THINQon : Tapping the Unknown

THINQon is a platform for a more intelligent web. It aims to replace the ruling paradigm of the web – that of sharing and gathering information – with a sharing and achieving of understanding. Instead of the Q&A model it offers an experience. A platform for discovery of ideas, people, and yourself. Continue >

Franis Engel, Me at: http://myhalfof.blogspot.com

Tapping the Unknown

Latest Post: February 3, 2012 at 9:37 PM

28 followers

In the spirit of the topic and its relevance to inquiry in general - I'm going to just ask a bunch of questions. I'm hoping that people will be OK with a string of questions. Often stringing questions together comes across as being a bit confrontational, but I don't mean them to be scary or argumentative. I don't intend to use questions as a way of making rhetorical statements. My motive isn't to rant. Please be encouraged to ask your own questions too. Sometimes letting a question hang in the air allows many answers. Of course, a good question can be understood in many different ways and has many interesting pointers toward expansion into new ground. Feel free to creatively misunderstand! Of course, you can pick any question or have your say about a group of them. You can ask your own questions and answer them. Maybe you have a "virtual question" - a favorite question of yours that has yielded many fruitful results...

I suspect that one condition that helps with tapping the unknown is safety to take chances. I'm hoping that nobody needs to fear being torn apart in debate mode. (We're pretty civil about that on Thinqon here, aren't we?) After all, we're talking about not knowing here! Nobody needs to position themselves as an authority, because anything you say can come from your own inner authority - your own observations are what I'm most interested in hearing about. Of course, it's always interesting to trade notes about what other authors, artists, inventors and scientific minds have written too, but I'm really interested in your own thoughts and experiences.

OK, so - questions...

1. What gets you in the mood to be willing to confront the unknown, to be comfortable with being a learner? What makes you ready to learn now?

2. Are there situations or conditions that need to be set up before your investigating starts that makes the process of learning to function more effectively for you?

3. In the presence of many answers or results - how do you know which one(s) to pursue? Are there characteristics that mark recognizing an effective course of inquiry to follow and go further into?

4. Have you had a pivotal learning experience and what did it mean for you? If you teach, do you teach differently from the way you were taught? How did you figure out the need for these improvements in teaching style?

5. Does criteria or the prioritization for evaluation of ideas need to be set up beforehand, or can you just absorb and organize what you are getting after it arrives? How do you compensate for time of arrival, if the useful stuff comes at unpredictable times?

6. When learning a skill that has a physical demonstration and no teacher or coach is available, what can a person do to help themselves to observe themselves in action - so they can repeat it if there's a happy accident of new progress?

7. Do you have strategies for learning? How might you have determined those strategies? Can you just haul off and improvise? Do you learn better in certain ways? Have there been certain ways, situations or people that were more effective for learning faster?

(The numbering doesn't imply hierarchy - I thought it might be a handy way to refer to which question(s) you'd like to answer.)

Let's see if we can think together and come up with something new...Thanks!

Postscript (January 7, 2012 at 5:22 AM):

Is that too many questions at once?

This post is referenced by the following other contributors:

Edna Stern

in "Tapping the Unknown / Different learning methods"

(Study)

Reply to:

Emily Andrews

January 12, 2012 at 3:15 PM

31 followers

Hi Franis,
One thing that makes learning interesting for me is when I feel there's something at stake. For instance, suppose someone is going to tell me a new theory (let's say a new theory about the origin of the universe). For me it works best if they start by saying, "What are the flaws of the current theory? What are the mysteries the current theory doesn't explain?" If they do a good job explaining this, and they are indeed interesting flaws, then I'm pretty motivated to hear the answer. I'm also in a much better position to fill in the gaps in the explanation.

Especially when it comes to learning science, one of the more subtle aspects is figuring out what "reasonable" assumptions are. Everyone has a model of some kind, and some way to ignore the huge amount of noise and impose a hierarchy on the data. Without knowing how they are focusing, it's hard to see their innovation. Thus one of the best things to learn from others in person is some sense of how they build their models and mental pictures. Calculations and so forth you can do on your own later.

