Inspiration Through Information

The art of skimming is a too often denigrated skill. When I encourage people to skim a book, long article or any other type of reading, I am often met with stares of disbelief that I would encourage skimming over what must surely be important material. Well, I am most definitely encouraging skimming.

Skimming is not only a generally useful skill, but I think a vital one for good self-educators. Since I think skimming nonfiction books is a particularly useful form of skimming, let’s use the example of skimming a book about a subject you want to learn. Yes, of course you might want to read the book in its entirety, and in many cases I would encourage that, but there is tremendous utility in skimming a book first to lay a foundation. Especially if you are new to the subject area you are studying.

When you carefully skim a book, you are constructing for yourself a basic, foundational schema of the subject matter – a mental map of sorts. If it is a subject area entirely new to you, this mental map will help to organize your learning. It will help you identify high-level topic areas on which to focus your learning. It can serve as a simple introduction to the subject at the same time.

You might read the book’s introduction, then skim each chapter’s headings and sub-headings, perhaps reading the first sentence of each sentence below a heading to add a bit more depth to the overall architecture of the subject. Taking a few simple notes during this skimming process can produce a great outline that will guide your learning going forward. How can you proceed to learn something if you have not a clue what it is you are supposed to be learning in the first place. Skimming and the subsequent optional outlining gives you the foundation and structure to guide your learning in the right direction.

If you already know something about a subject, skimming still has a use. Skimming new material can augment your already existing mental map of the subject or create new mental connections between ideas, concepts and facts. It is by creating new mental connections between all that you learn that your knowledge and skill become most useful and also more likely to stick with you longer.

In his article Continue Your Own Learning and Development Jason Womack mentioned what is essentially a skimming technique for nonfiction books. He suggests three quick steps in the process. First, read the table of contents, glossary and index to familiarize yourself with the main topics in the book. Second, read titles, subtitles and any text that’s bolded or otherwise emphasized. Finally, read the first sentence of every paragraph to delve a bit deeper into the content. Womack claims that with this technique you can read the average business book, for example, in about an hour. He also wisely suggests that if you find something particularly interesting in your quick scan, go ahead and read more of that section. (Note: Fewer books today have glossaries and indexes, although you will likely still find them in books such as academic textbooks or other scholarly books.)

Womack’s advice is a classic example of a skimming methodology and a pretty good one that will serve any self-educator well if applied to their learning.

So foster your skimming skills. No, you are not wasting time when you skim. In fact, you are likely speeding up your learning by providing yourself with a much needed structure upon which to base your learning efforts.

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A lot of research points to the fact that people learn best when more than one sensory input is utilized. The more types of inputs, the better the learning. For example, if you take one group of people and teach them by telling them (so they utilize their hearing), take another group and teach them by showing them (so they utilize their sight), and take another group and teach by using both means (hearing and sight), the third group that was taught using both senses will always learn better than the groups who receive the information through just one sense. If you can throw in yet one more sense, let’s say the sense of touch, learning increases even more.

So what does this mean for the self-educator? When you’re trying to learn something, see if you can engage more than one of your senses in the process. This will improve the effectiveness of your learning. Sight, hearing, touch and, perhaps less often, smell should be combined to make the learning experience as robust as possible.

Also, people learn better from words and pictures than from words alone. So try to access visual images to support your learning along with any reading you’re doing. When images and words are presented simultaneously rather than successively the learning is improved. So as you read and reference images consider going back and forth between them to have each support the other in the learning process.

When you are trying to use various senses as you learn, remember also that research shows that vision (sight) trumps all other senses when it comes to learning. The more visual you can make what you’re learning, the better the learning that takes place. As an example, if information is presented to people verbally, they will remember about 10 percent of what they were told. However, if you add in an illustrative picture to accompany the verbal information, the people will remember about 65 percent. That’s an amazing difference. So leverage visual images as much as you can when learning.

The incredibly effective nature of visual images is also why I consider image creation literacy to be an important part of the communication skill set needed today. It’s not just important to be able to communicate well with the written and spoken word, but to also have the skills to create at least basic visuals and images to illustrate what it is you are trying to communicate. And the drawings or images you create don’t need to be complex. Research has shown that simple or rough images are quite good at communicating information, and are sometimes superior to more complex or lifelike images that can distract from the learning.

