Hi OP I am wondering if you ever did the corsera course "Learning how to learn" and what your thoughts were on it and if the you consciously or unconsciously employed the methods described to help you learn new topics.
OP here, I haven't actually, but just looked it up and it looks like it talks more about test prep than the type of learning I talk about. Most of my coding skills come from self-learning things online the way I talked about it, at my own pace, without exams to reinforce that.
However, for test prep, through school and college I have read and tried a lot of guides on learning including simple index cards, the Leitner System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system), coming up with mnemonics, transcribing content from a source medium to some other medium, the Feynman technique, etc.
What I learnt about myself was that any technique involving writing didn't work for me. I would never go back to read something I wrote. I hated writing. I often walked into lectures without a notebook and just listened instead. Don't memorize. Listen. Understand. I have friends who were brilliant "test takers" - which to me meant they could quickly memorize a lot just before an exam. That's something I'm bad at, so I took tests primarily based on what I'd understood over lectures, or follow up discussions I had with professors or classmates.
This also means I wouldn't practice math questions or work out physics problems before a test - I'd sorta just read over solved problems and make sure I understood them.
In retrospect, I actually think this isn't a great way to study for an exam and I always got very nervous just before a test because I feel grossly underprepared, but I saw passing them as a formality and usually just worked on other things I found fun (for instance, I built CSS Peek during finals week of sophomore year).
imho if you plan on taking the course, try to find a better solution to every idea they suggest. The ideas behind why learning is the way it is are valid and well researched, but their solutions, while valid, could be better.
If the course moved from a set of rules to a set of principles and a philosophy, imho the course would be more useful.
One of the few things that blew my mind in the course was how they interviewed someone who went around the world learning different languages at an accelerated rate. His method is to learn enough to ask questions, then he only spoke in that language slowly picking up the language the way a kid does.
Most of the class comes down to differentiating between a focused and diffused state (though it's really a spectrum) and how to get into each mental state and the benefits of doing so.
imho, if you want to accelerate learning, learn how to meditate. It will increase awareness and reduce distractions. Though this is a bit more advanced than the class' recommendation.
However, for test prep, through school and college I have read and tried a lot of guides on learning including simple index cards, the Leitner System (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system), coming up with mnemonics, transcribing content from a source medium to some other medium, the Feynman technique, etc.
What I learnt about myself was that any technique involving writing didn't work for me. I would never go back to read something I wrote. I hated writing. I often walked into lectures without a notebook and just listened instead. Don't memorize. Listen. Understand. I have friends who were brilliant "test takers" - which to me meant they could quickly memorize a lot just before an exam. That's something I'm bad at, so I took tests primarily based on what I'd understood over lectures, or follow up discussions I had with professors or classmates.
This also means I wouldn't practice math questions or work out physics problems before a test - I'd sorta just read over solved problems and make sure I understood them.
In retrospect, I actually think this isn't a great way to study for an exam and I always got very nervous just before a test because I feel grossly underprepared, but I saw passing them as a formality and usually just worked on other things I found fun (for instance, I built CSS Peek during finals week of sophomore year).