A Simple Model of How Adults Learn

The diagram below should be thought of as an ongoing cycle.  Each step feeds the next.  It's true that sometimes we finish learning a particular subject and move onto learning something else.  Then the process begins anew with ingest of things different from before.  But, perhaps surprisingly to most students, mostly we don't get it all in just one cycle.  For really understanding an object of study it takes many cycles.  And then it may be that puzzles still remain.  So the particular investigation may be put aside for a while but then returned to sometime later.  

Ingest may happen in many different ways - taking photographs, interviewing subjects, listening to a performance, watching a movie, etc.  In the non-course we'll focus on ingest as reading.  We may discuss other forms of ingest as we go along, but we will definitely start with reading, longer form works that are of high quality. 

And for externalization, we'll focus on writing (of blog posts).  This is sometimes called writing to learn.  Another quite natural form of externalization, if you have a partner who is learning along with you, is to externalize via conversation.  A nice chat over coffee (when I was younger it might have been over a beer) is one of the more pleasurable things I can think of.  Learning with that much of a social element is very rewarding.  Perhaps such friendships will form for you with other non-course members.  That would be excellent.  In the meantime, you want to think of me as a reader of your blog posts.  I will react to what you say with comments of my own.  As the non-course proceeds other students might also read and comment on your posts.

The intermediate stage, referred to as reflection in the diagram, is sometimes called pre-writing when the externalization is written.  Pre-writing is time consuming.  At first, students are apt to be impatient and want to start writing immediately, with no pre-writing whatsoever.  This is almost a guaranteed way to create writer's block, which is unpleasant, but perhaps a necessary thing to experience.  My hope is that after a while, the pre-writing becomes something students want to do, an enjoyable activity for itself.