I like to feel that the things I learn have a certain value as tools. In a totally different context, I'd much rather hear "mixing perfume with a mild unscented lotion before dabbing it on your wrist makes the scent last longer" than have someone say "this is the way an elegant lady does things." For me the thrill of knowing how to make things work motivates a lot of inquiry, and also gives a well-designed structure into which I can put that knowledge.

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Franis Engel, Me at: http://myhalfof.blogspot.com

In response to Emily Andrews

January 23, 2012 at 5:32 PM

28 followers

Aloha Emily,
These are thoughtful points you're making.

Having a conceptual structure to hang the information onto as it arrives is a convenience many teachers leave out of their instruction. Most just jump right in and teach some content, and the student must find a way to make the new information meaningful. It would be interesting to hear how various people - students and teachers - create their framework.

One of the ways that I construct a way to retain information is to take a bit of time to find out specialized terminology. As you point out, getting some history or context of the motive to ask a specific question makes the answer interesting too. As you say, being filled in with some context about why something is notable also draws fascination. This is often connected to the lineage or history of the subject's line of inquiry.

Following along while the teacher-investigator asks unique questions for themselves gets me excited too. I love to get the advantage of someone's ability and skill for asking interesting, meaningful questions that are based on their unique experiences. So sometimes hearing what makes a teacher's point of view unique is motivating. I love to hear someone's story about how they started to become interested; how they started their business, how they came up with a unique idea, how they first applied the skill or information as they discovered it, etc.

Also, one of my big motives for learning (that is a touchstone theme for me) is gaining access to a whole different world or niche of sub-culture through someone's personal interest in it. It's a tremendous resource to get information first-hand; to be able to ask my own questions as they come up within my own learning curve.

Having something personal at stake is often amusing too. For instance, recently I've been given the opportunity to be regularly kayaking along the ocean shoreline in an open molded plastic floating boat design. Aside from not knowing about sailing or whatever someone in the open ocean would be watching out for while they are kayaking, it's also a completely new thing for me to jump out of a boat and then get back into that moving target. The first time I was able to jump into this kayak from the water a few days ago, my motivating force was a comment my skinny companion made that sometime heavy people can't do it. It was very motivating for me to want to prove by doing it that twenty pounds over being skin and bones wasn't going to stop ME from catapulting myself from deep water into the kayak!

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Edna Stern

February 3, 2012 at 9:37 PM

87 followers

Hello Franis,

I'll take your last question : "Do you have strategies for learning? How might you have determined those strategies? Can you just haul off and improvise? Do you learn better in certain ways? Have there been certain ways, situations or people that were more effective for learning faster?"

When I was a young student, my main strategy was to imitate, repeating after my teachers like a monkey. I was very lucky that all my teachers since I was eleven years old were fantastic pianists. It was still the main way for me to learn even as I got older and was playing on a high level the hardest pieces. I remember when I was sixteen playing to my Russian teacher Rachmaninov 3rd concerto where the second movement starts for the piano with a rather complicated long phrase- tons of notes* that blurred my vision of the phrasing and musical direction, and she tried to explain to me that I'm cutting the phrase into small pieces.
It didn't work so she explained again a second time singing how it should sound- I still didn't get it. Loosing patience she pushed me from the piano and showed me how it should be played. That was the fastest way for me to learn this phrase and I did it immediately well after her. It didn't make her especially happy (she was not easy to please), complaining that she didn't want to show me on purpose, that showing was the easiest way to learn for kids and beginners but adults (me) should find new ways and strategies to learn.

I had two Russian teachers when I was an adolescent, an older man and a younger woman who was his assistant. It happened that I met by chance at a concert my old teacher a couple of years ago. He must have missed on the fact that many years have passed since I came to him a little girl of eleven, and he asked me with whom I was studying now. I told him that I'm not studying with anybody anymore and that I'm on the other side now, teaching in London's RCM. He put me back into my place saying with his Russian accent : "you never stop studying."
Now, the best way for me to learn and progress is through conversations with knowledgeable people, usually not pianists but professionals who are touching into the same questions but from different points of views and who will show me how close they get to solve a given question. But let's say I need to learn how to do something that's not in my specialty, like cooking, computer etc...I'm certainly back to my old, favorite learning method- imitation.

*it is said that there are more notes in this one concerto than in all of the 27 Mozart concerti put together