So along with honing your writing and speaking skills, consider learning some basic graphic design, videography and other visual imagery development skills as well. It will serve you very well in life if you have these skills.

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Research shows that those people we consider highly knowledgeable in their fields (experts, although I usually hesitate to use that word) do much more than simply retain and regurgitate the facts and formulas that pertain to their domain of expertise. They instead hang these facts and formulas on the big picture or big ideas.

Experts organize their knowledge around core concepts represented by high-level themes, big picture concepts or generalized big ideas. They don’t start with the details. They start with key concepts and ideas and in a hierarchical manner form the details around the larger concepts and ideas.

Use this same approach when learning something. Try to grasp the major concepts in an area of study. Don’t try to focus too much on the intricate details of a subject area right away. Be content at first to understand the primary concepts and only after these are understood satisfactorily should you attempt to learn the deeper and more complex specifics.

Think of the big ideas and concepts as the “outline” of the subject area. Only once the top level headings of an outline are in place should you further expand upon the outline with more specific details.

So what do you do if you have no idea where to start? What if you’re not even sure how to begin identifying the big, overarching ideas and concepts that pertain to a certain area of knowledge. I find introductory textbooks to be an excellent starting point. I’m not necessarily a big fan of our formal educational system relying so heavily on textbooks, but they do serve an extremely useful function, if well researched and written, of presenting to the reader some of the big ideas and concepts from which to start your self-education efforts. And the reading or deep scanning of a good introductory textbook is likely to give you a pretty good foundation for the rest of your study.

You can also find course syllabi online and they can serve the same purpose as a textbook in helping you identify the big picture items from which your self-study will emanate.

As Kio Starks says in her book, Don’t Go Back To School: A Handbook for Learning Anything:

“For linear learning, school use to be the only place to get access to a map that charted a tried and true path to learning a particular subject. These maps, such as syllabi and textbooks, were scarce, restricted resources. But school is now far from the only place to find thes kinds of maps. Open courseware, experimental learning platforms, and the generosity of individual teachers in sharing their work mean that school isn’t the only place to find a well traveled path anymore. They’re widely available without paying tuition. Good old fashioned textbooks can be found cheaply and easily online.”

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Educational institutions, companies and organizations often create online learning portals to act as entryways into learning resources and opportunities for their students or employees. Search for “learning portal” using your favorite search engine to see some examples. You can create your own learning portal using just your browser.

No matter what type of browser you use, they all share the common feature of allowing you to bookmark a web page and to categorize those bookmarks. You can leverage this capability to create your own learning and reference portal.

Online learning destinations tend to fall into a few general categories. By categorizing your bookmarked web pages under appropriate category names, you can emulate the links you would find in a typical learning portal, and this one will be tailored to your specific needs.

The trick is to decide upon the right categories. Here are some suggestions, but you should use these only as a starting point. Your learning portal should be individualized and relevant to what you want to learn, how you learn, and your areas of interest.

You might create these categories under a single browser category of My Learning Portal.

• General Reference
• Libraries
• Professional Organizations
• Tutorials
• Blogs
• Videos

Within each of these categories you might break it down into sub-categories related to specific subject areas. One alternative categorization strategy could be to use subject matter and topic categories as the first level of categorization rather than these higher level categories. Do what works for you. Ultimately, how you organize your links is up to you. Only you know best what organization makes sense.

Keep your links and their categorization current. Over time it’s easy to get lazy about organizing your bookmarked pages and that will significantly reduce the usefulness of your learning portal. If well maintained, your personalized learning portal can serve as your pathway to ongoing learning for the rest of your life.

Here’s a great site that learning guru Marcia Conner suggested to me as inspiration regarding the power of a well-organized link collection. Chuck Green’s field of expertise is specifically design, but you can clearly see how such a link collection could prove valuable for a self-educator.

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Sometimes it only takes a few words with some great accompanying visuals to get a message across extremely well. Here is just such a case that asks quite appropriately exactly what is going on with America’s increasingly dysfunctional higher education system.

Based on recent history, my country does not really respect education. Outrageous student debt. Often predatory for-profit schools motivated more by profit than the actual education. Not nearly enough of our nation’s budget dedicated to quality education for all. So I agree with the post, WTF is wrong with my country. We can do better.

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