Learning

The widespread availability and easy user interface of artificial intelligence (AI) has put great power at everyone’s fingertips. We can do magical things.

Before the internet existed we would use books to help us better interpret the world. Communication among humans is hard. Expressing logic and even phenomena is complex. This is why social skills matter. Among other things, they help us to communicate. The most obvious example of a communication barrier is language. I remember having a pocket-sized English-Spanish dictionary that I used to help me memorize or query Spanish words. The book helped me communicate with others and to translate ideas from one language to another.

Math books do something similar but the translation is English-Math. We can get broader and say that all textbooks are translation devices. They define field-specific terms and ideas to help a person translate among topic domains, usually with a base-language that reaches a targeted generalizability. We can get extreme and say that all books are translators, communicating the content of one person’s head to another.

But sometimes the field-to-general language translation doesn’t work because readers don’t have an adequate grasp of either language. It isn’t necessarily that readers are generally illiterate. It may be that the level of generality and degree of focus of the translation isn’t right for the reader. Anyone who has ever tried to teach anything with math has encountered this. Students say that the book doesn’t translate clearly, and the communication fails. The book gets the reader’s numeracy or understood definitions wrong. Therefore, there is diversity among readers about how ‘good’ a textbook is.

Search engines are so useful because you can enter some keywords and find your destination, even if you don’t know the proper nouns or domain-specific terms. People used to memorize URLs and that’s becoming less common. Wikipedia is so great because if you want to learn about an idea, they usually explain it in 5 different ways. They tell the story of who created something and who they interacted with. They describe the motivation, the math, the logic, the developments, and usually include examples. Wikipedia translates domain-specific ideas to multiple general languages of different cognitive aptitudes or interests. It scatters links along the way to help users level-up their domain-specific understanding so that they can contextualize and translate the part that they care about.

Historical translation technology was largely for the audience. More recently, translation technology has empowered the transmitters.

Continue reading →

I just ran across a short article [1] summarizing a talk with some techniques on learning more efficiently, which seemed worth sharing here. It may be something for professors to pass along to their students.

The speaker was Andrew Watson, who is an expert on learning and the brain, and currently a teacher at the Loomis Chaffee School in Connecticut. He noted three key ways that students (and adults) can work with the ways the brain learns information. The last two points are good but well known, while the first point was not something I have seen emphasized much:

( 1 ) Retrieve information while studying:

To study better, students should focus on the idea of retrieval rather than review. Trying to recall information before looking back at it produces more remembering than simply reading it through again. He suggested creating flash cards and using visual hints and clues as effect retrieval techniques.

( 2 ) Change the environment to avoid distractions:

The environment in which someone studies also affects how well they retain information because the human brain works best when it focuses on one activity at a time.

(My comment: That is absolutely true for me, I can’t stand any distraction when I am studying or writing, but I know people who claim they study more effectively with a TV show or music going in the background…I wonder what academic studies show about that.)

( 3 ) Bolster your health:

The brain, like the rest of the body, benefits from a healthy lifestyle, including eating well and exercising regularly. Ample sleep helps the brain to process and solidify information absorbed during the day. If homework is everything that helps a person learn and if sleep help you learn, then sleep is a part of homework.

[1] “Brain Hacks for Brainiacs” in the Loomis Chaffee Magazine, Spring 2022, page 13.