How I Learn

What I Cannot See From Where I Stand

 "5.6331 For the form of the visual field is surely not like this." (Wittgenstein TLP)

 

One of my current side projects is a workshop at the University of Toronto applying scenario thinking to urban futures. I am working on this with Bruce Stewart (Director of the iSchool Institute) and Kyle Dionne-Clark. As part of our preparation for the workshop Kyle and I are doing a series of blog  posts on scenario thinking on the iSchool Institute website.

A couple of weeks ago, Kyle suggested that we include a post on our own biases, which we did here. As part of this post, I reached out to people who know me reasonably well in a number of different frames: business, writing, cycling and family and asked for their views on my biases. I have tried to factor this feedback into some expanded thoughts on my own biases.

My life has been shaped by living at the intersection of cultures. I grew up mostly in Montreal in the 60s and early 70s, a time when language was a charged issue (to put it mildly) and teenagers challenged each other on the streets with linguistic slurs (I hope this has changed). I learned a rough street French and had some of my complacent middle-class Anglo assumptions thrown in my face. In my late teens I began to spend a lot of time in Japan (my parents were stationed there), moving to Tokyo when I was 19. Over the next decade or so I lived immersed in Japan and it was in Japan that I began to grow up (still working on this). I learned the language, lived very local in an old house in Kohoku (on the edge of Shitamachi), worked, got married, began to raise a family. As a result of my early life in Montreal and my immersion in Japanese in Tokyo I became suspicious of any one language’s ability to be complete – all expression is partial and it is in the gaps that the most interesting possibilities can be glimpsed. It may be a fault, not to be able to see completeness in any one thing.

This doubt of any one language (or system’s) ability to grasp the truth runs deep. I suspect that there are (infinitely) many internally consistent systems of mathematics, but that there is no one meta system by which one can interpret all the others in a way that makes them consistent. Beyond that, I suspect it is the inconsistencies and contradictions that blast open the space that allows anything to exist at all.

I am a committed learner, and how I learn is a filter through which I see the world. My learning style is abstract (I need to understand the model and how the parts fit together), historical (I like to go back to the very first germs of an idea and see what paths were not taken and how the selection occurred), connected (I try to find unexpected relationships) and social (I learn best through conversations with others). Oh yes, I read way too much, but cannot tolerate being told what to read (hence I have had a very limited academic career). I can get a bit anal about my reading, and for the past six years have kept track of all the books I read (I will share this with anyone interested).

Narratives are one of my many weak points. Stories are not my natural way of understanding the world or of being with others. My imagination and relationships are much more spatial and tangential; I am as likely to follow an implication or connotation as a deduction-I am easily drawn into adductive reasoning. Working for a living and managing companies, I have taught myself to tell stories, and more importantly, to listen to other people’s stories, but this is a conscious and learned behavior. I doubt I will ever write a novel or direct a movie, I may write a renga (if I can find the right collaborators) and I enjoy growing a garden.

Reading I like to be challenged by books that force me to uncover and build up new ways to read. The same is true for music, or even walking/riding through a city listening to its sounds. There are many ways to read any one book, and more ways to read several books together. Recently, I have begun to read translations of Japanese poetry into French (mostly haiku) and French poetry into Japanese (Mallarmé). My understanding of both languages is imperfect (as is my understanding of English) and my occasional failure to understand helps me read closer and to pay more attention.

I am always looking for things that force me to pay attention: reading poetry, listening to street noise, riding a bike downtown, sailing (especially in light winds or heavy weather), Yoshie's photos, working with a knife, following what people are saying to each other. Attention is, I suppose, at the heart of much of what I practice and not something I find easy.

Physical activity is critical to paying attention and I need to be physical or to find physical analogs in order to understand (when I say my learning style is abstract I should also say that it is physical, and that I need to express myself physically and encode knowledge into muscles and nerves). I like to sketch systems and then act them out (like a dance, though I am a poor dancer). If I was a better coder, I would want to code what I think about, and then to break the code.

By temperament I am an optimist, I believe things can be made to work out. When I think about the deep changes facing us - climate change, a post-oil economy, massive immigrations, species loss - I assume that we will find some way to work things out. I know that assets cannot continue to compound indefinitely (that is one root of bubbles) and that all funds must fail at some point, but I assume we will find other options.

My optimism leads me to be aggressively anti-ideology. For me, markets are a human technology and not a natural law (although I have learned a lot from Geermat Vermeiji’s application of economic theory to ecology in Nature: An Economic History). I am attracted to technologies that have mechanisms to distribute decisions as close as possible to where the decision will have an impact, and then integrate the decisions at a higher level to find insight and direction. Markets are one example (many individual decisions about value set prices and the prices provide information to the market), Google’s PageRank is another (individual decisions about what to link where determine relevance in search). The competition between alleles that partly determines subsequent phenotypes is yet another (I side more with Dawkins than Gould). I am convinced that the correct answer to most questions that start “What is the best way to ...” is “We don’t know and if we did know that in itself would change the answer.” Accordingly, I prefer evolutionary and adaptive solutions – encourage variation, force selection, repeat. I try to apply this to my own decisions as well – make a decision, see how I am wrong, correct.

