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Do Meta-Learning?
What strategy do 98% of us apply when seeing a word that is Greek to us?
Ignore it or try to dope it out.
Meta-Learning has something to do with learning, but what exactly?
It is one-step higher than ordinary learning and means Learning-About-Learning.
How vital to your career is being your own teacher (autodidact)?
Meta (mee-ta) is from Latin meaning after, along-with, and beyond.
Meta-Learning was coined by John Biggs University of Hong Kong, 1985 to show how we can take control of our own learning.
The answer to your question – who cares? – is we live in the Knowledge Economy.
That means like it or not – you will be involved in learning new information throughout your life. You taught yourself how to use the computer, surf-the-web,
use a cell phone, and how to burn disks. You can even get your bucks out of an ATM. You are already an autodidactic (self-taught) learner.
Are you aware the average college graduate will have five career (not job)
changes in their working life? Think you should own the skill of meta-learning
also called meta-cognition and self-regulation to survive and thrive in our Information-Culture?
Clues
Ever be in the mood NOT to learn and had it forced down your throat?
School of course, and how about a mandatory company meeting?
Who is in charge of your mental attitude, state-of-mind and emotional intelligence?
No one can make you learn, it is a conscious-emotional decision every time.
The first secret is motivation. Don’t you consciously ask yourself what-is-in-it-for-me before you give your brain permission to offer up the feelings leading to learning
and memory. All conscious learning requires the involvement of your power hormone and pleasure neurotransmitter. Adrenaline drives learning and dopamine
rewards us for the behavior.
Without an emotional surge and a reward path, your brain stays dormant.
Second clue is interactivity. If you just listen or read without following a path of questions you will take away 20% of the key ideas available. To retrieve the other
80% you must listen or reading searching for the details of Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? We call it NoteFisting and it is a learning strategy.
Do know the two secrets of memory? This knowledge is critical because learning is 50% understanding (comprehension) and 50% encoding and decoding for long term memory.
Can you consciously construct mental visualizations in your mind’s eye?
It is part of your brain structure and how your mind functions. Try it now.
Imagine a elephant with zebra stripes and the name Dumbo painted across her
wide forehead. Easy, right?
The other essence of memory is called Association (linking). It enables us to link new information we choose to remember with elements of filed-away old knowledge.
We code new knowledge and link it with what we already have filed away.
Your brain thinks using mental pictures and codes new information by linking it to
what you already comprehend. Use your instinctive curiosity to discover the specifics of how to develop this skill.
Third clue is never reading or listening without a Pacer in your hand. How you direct your eyes decides how much your brain retrieves from the lecture or written
page. It has a fancy name – Vestibulo Ocular Reflex call it VOR.
Most of us cannot repair a car engine yet we can drive anywhere. VOR is not the key, using the Pacer is. Learn about using a Pacer and you can read-and-remember three books, articles and reports compared to your peers who can hardly finish one.
Motivation
Is this new knowledge valuable and useful to you, your career or significant others in your life? Does it engage me in something greater and beyond myself and my personal needs?
Religious folks learn and can easily retrieve whole sections of the Bible. Moslem children are expected to memorize the entire Koran. Many do and without Mensa IQs. It is all about personal motivation including fear, guilt, and a need to please
others in their society. What motivates you?
Negative Motivations
Emotions create behavior. Thinking and Action are inseparable. If you are worrying about paying the mortgage, believing the new information is irrelevant, imagining yourself swimming at the beach, feeling the sunshine and hearing the waves break, you are distracted.
These emotions destroy your focus; take your mind out of the Flow and Zone. If you are attempting to learn while the fear of failure fills your mind (SATs) you are distracted by negative mental movies. Distracts cause you to lose the ability to link new ideas to your filed ones in long-term memory.
Emotions
When we distance ourselves from what we are listening to or reading, our learning brain shuts down. Have you ever noticed yourself rereading the same paragraph
once-twice-three times and you still are not comprehending?
Profound Fact: the average college graduate will regress up to twenty-times per page of text? Ten would be bad enough but because of distractions, not using a
Pacer, and not being interactive with the text, we will re-read sentences and
even whole pages up to twenty-times. Talk about snailing.
Endwords
Master learners pay attention, have focus (awareness) and use their volition
(will power) to stay targeted when they are in a knowledge mode. The average
student and executive (life has continuity) will choose Instant Gratification over
a greater reward based on Delayed Gratification.
Muta-learning suggests pre-planning of new ideas. Directed Attention, Selective Attention (key ideas), Self-Monitoring and Self-Evaluation are required.
There are specific strategies and skills to being a killer learner. It is not just for
school but for a lifetime of success of internalizing knowledge.
We suggest you begin with speed learning to 3x your reading skills and
2x your memory. Let your intuition lead you to fulfill your dreams.
See ya,
copyright © 2006
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