

Monday, May 18, 2009

Learning, Extended Brain and Topic Hubs











What to Do When Learning Something New?









Speaking Topic Hub





Extended Brain











Nancy Devine said...

I find this post particularly interesting, because in it, whether you realize it or not, you've articulated some important an educational idea.
Your search to learn about the business of public speech, I would identify as schema building. Think of schema as the organization of your brain, a sort of mental cupboard, if you will.
If you have a well-developed schema on a particular topic, it is relatively easy to accommodate new learning, because it fits somewhere. If you don't have a well-developed schema, new learning has no place to go. So, when you're jumping into something new, you must build schema for that new thing.
I suspect that you feel as though you haven't completely explained this, because your brain is working hard to build schema and because that schema-building phase is difficult to describe. Since you are an accomplished and deft learner, I would say you instinctively set out to build schema on a topic right away, perhaps without any sort of conscious process.
You're fortunate to have resources to help you--people that you can ask for help---as well as the moxie to do so.
Additionally, you've operated under the belief that you could learn about something new, that the locus of control for your own learning resides within you.
I don't really know if you encounter people in the private sector who don't know how to learn and/or who don't have belief in their capacities to do so.
Will your speech be recorded, so others could see or hear it?

Tony Karrer said...

Nancy - that's really great insight. Thanks for putting words, "schema building", to part of what I'm describing. Certainly that's a core aspect. And then there's the process and pattern for going about that. What this also suggests to me is that there's a relationship between the process, pattern, tools, resulting form and the schema that will result. In other words, likely my schema are partly formed based on how I'm doing this. And while this process/pattern helps me fast forward my learning, I maybe should think about any implications it has on what results.

My presentation won't be until the fall sometime, likely Sept. One of them will be a teleseminar. I'll try to find out if it will be recorded or available after. Or if people can attend.

V Yonkers said...

Interesting that you should use the imagery that there are sockets without the light bulbs in them. This is close the imagery of the electric grid in which there are some vital hubs that need to be accessed (although there may be multiple paths to get to those hubs). Interestingly enough, I went through a similar search this year when I was updating my speech presentation course. I had the same end results (creating a schema about professional speech giving) with totally different paths to get there. Every source you named was new to me!

I have been doing a lot of reading lately about organizational knowledge building. Much of the literature distinguishes between knowledge (having access to content or information about a topic) and knowing (having a schema or "apprehesive" or implicit knowledge within which to make sense of the content).

It sounds to me like you and I have different ways of knowing about the topic, which points us in different direction when seeking knowledge about the topic. You come from this as a speaker/business professional whereas I come from it as a communicator/instructor. This is not to say that in discussing this we can't begin to share a common understanding (thus creating a new way of knowing).

Tony Karrer said...

Virginia - very much appreciate your thoughts on this. And yes, it's definitely interesting to take a different process, and focus, but arrive at overlapping sets.

I need to think about that one.