How I Learn

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.