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Re: Can you teach someone how to learn?

Subject: Re: Can you teach someone how to learn?
From: Bruce Byfield <bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2002 11:07:10 -0700


Karen Casemier wrote:

Specifically, can you teach someone how to learn a product so well he or she
becomes an expert?

I was a teaching assistant for four years, and taught at university and colleges for seven years, and I always thought that teaching someone to learn was an important (if unspoken) part of the job.

My take is that it can be done, but the student has to want to learn. There are some borderline cases in which a student can be persuaded to learn, but no one can teach much to anyone determined not to learn.I spent enough time teaching remedial and first year courses to have this fact thoroughly pounded into my head (it was something that I didn't want to learn).

If I'm right, then your goal may have a difficult problem to overcome: in many cases, people don't want to learn how to learn software. They want to be told the bare minimal they need to get on with whatever they're doing.


Or can those of you who have extensive teaching backgrounds give suggestions
as how to break down my own learning process so I can understand it better?

I think that your outline of the process is a good start. To continue, why not treat it as you would a piece of software or hardware that you're documenting. That is, identify the tasks that you did at each step, and what can go wrong - in my view, writing technical documentation isn't that different from teaching.

--
Bruce Byfield bbyfield -at- axionet -dot- com 604.421.7177
http://members.axion.net/~bbyfield

"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone . . . He seems to have written so much - all of it wrong."
- Tamora Pierce


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References:
Can you teach someone how to learn?: From: Karen Casemier

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