Work experience shapes our biases. I have been either self-employed or running my own company since I was 26, apart from a two-year stint at the consultancy Monitor Group. As I am normally directly responsible for my own successes and failures I tend to assume that most problems have solutions and that the solution is to be found by building a team and having at it. Freedom matters, but with freedom to make a decision comes responsibility and accountability. I can be harsh in how I hold myself and others accountable. But I also believe that with every responsibility comes the right to freedom to determine how to meet those responsibilities.

My long term goal is to weave double-loop learning into everything that I do:  not just to learn, but to learn how I learn; not just to have goals but to have movement towards any goal change the goal; not just to connect (with people, places, ideas) but to have my connections become part of what I am connected with.

I have said too much here to really make sense, even to myself, but what am I not seeing …  ?

 

Longer Rides

Things learned through thought and conversation often need to be consolidated by some type of physical activity. For me this can be cooking or washing up, the hot water over porcelain or glass is curiously restful, but many weeks I use a long ride on my bike to push thought down into the background rhythms of my body and make it my own. Friends who run long distances say that running performs the same function, but I prefer to get out and ride. I can go farter and keep up the effort much longer. For me a long ride is anything over 80 km, but preferably longer, 120 to 140 km, and occasionally I will do a century (100 miles or 160 km).

I generally set up some themes for each ride, things I want to have in the background as I push my legs around in circles. This could be a bit of math or logic, Cantor's continuum hypotheses and Zermello's axiom of choice are themes I have used on rides in the fall of 2008. Or it could be a business problem or personal issue I am working on - how to grow and support the people I work with or how to knit deeper my relationship with Yoshie. Sometimes I will try to blend two different themes on the same ride and then use a line from a poem or song as a prompt or point of distance reference, something to come back to as the pedaling begins to wear me down or a hill gets steeper. When the themes are something I grasp poorly, as is often the case with mathematics, logic or certain algorithms, or when I want to be precise and need a memory aide, I will often jot them down on a piece of paper I can shove in my pocket. If I need to I can take this out and glance at it while I wait at an intersection for a light to change, but often just writing something down is enough to fix it in memory long enough for the ride.

I can't say I am thorough or methodic in the way I think while riding. That is not really the intent. The goal is to get things working in the back of my mind, and as the effort grinds on, usually about 80 km in, ideas begin to drift and associate and become part of the sensations of the ride - the wind or rain, sun, sweat, road grit, in the summer bugs, in colder seasons the sting on my face and slight pain in my lungs. This let's loose coalitions of ideas from, how the axiom of choice implies a kind of freedom in infinity, or how my own growth and performance depend on the people I work with. I sometimes see images from Yoshie's photo blog flash up and blend into the textures of the road surface or flow beside me in the light flickering through the trees or off the water. It is not just the way ideas drift together and form new connections that is important, or the way the sensory flow smoothes things together. Riding helps me to think by linking ideas deep into the repeated pattern of movement, the muscle effort of pedaling and guiding the bike around the small dangers on the road surface - loose gravel, pot holes and ruts, the car brushing by too close or coming out of a blind corner not concerned with cyclists. It is the drifting thought, the physical work, and the peripheral flow of sensory information that calms and let's the ideas come together in new and deeper patterns that I can use in my work.

In Vancouver I like to ride from Kitsilano out to Deep Cove and sometimes up Mount Seymour. Or if I am too tired for this, I go south down to the fishing town of Steveston, where the ride along the Richmond dyke is especially lovely. In Boston I tend to head west, out the 117 past Bolton and down the 110 to the Wachusett reservoir. Or on some summer weekends I will take a train north to Beverly and then ride up through Ipswich to Newburyport and out to Plum Island then back down through Essex and around Cape Anne. These are all good roads, long enough to get into a rhythm, enough variety to keep the mind alive, and the car drivers on these roads tend to accept the odd cyclist.

For me, learning requires the integration of many different modes - physical and sensory as well as abstract and concrete thought. Cycling is one part of how I do this. Of course I need to talk to people as well, and conversation is important, but at times I need to be alone with my body in the world.

Learning Styles

A big part of my understanding how I learn has been to understand my own learning styles and them to find or create opportunities to learn in the ways that work for me. As it happens, these are rather idiosyncratic, and they are probably quite different from how most people learn. But then, I suspect that the ways in which any individual learns are different from the ways in which most people learn!

