Yesterday I put some of the blame for my recent dearth of posts on a TV show. Today, I am going to add "learning" to the list of things which distracted me.
You see, of all the blog entries I had been writing in recent months, it was the "Knowledge Series" which was taking more of my attention than anything else in Snippets and Wisps. If you'll recall, the Knowledge Series started as a way for me to synthesize many of the things I had learned while listening to many Great Courses (from The Teaching Company.)
Well, two things happened related to Great Courses and Learning in general which sidetracked me.
First, at around Christmas time, I completed two courses which were both, roughly, on the topic of Psychology. These were the first courses I had taken on this topic since an Intro to Psych course back at Luther. They were excellent. But I haven't yet written "reviews" of them for Snippets & Wisps. I didn't write the first review because I wanted to have heard both courses before I wrote either review, so that I could compare, contrast and synthesize. I didn't write the second review because, hey, it was Christmas break, and I don't push myself to blog while on vacation.
Unfortunately, that put me "behind" in writing Great Course reviews. This would have been OK, except, well, I started another course and it forced me into a second detour.
Many of the things I was writing about in the Knowledge Series are directly related to the material in this Great Course. And it's 36 lectures long!
I simply could not make myself continue the Knowledge Series without first having some of this new material in my head. And I could not force myself to go back and review the Psychology courses -- when I write my reviews, I always return to the course books so that I can do justice to the material in the course, and so that it gets better "set" in my memory. No, I could not go back to another course -- not while the Philosophy of Science was filling my brain.
So, you see, I was unwilling to continue to put my collected thoughts together while they were in the process of being updated by new information.
I am currently on lecture 35 of that Great Course, though (at the time of this writing, not at the time of your reading) so I anticipate I will be able to move on to some of the next points I need to make in the Knowledge Series soon. Perhaps by this weekend.
I must admit, of the "excuses" I'm giving for my blogging dry spell, this one feels least like an excuse, and more like a reason. It's also quite satisfying. Putting off talking while you're learning something? I think that's generally a good idea, if I do say so myself.
2 comments:
My wife has been listening to some Great Courses and loves them! I appreciate the idea about not talking whilst still digesting/learning but it works backward for me. I am aural, and I find that if I talk about what I'm learning, it solidifies better - the ideas seem to just work their way into my brain better via my ears than my eyes :-)
Buck, I think we're closer in how we learn than it appears at first reading. One of the reasons I always want to write a blog after I'm done with a Great Course is to solidify the learning. It's one thing I did not appreciate about learning when I was going to school -- those papers we had to write, and those tests we took helped us internalize the knowledge we gained.
No, the reason to stay silent was because I wanted to continue the Knowledge Series, but the points I had been preparing to make were being modified as I listed to the GC, and I didn't want to have half-formed ideas.
Of course, there is never an "end" to learning, so I will undoubtedly learn something next year which will modify an essay I write this year, but I certainly wasn't about to write a long post with knowledge I knew would be outdated in a day or two.
Thanks for the comment!
Also, glad to hear about another Great Course fan.
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