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 …  ?

 

Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker

In March 1999 management thinker Peter Drucker published an article in Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself. Drucker, who was born in 1909 and died in 2005, published this at the age of ninety, and it distills the thoughts of an emotionally and intellectually rich life. There is much good advice here for anyone who wants to better understand, foster and share their own learning and to make it part of a successful life.

The article was recently republished in book form by Harvard Business School Press. This is a small book, only 64 pages it can be read in a few hours. But it repays close reading and thought, so I will not begrudge HBSP this repackaging. It is nice to have this in a bound form to keep handy and to give on to other people.

The key messages are

• Know ones strengths through analysis of the outcomes of ones decisions
  
• Understand how one performs, or gets things done
  
• Understand how one learns
  
• Know ones values and work in organizations that support them
  
• Know where one belongs and what one contributes
  
• Be responsible for ones relationships
  
• Plan for more than one career

Decision Records and Understanding Performance & Learning

Drucker feels that the best way to understand ones strengths is to keep a record of ones decisions. Each time you face a major life decision, write down what you have decided, what the alternatives were and what you expect the outcomes to be. Then periodically revisit the decision and see what the actual outcomes have been. Eventually you will get a feeling for what you are good at. Your decisions will improve and you will learn to focus your time and energy on what makes you successful.

I seem to be facing my fair share of decisions over the past few years, and I adopted Drucker's approach in 2005 when I left Recombo, a company I helped to found. At that time the basic decision was whether to (i) go back to school and maybe get a Ph.D., (ii) start another company, (iii) do some consulting, or (iv) take a position at a larger company. I began with the consulting as a way to defer a decision and then when an opportunity came up I joined Monitor Group, a consultancy in Cambridge MA. My goals in joining Monitor and the results to date are sketched out below.

• To see how I would perform in a larger organization
  
  So far so good, my main struggles have been with not having direct control over the larger decision making process and not having deep visibility into finances. I find both of these deeply frustrating. The learning made possible at Monitor, especially the opportunity to work with thought leaders such as Bruce Chew, Tom Nagle and my boss Jonathon Levy has been astonishing, and I am learning as quickly here as I have at any time in my life (I have zero tolerance for situations where I am not learning full tilt).
  
• To understand how big-time consulting works and see if it suits me
  
  I have learned an enormous amount about how the consulting business works and about key frameworks, especially in marketing, pricing and decision making, and how these are implemented in very large companies. Consulting itself does not really suit me as I prefer to be engaged in building teams and creating innovative products - again, this has something to do with being able to shape things directly, whereas consultants work through analysis and persuasion
  
• To experience living in the US and come to understand it better
  
  I am a committed citizen of Vancouver and am deeply engaged in the art, writing, food and music of that city. But I spent ten years of my life in Japan and have lived in Europe as well. Living in these other cultures has helped me to see Canada and Vancouver more clearly. But I lacked the perspective of our closest neighbour, which also happens to be the world's most powerful country. And we have chosen a good time live in the US: a presidential election year, during a financial crisis, with infrastructure crumbling, as the semantic web emerges from research groups like MIT (I cycle by it everyday and should spend more time interacting with researchers there), Stanford and Rensselaer and begins to be applied in real-world applications, and (I am being optimistic here) hints of a cultural rebirth can be seen in music, street art and poetry. Do I understand the US? Not sure that one can understand another person, let alone a country. But I surely have a more honest and informed perspective and a deeper affection for the people. I can also see that I want to live in Vancouver in the long-term.

Values and Contribution

If an organization does not share your values then don't work there. End stop.

Understand how you best contribute and make sure the organization supports you in contributing in that way. And if it does not, create a new job, either in the same organization, at a different organization, or somewhere you create with your partners.

I believe I best contribute to an organization in three ways

• Idea shaper and instigator - I am not sure how original my thinking is, but I have a good ability to take ideas from different disciplines and to blend them into new constellations that can be applied to solve real problems
  
• Team leader - I enjoy and think I am quite good at building teams and making each team member successful
  
• Pattern detector - I am reasonably good at spotting long-term economic, technical, social and cultural trends and injecting them into ideas I am trying to shape and teams I am trying to build

On the other hand, I am not a skilled administrator and my sales quotient is no better than average (unfortunate as I have learned to enjoy sales). I can only work effectively on a team where I can help other people to use their own strengths and cover my deficiencies.

Working with my wife, object maker and photographer Yoshie Hattori, over the past almost three decades has also helped me live into my values and contribute to our families growth. And she, quite simply, helps me to see better!

Relationships and Career

Drucker points out that most of us can and should expect to keep on working as long as we keep on living, but that most of us will not want to stay in one career for forty or fifty years. We need to build a wide net of people that will help us and guide us in our decisions over our life and these people should come from many different areas.

