If you want to write something, you have to be willing to learn something. I’m not talking about grammar or style, though learning these things are important. No, I’m talking about the subject matter you’re writing about.

In order to write well, you have to understand thoroughly. Understand well enough to express yourself casually without misunderstanding at any level. This is easier when you’re speaking because you can look for audience reaction and respond to it, but when you’re writing, what you’ve written has to stand alone, without your help. You can’t look over the shoulder of the person who is reading your piece, what you wrote is on its own.

What sort of subject matter expertise do you need? Certainly, more than the person who is reading what you’re writing. It’s fair to say that you can’t learn too much here, but practical considerations limit how much you CAN learn. Time is limited. Subject material may be limited. Subject matter may be confusing, conflicting, difficult to find, or just downright wrong. How can you tell? Let’s take a moment to consider some practical recommendations for getting what you need.

FIRST and most important for any learning experience is your own motivation. It doesn’t matter what sort of learning environment you’re in. If you’re in high school, college, a training program, or just trying to learn something that interests you, you have to realize that if you fail to learn, you are the one responsible. Teachers, mentors, instructional designers, and others don’t make you learn. They can HELP but they can’t learn for you. You need to be motivated to learn. Ask yourself:

• What’s your goal? What do you want to accomplish?

SECOND how do you learn most effectively? We all have ways we prefer to learn. Some of us are visual, you like to see charts, pictures, diagrams, or some other visual representation. Some of us are tactile, we like to touch and do. We learn best when we can actually get our hands on things. Some of us prefer to use textual modes, getting information faster from books or other written material. There are also those who learn best by using auditory modes for what we need to learn. How do you learn best? Further, no one is purely any one of those styles. The visual mode may dominate, but the tactical mode is a strong second so mixed mode learning will help you get information together faster and more effectively.

Remember the first point, you are responsible for your own learning. If you really WANT to learn, then you need to take responsibility for adapting what’s available to make best use of your modes of learning. Let’s say you’re taking an online course, you have a lot of material to read, but you’re best working in a tactile mode. If you’re really interested in learning, then find ways to actually apply what you’re reading. Get hands on in one way or another, even if it’s nothing more than taking notes.

THIRD you know the goal. You know how you work best. Do you have a plan? How are you going to get from where you are to where you want to be? What do you need to learn? How much time do you have? What resources are available to learn from? A plan doesn’t have to be written down with GANTT charts or PERT charts, but you need to think through what you need to do. It’s the PLANNING far more than the plan that makes you successful. However, to plan, you need to know where you are.

FOURTH, knowing where you are is essential to good learning. The most effective way for me personally has always been the Memory Dump. I’ll start to build a mind map, starting initially with questions about where the information is and what I already know and eventually adding in more and more details. My starting point for Learning was something like this:

I don’t usually build a dump like this with software, but instead put it in my journal, more like this:

It’s messy, informal, and probably not readable by anyone but myself. However, it’s not for anyone else. it’s to help me figure out what I know and help me develop questions that I can use in my reading to help me learn.

Ultimately, if you plan to learn anything, you’ve got to put the time and effort into it and accept responsibility for your own success. As a teacher, mentor, instructor, and trainer, I’ve often heard the old “I didn’t have the time” excuse from people who come to the end of an online course. In most cases though, time wasn’t the problem. There’s an old saying that ‘We make the time to do what we want to do.’ Lack of time is never the issue, it’s lack of motivation.

All of these things are best done as we begin to learn, when motivation is high.

UPDATE: Updated the figure of my notebook to make it more readable

Categories: Learning, The Basics
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As I’ve said several times, my journal is important to me. I think of it as an intellectual toolkit that helps me think thins through. I’m not always good about keeping it up, but I know I should.

I ran across this article about journal writing and decided that while I apply it’s basic points differently, they still are meaningful even in my context.

My journal is an important part of my work and a lasting record of my thoughts. I’ll draw in the book, do mind maps, diagrams, notes, snippets of code, design patterns, use cases, UML diagrams, or whatever. I’ll also take notes there when interviewing and notes when I’m studying a problem I’m trying to solve. I have journals that go back as far as the early 1960s. There are plenty of gaps, but I always come back to using a journal because it’s so useful to me.

• Get the Right Tools - Working in a journal needs to be about what you’re thinking and not the tools. You need tools you’ll be comfortable with. I don’t use top-of-the-line quality, but I work on good paper and with writing instruments that feel good in my hand. Currently, I’m using notebooks I picked up at an Office Max with pretty good quality paper. I splurged some years back and purchased a leather cover for my journals that the notebooks fit in nicely.
  

  Along with it, I purchased a leather pen holder which can hold 6 pens. In it, I keep a Black, Blue, Red, and Green pen (currently Pilot G2) and my pen & pencil set. I do my initial work in Black and use Blue, Red, & Green to annotate and add to the basic entry.

