Learn from a Book
I’m surprised that the abundance of books didn’t make learning from books happen more often.
Reading and learning should be very popular considering all the eBooks we are being offered on the web or real paperback available in on the business, design, programming department of your favorite bookstore. It is not the kind of books you read to be entertained so there must be some profit to make out of reading them. Learning, ingraining this knowledge and putting it to work is what comes to my mind as a insaid evidence. Does it happen for all books, for all of us? Do you have tips and experience you are willing to share? Join PKMChat and let’s the ball rolling.
I was a time I bought books without counting, my idea was that the team would always pick something from those books. There were many long waiting period in the development cycles. A build could take 2 hours, a test 5 seconds and you have to start again. Few distractions, few books, many readers causing discussions was a favorable setup for deep learning.
I realized recently that at one hour per book I just couldn’t read all the books I accumulated:) I have to become way more selective in my readings and my reading methods.
- Learning requires chunking, repetitions, relating to already acquired knowledge.
- How do create the conditions for this to happen?
- Chunking could be done by using chapters. What is your experience?
- Taking notes and reading them several times could do the trick for spaced repetition. Did you use it?
- How do you take notes.
- do you have prefered ways to keep your notes and reviews.
- Do you really need to memorized if you keep a reference to the exact page of the book? I quote”Never memorize something you can look up” — Albert Einstein
- Learning from a book is often a self directed experience. Unless the book is a textbook or a learning method there will be little indications of which chapters will fit your goals.
- How do you choose the books you read?
- How do organize your reading to match your learning objectives?
- Did you set learning objectives, goals before starting to read the book?
- How social media transformed your reading experience?
- As opposed to a live course a book don’t answer your questions.
- Do you share your reading? before, after, during?
- Did you participate to co-reading experiences like #LrnBook on social media?
- Did you engage the author (considering he is alive and on a social media)
- Do you read paper books or e-Books.
- How does it affect your note taking.
- Is the choice related to when and where you read?
We could question the role of speed reading. Having 3 successives reading could not only help faster reading but retention.
We could question our considereation of the authority of printed matter. There is a widely shared respect for books but does it still hold now that books are so abundant.
A book is a linear discourse/presentation/unwinding of some Knowledge present on the author mind. This was fit for storytelling or books but no more for online hyperlinking based reading. Today it goes as far as the site presenting you a recommended next reading. They are actually profiling readers and dynamically recommending you the next chapter. Eventually every reading experience would be different. This causes an new issue because reading experience cannot be shared in its globally but only by touch points. Is online reading going to affect how we read books?
PKMChat being about Personal Knowledge Management encompass Knowledge lifecycle in general. Our first chat was about learning, acquiring Knowledge. Our second is about sharing it. Week after weeks we will switch from one end of the lifecycle to another while exploring all the channels that could be used: social, formal, writing, videos. Feel free to suggest topics by tweeting to @pkmchat.