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Took the course. A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. The techniques suggested are things many people are already familiar with: r
by sp527 9y ago
Took the course. A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. The techniques suggested are things many people are already familiar with: recall, deliberate practice, interleaving, spaced repetition, Einstellung, Pomodoro, Feynman Method, Cornell notes or similar (to force recall), exercise regularly, sleep well, focus on concepts not facts (chunking), etc. A composite of these dramatically enhances the learning process.
I can post some of the notes I took on the course if anyone is genuinely curious. The key premise of the course is that the brute force approach people usually take to learning is highly inefficient and ultimately ineffective (you'll forget).
EDIT: Notes https://pastebin.com/JNbGxvpQ https://pastebin.com/JNbGxvpQ
- appearsonline 9y agoI would appreciate the notes. :)
- rpeden 9y ago"A Mind for Numbers" is basically the book version of this course (same author). I found it quite good, and I personally found it faster and easier to learn the concepts in book form than on Coursera.
- vira28 9y agoambivalents posted above. https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj
- ishansharma 9y agoWould be great if you could post the notes. I'm definitely interested. :)
- pfranz 9y agoI thought similarly, but still think it was worth it. A big reason I took it was because I had been meaning to read her book. My wife and I have thought about the topic of learning probably more than the average person. She has been using Anki for years to help with foreign language study. She admits she didn't figure out how to study until college and most of it was self learned try-and-fail. We see others in our family who spend hours blankly staring at materials, but still do poorly. I feel like learning should be taught in schools. Not sure if high school is too premature or if it should be a college freshman course.
- stinkytaco 9y agoWhen I was in college (some 20 years ago almost), they had a freshman course that more or less covered this and was required. Less science and more "life skills", it still had a lot on study discipline and covered many of the concepts in this course. I imagine many American universities do the same.
- softawre 9y agoI never had this class in college (average state university). Would have appreciated it if I had.
- stinkytaco 9y agoAs a freshman it seemed like the lamest thing ever. It wasn't particularly well executed, but if I had been more mature and less of an ass I think I'd haven gotten something out of it. Alas, it was wasted on me.
- pfranz 9y agoMy wife and I were thinking trying to teach that in HS would be written off more than college. Honestly, teachers are all professional educators. The basic principals should be taught throughout school--effectively part of it.
- capkutay 9y agoWell I'm not familiar with any of those methods other than Cornell notes...
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ambivalents 9y agoNot OP but I also recently took the course, my notes* are here for anyone interested: https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj *Apologies if they are somewhat disorganized; they are generally broken down into the four discrete units that match the course. I wrote the notes with no intention that other eyes would see them :) feel free to reach out if you have any questions on them though
- Diederich 9y agoThanks! These are a hell of a lot more organized than my raw notes. Well done.
- vira28 9y agoThanks for the notes. I did first week and honestly felt it was too slow and somewhat discontinued. I am going to read your notes :)
- tertius 9y agoI think their audience (i.e. style) are new college students.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- posguy 9y agoI dunno, as a new college student I wasn't terribly impressed with Coursera's offerings as compared to the (half-hearted) online classes I've taken from my local community college. Despite many of the professors not knowing how to work Canvas, often the courses are engaging enough to get me to actually complete said coursework.
- leggomylibro 9y agoThat's about how I feel about most of Coursera's offerings. Check out some other MOOC providers, there are other players like EdX, Udacity, Udemy. I've had good results with EdX, but my one positive experience with them ('Introduction to Biology - The Secret of Life') is much more anecdotal than my multiple very poor experiences with Coursera. It's gotten me excited about the potential of online classes again, though!
- henrik_w 9y agoIf you are interested in the course, start taking it. It is quite quick and easy. I used the Coursera app on my phone and downloaded the lectures and watch during my train commute. It won't take long to watch the whole thing.
- pgeorgep 9y agoSounds like a great course. I love hearing about learning techniques like chunking and seeing how I can utilize them to better learn.
- rimliu 9y agoI'd add that discussion about diffuse and focused modes is quite important too. As well as chunking and building a foundation—but you touch on that in the last sentence.
- mcshicks 9y agoI also took the course, and I more or less agree with your assessment. However as someone who went to school a pretty long time ago and frankly never really learned how to study it was helpful. It reminded of one of those books you read where the author doesn't really say anything you didn't know, but puts the pieces together in a way you had not really thought about it. So I found it pretty worthwhile and I think if you are spending a lot of time trying to learn new things (i.e. foreign language, online courses, self study) it can be worthwhile, even if you are familiar with most of the techniques.
- sp527 9y agoHad to clean up my notes a bit. Can find those here: https://pastebin.com/JNbGxvpQ https://pastebin.com/JNbGxvpQ. Sorry about the formatting. There really wasn't a good way to retain the styling I had in the original that made this easier on the eyes. Also, as some others have noted, A Mind For Numbers is a much more expedient way of ingesting the course material for people who don't care for a visual-audial medium. It's the same exact material (often verbatim). The title is extremely misleading - there's almost nothing in it pertaining to math specifically.
- k_lander 9y agoyeah, same. felt the entire course could've been compressed to a 12-point medium article.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoActually, I find the course rather helpful. See, I coasted through undergrad and even some of my MSc on just being smart and doing homework and stuff. Deliberate techniques for studying were never anything I learned, and I sure as hell need them now.
- kelukelugames 9y agoWhat is considered brute force and inefficient? I'm relearning to play basketball and found repetitive drills on basic skills to be the most helpful. I shoot dozens and dozens of mikan layups and it's really helped my pick up game.
