My Learning Style

Several colleagues and I got into a discussion recently about learning styles, learning networks and their implications for use of technology, and it got me to thinking about my personal experiences, which I thought I might explore, document and share here.

Contemplation, Reflection, Blogging
Contemplation and reflection play a tremendous role in the way I approached learning, and blogs for me are a key way through which I reflect and contemplate.  The act of sharing these reflections publicly serves to help me focus my attention.  Somehow the idea that my thoughts will be read by others inspires me to dedicate even greater attention and energy to establishing and discovering what I truly think, feel and understand.

I’ve found that I come to conclusions through the act of writing at-length. Discussion does come into play in how I grow to understand a subject, but for me discussion only comes into play after reflection and contemplation. I need to feel confident and comfortable with what I think before I’m able to articulate it in a discussion with others – and particularly before I am able to explain it or debate about it.

Self-Directed, Solitary Learning

Following on this, I’ve realised over time that I am a fairly solitary learner.  I tend to have trouble brainstorming and learning through discussion.  So blogs and leaving quiet time to think and contemplate are very important to my learning style.  Blogs are very appropriate to me because I don’t need discussion with others to really explore ideas.  Indeed part of contemplation for me is constant questioning of the conclusions I’m exploring – it’s very much an internal dialogue with myself where I ask questions, internally debate points, and look at topics from multiple angles.

This perhaps makes me a poor commenter on the posts of others, since so much of my mental energy goes into realising and articulating the ideas that I’m exploring. That said I do find I greatly benefit from the comments that people leave on my posts, since they emerged in the wake of a train of thought I’d already explored and enabled me to pursue an idea even further through tangential discussions.

Conceptual Connections

From a Connectivism standpoint connections are not limited to interacting/engagement with people; they can and do include neural and/or conceptual/theoretical connections as well. For me the latter is where the bulk of my learning processes begin, typically through making a connection between new concepts or ideas and others that are already understood.

In my case the initial phases of grappling with an idea and establishing patterns and frameworks for sense-making is a very internal process where I do a lot of thinking, questioning, and comparing it with existing areas of understanding (e.g. “How does this new topic relate to things I already know?”). Eventually this leads to initial conceptual connections, and I can start to recognise patterns and similarities with other ideas.

This stage is typically where blogging comes into play. In many ways constructing posts is externalising around knowledge for me, since the way I naturally write is fairly systematic and analytical (a leads to b, which leads to c). Putting my thoughts to paper enables me to map out a conceptual exploration in a way that can be referenced later, reviewed, critiqued, challenged, and built upon.

As a result I’ve found over time that the act of writing enables me to draw additional conclusions and establish new connections that had not previously occurred to me – both through the writing process itself, as well as recognising trends in my posts over time.

The enormous benefit of blogging to me is that this very personal act of cognitive exploration then becomes the seeds from which discussion with others may emerge, since people are largely able to follow the exact train of thought I had pursued when drawing my initial conclusions.

This point tends to lead into/facilitate the development of social/external connections – through commenting, Twitter discussions, and face-to-face conversations – which in turn can inspire the whole process to begin again as people inject new ideas into the mix and I’m brought to reconsider existing perspectives on things.

Artifacts as references or dialogue?

One question I haven’t quite resolved yet though is where artifacts sit in the process. For example, are journal articles, papers, blog posts, YouTube clips, Wikipedia articles and the like considered to be social/external interaction, or are they somehow different to this?

In other words, when does a reference resource or artifact become a form of dialogue?

I have traditionally considered these items to be somehow different to asynchronous dialogue, since I frequently do not interact with the producer/creator of the artifact. Commonly I’ll watch YouTube clips, read blog posts and Wikipedia articles without ever leaving a comment for the author – so effectively they have no way of knowing I have engaged with their creation, let alone what my interpretation on the matter was. Yet I rely greatly on them as reference resources in order to address areas of confusion during the early reflective/contemplative stages.

However if these items are considered to be a form of asynchronous dialogue, then I may not be as solitary a learner as I’d previously thought.