• Make it a Habit - I spend time writing in my journal daily. As a minimum, I try to capture major events during the day. There are days where I’m so involved in something that I completely forget the time and everything else. I’ve slipped into a Flow state and am oblivious to everything. When that happens, I’ll probably not get a journal entry that day because I usually don’t snap out until someone gets ready to turn out the lights and say it’s time for bed. I realize I’m so tired that I just can’t think and off I go. I may have a bunch of notes in my journal or my popup wiki, but they’re associated with whatever I’m working on and nothing else. I DO try to make it a habit though and put an item daily on my task list for the journal.
• Fire Your Inner Critic - Once you start putting things in, turn off your inner critic for a while. Let yourself go and just start dumping. Go free form whether you’re using a mindmap, doing a freewriting exercise, or whatever. Sometimes the best, most creative stuff comes out when the inner critic is off. There’s a time for being critical, certainly before anyone sees what you’re doing. But the journal is private and just for you. What you put there is yours alone, so open up and get it down.
• Use your Journal for Mental Food - the article actually said ‘article food’, but I use it for food for all of my mental & intellectual pursuits. It’s my notebook when I’m learning something. It’s my dumping ground when I’m trying to test what I know. It’s my source for what I’m doing whether I’m writing my blog, a program, or a proposal. My journal is my source, my playground, and the place where I keep everything I want to think about. When I’m on my laptop working like this, it’s inconvenient to write in my paper journal, so I use a popup wiki that I can add thoughts to easily to capture what I want to remember.

Journal writing on a regular basis gives you fodder for all the things you do. Right now, I’m working on a Ruby/Rails project, reviewing some material and testing things. I’m doing rough notes and diagrams in my journal, getting things out of my head. When I see my rough notes on paper, I find I can think about them better and my journal never forgets.

I’d extend the list a bit too

• Keep it or something to write on with you all the time - I always have some way to take notes with me. Even when I’m driving, I have a small portable recorder near by because sometimes I get good ideas when I can’t stop and can’t take my eyes off the road. So I speak it into my recorder. At night and whenever my journal can’t be near, I have a ‘Shirt Pocket Briefcase‘ always at hand with a small pen or pencil. I have two, one which I carry with me and another which has a pen loop on it that stays by my bed.
  

  I have specially printed cards that I keep in them which include the normal stuff on a business card. I can write a note and hand it to someone or keep it for myself. Later, I can transfer the notes to my journal and throw away the 3X5 cards.

Categories: The Basics, Tools
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Learning is a big topic and one that a lot of disagreement still exists over. Unfortunately, but the time there is general agreement, we’ll already be dead, so to get practical about it, we need to use what we know now as effectively as we can.

I wrote a piece called ‘Learning to Learn‘ that I’ve made available for download. I plan to extend this to talk about Online Learning, but this is a good place to start.

Categories: Learning, Practical Applications, Skills
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SECOND - Mindmapping - Mindmapping continues to be a major tool in my arsenal when it comes to initial work on topics or problems. I worked with several tools in the course of this project and don’t see a way to get rid of any of them.

My Journal - Mindmapping in my journal is essential to me as i start making sense of something. I can get high level information together, find links between different pieces of information, and develop my understanding.

As I read or study a piece of material, I mind map it in my journal. I normally use a two-page layout for major mind maps with lots of information and one-page for high level overviews. I also use my journal for mind dumps to get out what I know when I’m starting to read.

Mind Mapping Software - I find that there is a definite advantage at some point of shifting to software to work with the information. The point in this project where it started to make sense was just before I started writing. As I was gathering information and sorting out my sense of the situation, I used my journal to mind map informally, but as I got near to needing to put the information into a meaningful linear format, I used mindmapping software to 1) dump everything I could remember about the specific piece I was working on. I did this for each lesson. 2) I reviewed my mind dump and determined where I had holes. I indicated this by putting questions into the mind map which I wanted to answer. 3) I found answers within my research material for the questions I had on the mind map. 4) I did additional research as necessary to answer the remaining questions. Finally 5) I organized the mind map into an outline to order my thoughts for linear presentation. In some cases I would have liked to use a non-linear presentation, but the format required linear presentation for the material. It would also have taken time I was not given to translate the course into a non-linear format.

One piece of software I used extensively in this process was the freeware FreeMind. For example, this is part of a dump I did on NVIS propagation in the final stages of writing a new lesson:

I find this is a very good way to get all the information out and organized so I can get ready for the actual writing.

Categories: General Thoughts, Practical Applications, Tools
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As I finish up a major project updating some online training material, it’s time to reflect on the tools I’ve used and what they brought to the effort.

FIRST - Scrivener - This was my first major project where I used Scrivener to support the project from beginning to end. I played with it and used it for portions of other things, but this time I started with it to start the project and finished with it as well. So on reflection, was it useful or not?

I have to say that Scrivener was of major use to me during the project. I setup my research in different folders, identified and drafted the lesson units, and brought everything together easily. It’s ability to open two document windows allowed me to see what I was writing at the same time as I had a piece of research available online.

During the writing, I reorganized several times, shifting research materials and building new categories as folders in which I placed other folders. My biggest problem was keeping my references straight. If I kept the full web page as I needed to, I had to download the page first to edit and get rid of extraneous stuff in the page. If I let Scrivener bring the page it, it brought the whole page including embedded ads and such, but it kept the reference to the page straight. Eventually, I developed the habit of recording reference information as part of every research document, but it took some time to sink into my head.

… More later

Categories: General Thoughts, Practical Applications, Tools
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