- jonnybgood 9y agoCramming
- neves 9y agoSorry, you are just familiar if you already are curious about the subject (like I am). I assure you that the normal human beings don't know about it at all.
- sp527 9y agoYea didn't phrase that correctly. What I really meant was it's largely the standard stuff you come across if you spend a handful of hours browsing on the subject. But there is a convenience in having it all in one place and extra assurance in seeing it validated with actual research (Dr. Oakley is especially good at collating relevant academic papers/articles).
- DigitalJack 9y agoChunking is most definitely not "focus on concept not facts."
- sp527 9y agoYes, that was misstated. What I meant was that chunking is a realization of the principle of focusing on concepts instead of facts since chunks are the residual output of knowledge acquisition that actually sticks in the long term.
- DigitalJack 9y agoMaybe I misunderstood chunking when I watched the class. I took it to mean grouping items to remember into a larger whole. Orthogonal to concept vs fact. I can remember my credit card numbers because I have chunked the digits into a whole. Or at least that's what I thought was meant by chunking.
- DigitalJack 9y agoNow that I've been reflecting on it, I seem to recall what you are talking about. Stepping up the ladder of abstraction... Sorry, it's been a while since I watched it.
- glenneroo 9y agoYeah I used to remember it being slang for chatting in the BBS (multinode e.g. Wildcat) days because of the loud "chunk" (or clunk) sound of keyboards in the 90s.
- nlawalker 9y ago>> A lot of it is cruft and motivation for the underlying core ideas. Someone else made the exact same remark about Cal Newport's book "Deep Work" earlier this week in another thread. I find this to be true about a lot of books/courses/content of a "self-help" nature that are designed to be practical and applicable - the real helpful stuff boiled down to its essence could fit in a tri-fold pamphlet (or a 350-line pastebin), but you can't make money selling a tri-fold pamphlet, so the content gets augmented with tons of case studies and variations on variations on variations of the core ideas to justify 200 pages or a multi-week course. I stopped buying these kinds of books. Every one turned into "thumb to about page 60 to skip the intro/life story/motivating metaphor, read a few pages, and skim the beginning of each chapter after that."
- marklgr 9y agoI call these books candy for the brain. That audience just love to feel smart, wise or "aware" (depending on the specific subgenre), and these books give them just that -- pleasant feelings. Napoleon Hill is perhaps the poster child of brain candy, and once you realize a lot of today's books are the (supposedly) backed-by-science versions of the same recipe, the whole genre loses almost all interest.
- sp527 9y agoAgreed. There's a serious problem of information density in content these days. Most publisher-driven content is almost intentionally sparse. It takes tremendous expertise to weld information with context in a way that doesn't feel hollow and commercial. Two books I've come across recently that do well to circumvent that problem: Sapiens by Yuval Harari and Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. In both cases, you get a sense of the author distilling a lifetime's worth of knowledge and expertise into a form that seems hopelessly condensed, and in fact provokes you into further study. That's the mark of excellent exposition in my opinion.
- CuriouslyC 9y agoThe problem of low information density isn't new. Most of the "classics" of western literature have the same problem. We're just more attuned to it now because we've been trained by internet articles to expect an idea to be introduced, explored and concluded in 1000-2000 words. Beyond that, these days many people won't even bother with that if there isn't a quick hook or a TL;DR that sucks them into reading further.
- lhuser123 9y ago> - Interrogating information for its “why” and connecting new information to related existing information are solid ways of improving understanding and retention. That reminded me the book "Make It Stick". It's something that has change the way I approach learning.
- Iv 9y agoWhen half the students say "It was just obvious stuff" it means that it was an incredibly useful and essential class for the other half. I remember talking with two students who took a class my friend was teaching at uni: it was critical thinking with several example of typical manipulation techniques, from marketing techniques to what cults use. One student told me "It was interesting but a bit obvious. Anyone knows that, no?" and the other one said "I learned a lot of interesting things about source checking."
- PaulRobinson 9y ago>> The techniques suggested are things many people are already familiar with [...] And you then list 11 concepts, 5 of which I'd never heard of before I took this course, 3 more which I had not associated with aiding learning and the remaining 3 not being sufficient to help me learn more. Your tone is unhelpful, elitist and snobby. This course is extremely useful to a lot of people - there is a reason it's popular, a reason why I recommend it to many others who seem to be struggling with studying, and a reason why this should not be the top-voted comment. I'm sorry but I find HN utterly dismal when people say things like "Oh, Einstellung, Feynman and chunking? Sure everybody knows that, right?" Go have a think about this: https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/ And next time, try and be more encouraging of others, please.
- alphapapa 9y agoNothing wrong with his comment. Yours is rude.
- cholantesh 9y agoThe original comment is condescending, and is not unusual on HN. To call that out is not rude.
- sp527 9y agoThe original comment was written hastily. I clarified what I meant in a separate comment (my mistake for not editing the original): >>> Yea didn't phrase that correctly. What I really meant was it's largely the standard stuff you come across if you spend a handful of hours browsing on the subject. But there is a convenience in having it all in one place and extra assurance in seeing it validated with actual research (Dr. Oakley is especially good at collating relevant academic papers/articles). So what I meant is that the content mostly isn't earth-shattering for anyone who has already spent a decent bit of time trying to explore learning methods independently. I made the obviously poor assumption that the HN crowd would be disproportionately interested in that sort of stuff. The course is longer than it needs to be in MY opinion. For instance, of the notes I posted, only about 10% was in bold in the native styling and that's the part I considered useful. I also noted elsewhere that the book is a better alternative. People are always welcome to disagree (and many have).
- perseusprime11 9y agoI took this course and felt the teachers were not inspiring or motivating. The classes felt boring and went too deep into theory.