for teaching will typically provide descriptions of concepts in terms of other concepts. These concepts are obviously connected and the connections should be noted. If you don't understand the description, then you can search for definitions of concepts or terms you didn't understand. This next set of definitions will add more concepts to connect. This process forms a chain or "graph" of concepts that should eventually lead to a list of concepts and a list of descriptions that together you can read and have some sense of their meaning.

Supplementary Topics

 * 1) Motivations for learning
 * 2) Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation
 * 3) Intrinsic and instrumental value
 * 4) Identity
 * 5) Growth mindset
 * 6) Perfectionism
 * 7) Effort
 * 8) Self-control
 * 9) Habits
 * 10) Procrastination
 * 11) External awareness
 * 12) Self-awareness
 * 13) Epistemology
 * 14) Knowledge
 * 15) Logic
 * 16) Fuzzy logic
 * 17) Probability and accuracy
 * 18) Managing uncertainty

Grouped units


 * 1) Memory
 * 2) Working, short-term, long-term
 * 3) Implicit and explicit
 * 4) Episodic, semantic, procedural
 * 5) Machine learning
 * 6) Basics
 * 7) Supervised learning
 * 8) Unsupervised learning
 * 9) Reinforcement learning