Dr. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov Sculpture photo by Flickr user dbking. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (May 21, 1921 – December 14, 1989) was an eminent Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. (wikipedia)
There is a small project that I’m working on with a friend, and since for years I’ve wanted to try Python…
I find two of the greatest assistants in learning and developing expertise in something are:
- Helping someone else (teaching).
- Using something else (compare).
Experimenting with something else helps me take the emotions and religion out of what I’m developing expertise in. It lends to a pragmatic foundation and helps be able to speak to another audience.
So while I work on this Python project, I won’t feel like I’m cheating on PHP and WordPress. Instead I’m continuing my learning about both and will be a better representative of both.
I was just thinking about this yesterday. Sometimes, the best way to learn the ins and outs of a subject is to get a fresh perspective by applying an apparently unrelated subject to it. You get to learn the new subject and rediscover the old in a new light.
So I’m trying to relate wine to new areas of study for me like the Free Culture Movement, Remodernist Film, Punk Music, and more. And I’m taking requests (so far people have asked for French Military Defeats and the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde
).
Interesting idea – also, another great way of learning something is by doing something very different: sleeping. There’s a fascinating article on this in relation to birds:
http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1507
As the article points out, there is evidence to suggest this is very important to human learning as well.
Paul
You might find this article interesting — it finds empirical evidence for learning by doing something else, and provides some theoretical rationale:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~mschilli/learning%20mgmt%20sci.pdf
-Melissa