There has been a lot of talk on learning styles over the past thirty years or so, probably more talk than there has been understanding. In many cases what are conventionally called 'learning styles' are better understood as preferred modes of information absorption. For example, a Google search on learning styles (made February 23, 2008) turned up the following explanation from ldPride.net as its top return. (LdPride.net is a wonderful site for people with learning disabilities that shows how to turn a learning disability into a learning ability.)

• Visual Learners - Learn through Seeing
• Auditory Learners - Learn Through Listening
• Tactile/Kinesthetic Learners - Learn through moving, doing and touching

To me these are modes of gathering information and when turned into the actions of drawing, speak and writing, and moving they are modes of expression. Important stuff, and useful to understand. But I use all three and do so consciously. I will give some examples of how blending modes can enhance learning and memory, for now suffice to say that I love to cook for other people, and I use all three modes plus taste when I explore new ways to prepare food - one of the most important ways I learn. (And our beagle, Hana - means both 'nose' and 'flower' in Japanese - learns a lot by smelling things, and once in a while I try to follow her around and learn how she experiences the world by trying to figure out what on earth she is smelling - and she usually does have her nose stuck close to the earth.)

So if Visual, Auditory, Tactile/Kinesthetic are modes of gathering information, then what are 'learning styles'?

I find it useful to use the term 'learning style' to refer to the preferred approach people take to learning in terms of how they access, organize and apply information (in some cases knowledge) using a variety of models and integrate this into their own lives. I have tried to sketch this below (don't take the sketches too seriously, they are casual aides to understanding and not formal diagrams).

A full set of learning styles would be described in terms of the different ways that people 'access', 'organize', 'apply' and 'integrate' information (including its affective or emotional aspects) in their day-to-day lives.

The modes visual, auditory, tactile, etc. described above may be useful in understanding 'access'. Different approaches to knowledge classification - hierarchical, networked, open networked - may help to understand 'organize' and theories of action could provide models for how learning is 'applied. The styles people adopt when applying learning are equally importnt - some want to begin by imitatiion, others need to first create their own applications. Affect also plays an important role, not captured in the sketch but relevant to a person's learning styles. What one feels about what one learns is a key to motivation of course, but there is an affective aspect to learning that goes well beyond the movtivational. Affective learning itself is an important topic. One that I will come to in future posts - and it is an area where I have a great deal of learning to do!  But all this takes us beyond where I am ready to go in this post, so I would like to come back to my own understanding of my own learning styles.

At this point I have identified five learning styles that I come back to over and over again in my learning.

• Abstract
• Historical
• Social
• Modeling
• Written

Let's dig into each of these and give some examples.

Abstract - I need to understand the theoretical framework and often prefer to work top down in understanding an area of practice. You can see this in my approach to this post, which begins by a discussion of 'modes' and 'learning styles' before getting down to my own idiosyncratic styles. I also try to find the largest and most general patterns in what I study and link them in with other patterns (when I am ready to add a sixth learning style, I will probably add one around associating or blending of ideas). This 'abstract' style is closely related to the 'modeling' style.

Historical - I like to understand the history of how things came to be the way they are, go back to the source materials, and explore some of the paths not taken. So I often go back and try to read the original texts in a field, the recent trend in the publishing industry to collect original scientific texts with comments by a leading contemporary researcher has been very helpful for me, see, for example, physicist Stephen Hawking's On the Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy. I tend to prefer poetry, art and music from the beginning of a style (I am a big fan of Archilocus, less fond of Theocritus), but I do try to follow how styles (of thought as well as art) develop over time and explore the byways and supposed dead ends.

Social - I learn best by discussing things with other people and entering dialogues. I often take this to the step of organizing an organization in order to learn something at some depth. At Monitor, we sometimes form 'Buddy Groups' of people who want to learn about something together. The choice of a blog as a place to gather these thoughts on my own learning is another example of this.

Modeling - Modeling and mapping an area of practice and creating models, both internal models and external models that place it in a larger context or ecology, helps me to remember things and to make first guesses on the causal web and the implications of decisions as they ripple through the field of effects. There are many tools I find useful for this, but over the past few years I have tended to default to the Unified Modeling Language, to Concept Maps and to various light (as light as possible) uses of the Semantic Web. One of the main places I collect and think about learning and that of my team is on an internal Semantic MediaWiki that Monitor maintains.

Written - By writing, including writing poetry, aphorisms and abstract equations or pseudo code, I come to my own understanding of an area and develop the ability to make decisions and to act. And reading is a good complement to writing, so I try to read a lot, keep track of what I read, and weave what I read into what I do.

In my previous post I looked at how understanding one's strengths is an important way to understand how one learns. In this post I wrote about learning styles. In my next post I will see how strengths and learning styles come together.