Deep thought

I'm watching a video in which people discuss where they like learning. One likes a coffee shop but another gets too distracted in that environment. One learns whilst riding his bike.

I think it depends what we mean by learning. Surely learning must be a multi-phase activity. Lev Manovich has written about what might be called a 'rip, mix and burn' process of learning:
Ripping in music or IT is the process of copying something; in learning this would be the transmissive phase in which a learner listens to a teacher or reads a book or watches a video.
Mixing in music is when a musician combines various different riffs or ideas etc (you can tell I'm not a musician!). This is a highly creative process. A learner needs to mix the new learning with other inputs and with what the learner already knows. This may require a period of unlearning while the learner's concepts modify themselves to take account of the new ideas.
Burning is when a musician writes down or otherwise records a new composition. Is this the constructivist phase in learning? It is the process of consolidating one's new knowledge.

For me, I need a high degree of peace and quiet when I am ripping so that I can devote my full concentration to the new information. This is because I am easily distracted. I don't like listening to music at this stage because I find it highly distracting. Is this because I am an auditory learner? Actually, I think I am better at visual learning: I prefer reading to lectures and although I pick up written languages quite easily when I am abroad I am rubbish at hearing and speaking them. Furthermore, I can listen to instrumental music unless I want to concentrate really hard so it is something about the words that is key. But this is standard attention channel psychology I think.

When I am mixing what I like to do most is to wander. I walk corridors, sometimes into other offices (most of my colleagues have learned that if I do walk in with an abstracted look on my face it is not because I want to talk to them; quite the opposite in fact. 

When I am burning I need intense peace and quiet. The process of consolidation is, for me, still part of the process of mixing. Writing this little blog snippet has meant writing and amending and deleting continuously. Young people don't understand how much word processing has liberated writers like myself from the tyranny of longhand drafts!

How I like to learn

Things I like about learning:

• Reading and writing
• A bit of peace and quiet so I can think about the ideas I have encountered
• Working at my own pace

Things I hate about learning

• Role play. Yuck, yuck, yuck. I mean, yuck. 
• Big group discussions where some windbag keeps interrupting with their weird views (I have found that the real bonus of text based discussions on discussion forums and in second life is that you can chat to more interesting people at the same time as the windbag is droning on)

This is just me. I know I am a shy, weird geek and most people are normal. 

But I am finally old enough to stand up for myself and say that there are probably a small but significant if rather silent minority who do like learning on their own in quiet. You find them in every classroom. They're the ones the teachers mostly ignore but rely on to get decent results. The ones the teachers can't think of anything to say at parents' evening.

But the fashion in education at the moment seems to be massively in favour of collaborative learning. Get them into a group and they will learn. Sugatha Mitra (http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves?language=en) suggests that collaborating kids and no adults are the two essential conditions for what he calls Self Organised Learning Environments. 

And I understand that collaboration is essential. Newton's ideas didn't come from introspection, they were generated through lots of late night conversations at coffee houses. He had to have input from other people before he could create his theories. But the difference between Newton and, eg, Robert Hooke is that Newton then went home and spent two years or so in solitary thinking, reflecting on the ideas he had heard and remixing them into his own theories.

David Thornburg talks about the primitive pedagogies. He suggests that learning has evolved in humans in three ways: the campfire (where people, eg teachers, tell us stories), the watering hole (where we discuss with the rest of the tribe) and the cave (where we hide away to think). At some stage even the most collaborative learner has to file new knowledge into their brain. And I fear that some teachers with their love for frenetic group work in the classroom mistake all this activity for learning and don't give their pupils time to hide away and ponder and process.

But maybe that's just the weird geek talking. Maybe the multi-tasking kids of today really can watch TV whilst tweeting and facebooking and googling and chatting to their friends and followers. I know my step-daughter flicks from website to website before I have even had the chance to read half a page. Perhaps she is just quicker than me.

But I think (and this may be just inter-generational arrogance) that I learn faster, better and more deeply than she does. And I know (but this may be just a self-limiting illusion) that I could not learn so well if I tried to learn in her way.

I need peace and quiet.

PS: Just watched the first lecture. Glad to know that I'm not alone!