I invest a lot of time in my network of friends and colleagues (and I don't separate the two groups) and in meeting and talking to al sorts of different people. But I am doing less well in thinking through what an alternative career might be! Whatever it is, it will probably involve starting a company or founding a non-profit organization. Some possibilities - a store that sells odd things from every part of industry and design, a small restaurant, a company giving art tours for older people, a company giving art tours for children, a non-profit for people raising children in more than one language or for people who have no first language, an institution to research long-term patterns of all types ...

Suggestions?

 

Blends

I sometimes have a bit of a purist streak to me, preferring things straight and unalderterated. But I am slowly realizing that this is just an affectation, and that most things are in fact blends of one sort or another, and that bringing out the blend is one of the most creative things we do. Much learning is based on the blending of two or more concepts or experiences. Several years ago, when I was deep in my puritanical phase, I had a conversation with a French wine maker about the virtues of the single vairetal wines that have been quite popular with many of the better wineries in North America. His comment, "asking a wine maker to use just one grape to bring out the terroir (the way that the soil and climate are reflected in the wine) is like asking a painter to portray a landscape using only one colour." He stopped me short, and I have noticed that over the past few years more and more of the best North American wines are blends.

Linguists and cognitive scientists have made great progress in understanding how human thought depends on conceptual blending and in uncovering the various mechanisms by which blending is carried out. The roots of this work come from the 'blending" of George Lakoff and associates ideas about the foundational role that metaphor plays in all human thought and a large body of thought around embodied cognition.

Metaphor is sometimes disparaged as a lightweight mode of thinking, not to be compared with the rigors of deductive or inductive reasoning. But in fact most human thought is metaphorical, including most mathematics and logic. Take set theory for example, the foundation of much of modern mathematics. Set theory has grown from basic intuitions about what it means to group things together and what things have in common. Apples and pears are each sets in their own right, and belong to the more general set of fruit. Sets can be joined together, all apples and pears, using what is often known as the 'or' operator (all things that are apples or pears). One can also look for the intersection, the 'and' operator (all things that are fruits and are red would include many apples and some pears). Most sets are actually quite fuzzy and are easily extended by metaphor. In fact, sets are metaphors. We can't really think about sets without using concepts such as 'container' or 'feature'. This is covered in depth in the George Lakoff and Mark Johnson book Philosophy in the Flesh (see below).

Embodied cognition refers to a way of thinking about cognition that recognizes that we have bodies that exist in a world and that the way we think depends on this. Sounds obvious, but in fact this goes counter to a long strand of Western Philosophy that goes all the way back to Plato and his Platonic forms (ideal forms that exist independent of any physical incarnation) or Rene Descartes' notion that the conscious mind is all there is to thought. This position is demonstrably wrong. The mind is (i) in a body, (ii) that is situated in world, and (iii) communicates with other bodies, (iv) in ways that it is often not aware of. There are many excellent books on this, the most enjoyable to me being Ed Hutchins' classic Cognition in the Wild. Hutchins looks at how teams of people expose their thought processes when communicating, using the example of how the US Navy conducts coastal navigation and then contrasts this with Melanesian navigation. Hutchins also shows how ideas about navigation get embedded into instruments like the compass or sextant.

These ideas about metaphor and embodied cognition have come together in the model of conceptual blending. Before diving into this (note the metaphor) I want to put this in the context of learning. Most of what we call learning is actually the act of (i) creating new blends within our own minds and with the people we live and work with (there is a social dimension to both blending and learning) (ii) unfolding blends to understand what ideas have been blended together to begin with, and (iii) embedding blends in the things we work with - tools, instruments, drawings, patterns, conversations.

Learning as the Creation of Blends

Most os us learn most easily if we can relate what we are learning to something that we already know. This is the most basic form of blending. When I wanted to learn about American politics (I am writing this as a Canadian living in the United States during a presidential election year) I began by mapping from Canadian notions of democracy, representation, political parties, delegates, platforms, political advertising and so on to what I could understand of US notions. Of course there are many differences, and these sometimes misled me (the US Electoral College that actually elects the president is a complex beast) but there were enough points of comparison to give me my bearings. And as I began to understand how things work in the US, my understanding of Canadian democracy also changed. This is an important point: metaphors that support true learning seldom go just one way, they are dynamic and each of the perspectives blended together can change the other as well as generating a third, deeper perspectives that combines aspects of both.

