Tuesday, September 30, 2008

How to Be Self Learning


How to Be Self Learning


from wikiHow - The How to Manual That You Can Edit

These days, if you want to learn something, get a teacher. But you have to pay a cost and these costs are expensive. To be self learning is just great!!!

Steps


  1. In order to be motivated, make sure you really want to learn something. If you do not want to learn for learning's sake, become clear about the reason why you want to learn something and try to imagine how it is, when your learning was successful. Maybe you'll find out, that you don't want to learn that thing, so at least you can save some time. If you don't really want to learn it, the time spent on trying to learn it will be mostly wasted.
  2. Take a look at the information you have at the moment: does it provide you enough stuff to learn? If so, start learning, else gather at least as much information as you need to begin learning. Some people may like it more if they have all the information they want to learn, but it is also possible, that you become discouraged by too much information, so find out how you feel most comfortable.
  3. As said above, start learning. If possible, do experimental stuff first, because it helps you to get into the topic. Physicists for example often try to explain why something works like they've seen in the experiment, so it would be good if you can do the experiment on your own, make a thought-experiment or get a video of that experiment. Although in some fields like mathematics concrete examples may lead off-road, in most cases it will help you to understand what's that stuff all about. It's not beneficial to learn some formulae, statistics or dates if you can not imagine what they describe.
  4. If there is anything you can practice, maybe if you try to learn dancing some steps or in school exercises just do them. Albeit it may be tempting to rush through them, for somebody inexperienced it is better to do the exercises in a moderate pace and careful. This prevents sloppy technique or bad habits, which are much harder to correct than small mistakes at the beginning.
  5. Get more experienced people to judge you. Beside they can correct your mistakes, they - maybe even more important - can tell you when you are already doing something well, which can be very motivating.
  6. Gather knowledge. One of the most common mistakes is that people concentrate either on the practical or on the theoretical aspects of something. This only leads to stereotypes like the stupid sportsman or the nonathletic nerd. However, it is also very ineffective, because you probably don't use your whole brain, but only the left side or the motoric part. Having an open mind also helps to see connections to things you already like, thus increasing comprehension and motivation.
  7. Throw time at it. The best learning strategy doesn't help, if you don't spend a decent amount of time in it. According to the topic it even may be enough just to spend everyday half an hour on some exercises or texts. Special learning techniques can make learning easier, but they still require work done by you.
  8. Organize your learning. At the end of a session look what you accomplished and prepare the next session with some questions or tasks, so the next time you only need to start working on the topic, which decreases the risk of procrastination.


Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Be Self Learning. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

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