Learning & Knitting

I read a book, and I don’t talk to anyone about it. It goes in through my eyes, and out the same ear that discarded most of what I ever studied at school. The (truly fascinating) material in the book remains captured in its own context, and doesn’t interact much with what I already know, feel and believe. It doesn’t create many associations. The line of thought explained in the book is just hanging there below the plain of my existing state of mind. The slightest damage to that line – such as an idea I don’t understand – and the whole line falls down and disappears.

One remedy for that, is talking about what I read in the book with anyone. It makes me think about the text and paraphrase it – already creating another thread in the line of thought, which makes it more durable. The person talking to me about the book may have a related idea, adding more associations and context. I may have to explain to myself and my companion/adversary why I agree or disagree with something in the book, thereby creating ties between the line of the book and the plain of my own state of mind. In conversation, feelings can come up, creating more ties. The very fact that I hear myself speaking creates extra ties through my brain’s speech center and hearing center. The line of thought offered in the book gets knitted into my own ecology of thoughts. It is not quite as susceptible to being cut off.

This “talking about it” can take many forms: The book-reader may talk to friends in a group, and possibly read together – either by everyone reading the same text and then talking about it, or by each member reading different parts and then talking about it. Another form is that of teaching others, which has similar effects, especially if we allow the pupils to ask many questions and don’t let the teaching degenerate into declaiming.

Even talking to oneself – having an “internal conversation” – can do much of the job. Internal conversation may be done by stopping the reading occasionally and thinking about how the material relates to one’s life, knowledge, feelings, beliefs etc. Writing a blog or a book is another form of “internal conversation”. Even the ancient custom of annotating a book one reads (Yes, writing inside the book), is a useful way to maintain that internal conversation, thereby knitting a new line of thought into one’s existing mesh of thought-lines. For example, if I were to annotate the book on motivation I am reading (Motivation In Education: Theory, Research and Applications – an excellent book), I would have written a note where the book talks about self-efficacy (pardon the jargon), and I would have connected it to Churchill’s definition of success as “the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” Where enthusiasm is connected in my mind to the self efficacy. It doesn’t matter very much if the connection is scientifically valid. What matters is that this connection helps me remember and relate to the new information about self efficacy.

This also gives an opportunity to illustrate the ability of conversation to knit new information not only to other academic knowledge, but also to emotional state: I find this quote from Churchill quite inspiring and exciting. Connecting the new idea to an exciting feeling gives the new knowledge an extra dimension. I now like the idea (an emotional statement) of keeping my self-perception and that of others a bit higher than what’s warranted by real capability. I am more likely to do it – act on the new information and make it part of my life.

A major problem with frontal teaching/lecturing, is this same problem of lack of conversation. The teacher’s speech is a long thread of thoughts, which hangs detached from the pupils’ life. Even if the teacher develops the ideas beautifully, they can remain detached from the students and easily forgotten. The more chance the pupils get to associate the new material with existing context, the better they are likely to incorporate the new knowledge into their lives. For this to occur, the conversation – either external or internal – should be quite lively for each student. This may be done best in small groups – 2-3-4 students talking things over. In a classroom, whether it has 40 or 20 or 200 students in it, many individual students will naturally stay out of the conversation, and the studied material will stay out of their mind.

An inner conversation is possible when there are pauses in the speech of the lecturer or when the book-reader pauses often. Otherwise there is no time to make any extra knitting connections, other than those explicitly presented by the lecturer, which are often disconnected from the listener’s state. One way to create such pauses is to allow for questions. An often retold story is that of Isidor Rabi, winner of a Nobel Prize for physics, who was once asked why he became a scientist. He replied: "My mother made me a scientist without ever knowing it. Every other child would come back from school and be asked, 'What did you learn today?' But my mother used to say, 'Izzy, did you ask a good question today?' That made the difference. Asking good questions made me into a scientist." Asking questions does not only create conversation, but the asking in itself indicates an internal conversation is already going on.

One more method for creating an internal conversation, and associatively knot new information into the existing mesh, is to browse the Internet. The individual browsing the Internet leans-forward and naturally skips from one issue to an associatively related issue. An extra benefit of that activity is that it is under the control of the individual, which means they can pause whenever they want, go back and forth, retrace their own thinking (thereby making it more explicit), etc. Internet browsing as a useful learning tool is not yet well understood.

To better understand conversations in general and Internet-internal conversations in particular, and in line with one of the main themes emerging from this blog, here are a few research questions:

• “Does learning using the Internet have different qualities related to the internal conversation?”
• “Does conversation improve learning?"
• Studying without intermissions
• ... With a few intermissions (short/long)
• ... With many intermissions (short/long)
• ... With/Without conversation among pupils
• ... Different types of conversations
• Pupils teaching each other
• Arguing points
• ...
• “Does conversation have a short/long term effect?”