Unfolding Blends for Deeper Understanding

Learning is not just about creating new blends. Most of what we know, or think we know, is already based on blends. Moving from politics to mathematics, Rene Descartes created the Cartesian geometry that we learned in high school by blending the ideas of the number line and the plane, and then writing algebraic equations into this blend. There are three blends working on the surface here, number lines, the plane and algebra, and of course each of these are already complex blends in their own right. Not that this is how I normally think when I calculate a function on a graph. The blend is now embodied in our language, tools and conversations. "The slope of a curve" sounds perfectly natural to many people, but it actually blends many experiences and concepts: a line inscribed on a plane ('line' and 'plane' are already blends), change, a straight line touching a curved one at a single point, and so on. To really learn about Cartesian geometry, and be able to think about it to do new things, one needs to decompose the blends it is based on and then build them back up. This is hard work, but it is part of the work of learning. A similar approach of taking apart a blend and then building it back up is used by many sports coaches. A golf swing, a tennis serve, or even something as seemingly simple as turning the crank on a bicycle can be broken down into steps, each of which is practiced and perfected, and then put back together as a stronger whole.

Embedding Blends

Connecting the old to the new, unfolding assumptions and clarifying the underlying metaphors, these are just steps along the path. To really learn something one needs to be able to apply it. The concepts, perceptions, behaviours need to get embedded in one's life. Embedding takes place on several levels. The most common is language. We have learned something when it is embedded in our language systems. This requires a community and conversations. Common phrases, abbreviations, even acronyms are the seeds of a languages system, that are fed by common questions, assciations and perceptions. Even something as physical as learning how to ski or ride a bicycle involves a shared language system. Learning to cycle one began with the seat, the handle bars, the pedals and a notion of balance dependent on speed - "go faster or you'll fall over". Over time, if you go on long rides, you talk about hydration and nutrition, cadence, gears and boinking (when you run out of fuel in your blood). Riding as a group one learns to "hold the line", "close up" and various hand signals to warn of danger or encourage speed.

Language systems are just one of the tools we use to express and apply learning. Just as important are the many physical artifacts that encode what we learn. I currently work for a management consulting firm where a great deal of learning gets encoded into Powerpoint slide, themselves a blend of visual representations (boxes, arrows, colours) and words. A compass rose embeds a tremendous amount of learning about the world - that there are directions, on a two dimensional grid, that directions remain constant (OK, so the magnetic poles drift, and the compass needle can be misled by surrounding metals or spun by an electric charge, but its power lies in its constant pointing towards the north). Learning how to embed learning into things is at the heart of design. Think of the dashboard and controls of a car - learning how to use these is learning how to drive, learning how to design them so that they provide an interface between driver and car is central to automotive design.

Learning also gets embedded in the body as one lays down and reinforces networks of nerve and muscle, linking perception to action. Riding home from the office in Cambridge, across Harvard Bridge and into Boston my body knows to relax, open up peripheral perception, watch for car doors and busses brushing up beside me, where to twitch away from potholes, accelerate over the I90 highway, make eye contact with drivers wanting to turn right and run over me. Embodied learning goes beyond this to even abstract systems. I have a friend who relaxes by unfolding n-dimensional objects in n-1 dimensions (a simple example, unfold a 3D cube into a 2D cross). How is this embodied? It links our physical experience of 2D and 3D space, of unfolding paper and opening boxes to abstract notions of space and transitions. These abstract notions are imagined by a body acting in the world with others.

This cycle is sketched below.

A General Model of Blends

Fauconnier and Turner provide a useful model of blends in their book The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. In their model there are two input spaces, which combine into a blended space and are abstracted into a generic space. Concepts (and by extension any structure - emotional, social and physical as well as conceptual) are mapped between the input spaces. There are several forms of mapping: direct, opposition or difference, various types of transformation, and the recognition that for parts of the blend there is no mapping. Indeed, if every concept can be mapped the blend is likely to bog down, blends (and learning) are selective. The mapping between the two input spaces is projected to the blended space and applied to new content. Emptied of content, the mapping is projected onto a generic space of relations.

An example from The Way We Think (page 271 in my edition). The concepts of traditional marriage and same-sex couple are mapped and key relationships called out. The blend inherits key concepts from both spaces to create a new concept of same-sex marriage. This concept can then become embedded in language, social practices, laws and financial treatment. It also invites us to unfold the original Traditional Marriage blend and think about it more deeply. Where did this blend come from and how does it blend in other concepts such as ownership or kinship?

In my team at work we have been making explicit use of blends to guide design decisions. We consciously search for the blends that we can make that will inform design, and try to unfold the concepts This is hardly new of course. The compass rose blends a circle, space is infinitely divisible and one can go in any direction, with a two-dimensional axes, that privileges north and south, east and west, giving us our bearings. Or more recently, the desktop user interface blends the control of a computer with a desktop.

Some Useful Books on Conceptual Blending

The core text is

The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities by Giles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, Basic Books, New York, 2002.

