As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m required to keep a reflective journal for a course that I’m currently taking. Of course, because I’ve been told to do it, I’ve not made any blog posts since. I seem to like to blog if it’s a voluntary activity, but I don’t like it if I’m told to keep a journal.
Anyway…let’s reflect. I attended my action learning group meeting today. I had done some preparation for it because I realise that even though I don’t like the format of the meetings I should be professional about it; prepare, contribute and learn. I’m not sure how much I learned, but I’ll give it some time.
My next job is to finish the learning pack that I’m working on. It’s on assessment which is something that I need to improve at. However, after reading the referenced chapters and websites I don’t think I’ve picked up anything that Des hasn’t ranted about. I seem to be able to pick up more from my collegues in a shorter space of time than from spending time reading.
So apart from not liking the format of the meetings (I periodically transition from feeling angry at being told to sit somewhere for several hours like a child to being really angry that I’m being put in some pseudo-therapy [unfortunatly not the uber-cool rock group Therapy?]) and not getting a high return on investement from the study packs it’s all going well 
Information retrieval through in person discussion is the most effective method of finding out stuff you need to know. It beats Google, textbooks, and everything else. Thats why from chatting to someone about a topic, you’ll generally learn stuff, whereas through perusing a book, you’ll generally gain fragile knowledge or indices. (i.e. you don’t know how to do X, but you know where to find it in a book)
The above might seem really obvious, but most people ignore it. If I need to know the best way to use Perl to process XML, I’d be better served talking to Dave Cahill about it, than googling, cause I will retrieve, store, and learn the info. Also, discussion tends to encourage meaningful learning, as the discussion usually relies on knowledge anchors. E.g. “You know HTML yeah, well XHTML is the same thing but with blah blah blah” , If I was explaining a concept to you , I’d be able to select some knowledge anchors (i.e. stuff you know really well) and use them to make the learning process really easy.
For more about meaningful learning, have a read here
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=356841
You may have already read this.
The real deal in this area is a book by Ausubel, Information Learning and Retention.
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