This is based in part on

Philosophy in the Flesh: The Emboddied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Basic Books, New York, 1999.

Where Mathemetics Comes From: How the Emboddied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being by George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez, Basic Books, New York, 2001.

And on the embodied cognition school of thought, of which my favourite book is

Cognition in the Wild by Edwin Hutchins, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1996.

Some books that apply conceptual blending are

A Clearing In The Forest: Law Life and Mind by Steven L. Winter, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003.

Semantic Leaps: Frame Shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction by Seana Coulson, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK, 2006.

Making Sense of Life: Explaining Biological Development With Models Metaphors and Machines by Evelyn Fox Keller, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2003.

Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure Theory and Analysis by Lawerence M. Zibikowski, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005.

Application of these ideas to design is discussed in

Designing With Blends: Conceptual Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction and Software Engineering by Manuel Imaz and David Benyon, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2007.

Learning Styles and Strengths

In the previous post I looked at learning styles generally and my own in particular. And in the post before that the focus was on understanding one's strengths and using them as a way to leverage personal growth. Learning styles were defined as a person's preferred approach to accessing, organizing and applying information, with information understood widely to include things like motor and perceptual skills as well as cognitive skills and organized collections (maps) of information.

In this post I would like to blend my strengths and learning styles together to see how strengths support learning styles and learning style can be leveraged to enhance strengths.

The notion of blending is a crucial one, and one I will come back to many times. It is worth a post of its own. Blending occurs when two different concepts and experiences are brought together to create a third, new level of experience. Blending is the mental (and physical) operation that lies behind metaphor and synthesis, and is the key to how humans evolve new understandings of the world. The key texts on Blending are Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.

So how do my strengths and my learning styles play together?

My strengths, according to the last time I went through Strengthsfinder, are

• Strategic
• Achievement
• Ideation
• Input
• Learning

My learning styles, from my own self assessment and introspection are

• Abstract
• Historical
• Written
• Modeling
• Social

I actively engage all three modes of information access - visual, verbal, motor - in all five of these learning styles. (Some people think of a visual, verbal or motor bias as a learning styles in themselves, but I have not found this construction to be useful.)

• Strategic thinking requires high-level models and an understanding of how and why things are as they are. This is necessary to effect change. My abstract, historical and modeling learning styles underlie and support my strength in strategic thinking: abstract by helping me to detect the most salient patterns in events; historical by helping me to understand the threads that led things to be as they are, and just as important, to see the ways in which they have been, could have been, and will be different; modeling is closely related to abstraction (in some cases the terms are used interchangeably) and I actively try to construct models of events and processes in order to understand and to influence them ( a habit of though that is reinforced in my current work environment, a major strategic consulting firm, in which the making and breaking of models is part of our day-to-day work).
• Achievement – the drive to excel. I spend a lot of time thinking and learning and working to apply what I am learning to test it and see if it will drive success. Though I will not always admit it, there is an element of competition in my social learning style, I like to know things and to show it, and I also like to help the people I live and work with to excel.
• Ideation – abstract thought and modeling drive new ideas, as does the urge to go back to the source and explore other paths and potentials (historical). Generating and sharing ideas through conversations is key to both learning and achievement (social). Generating, testing, and watching new ideas get selected out is woven through learning and modeling is an act of selecting what parts of the world to notice and then testing and in most cases discarding or modifying the model.
• Input. My approach to learning is input intensive (this is not always a good thing, I sometimes get caught up in the noise and fail to model successfully). I read a great deal, on-line and in book form, scan constantly, and pay close attention to my environment. It is probably attention to the environment that is the most important input to my learning. And it is here that I can best blend the visual, verbal and haptic modes of information organization. My wife has taught me through her design and photography work to pay close attention to the visual and tactile detail of the world. You can see this in her blog Itis. We even try to smell and taste the things we see and live with - the salty wet grit of the air in Boston when it warms after a snowfall (note the date of this post) helps me integrate thoughts on climate change, the physical location of Boston as on but removed from the sea, and the paths I use to cycle around the city. All forms of input, all linked back to my abstract and modeling learning styles. One of my most valuable learning tools is the social tagging site Crowdtrust, where I not only keep track of websites I am interested in, but share them with other people (social) and evolve tag clouds that are part of how I model my thoughts.
• Learning – well that it seems a bit recursive to note that my strength in learning shapes my approach to learning and that my learning styles support my strength learning. But then, recursive structures are something that fascinates me. Google’s application of recursive structures to its technical architecture is something to learn from, and one can think of Chris Argyris’s double loop learning as a form of recursive structure. And double loop learning is at once a model of learning in a social environment, is of historical significance and is something that I try to weave into my own work (I will write more on double loop learning in a later post).

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.