Big Idea of the Week

Learning and Interests

In Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman helped us understand why and how interests, questions, and making connections were some of our most powerful weapons against stress from overwhelming non-information. His other big idea is: learning is remembering what you are interested in. No interest, no retention. Therefore, one of our most important tasks is to discover our true interests, to nurture them, and to indulge them. Furthermore, we need to protect our interests from guilt and anxiety. For Wurman, interests are not just for getting pleasure in leisure activities. In his youth, with a friend, he tested himself by traveling and exploring the world without money.  He pointed out that you could learn a lot when you have to survive. Wurman’s concept of interest is, in a broader sense, what is personally relevant for you. He said: “If you spend a considerable amount of time reading about subjects that have nothing to do with your life, but provide you with great satisfaction, try to incorporate these interests into your life or work in some way.” For people with many diverse interests, it is also worthwhile to think about how to connect them in a meaningful way.

Book review: http://yingtan.typepad.com/big_idea_of_the_week/2008/06/information-anxiety-part-2.html

Information Anxiety Part 2

The more I read Richard Saul Wurman’s books, the more I find his ideas and his life fascinating. He was trained and worked in architecture for a while. At some point, practicing architecture became too restrictive for him. When he had an idea or found something interesting that he wanted to try, he can not just go out and try because clients would have to decide what was needed. To gain his freedom to follow his own interests, he later morphed into the producer of the Access tour guides for many cities. If you search for books by Wurman, majority of them are in the Access series. He has had many roles after that and did some amazing things. When I read his books, I can’t help feeling inspired. This is a person who wrote because he wanted to find a way for himself. When he can’t find what he needed, he went ahead to create the structure, the methods, and the field for himself. 20 years ago he coined the term “information architecture” and started a new discipline. Today when I typed in “information architecture” in Google, I got about 2,280,000 results in return. His creation has universal appeal.  And that is exactly because he knew himself so well and he focused on satisfying his own urge to know. This is also a man who strived to understand and used that understanding to design a good and interesting life for himself. He said, “The most creative project that we can undertake is the design of our lives, so I set to work to redesign mine in such a way that my curiosity could manifest itself in my career. It was sort of an adaptive or re-use project.”

Another major topic of Information Anxiety is learning.

For Wurman, “learning is remembering what you are interested in.” It is as simple as indulging your interests, making lots of comparisons and connections, and transforming the information into structured knowledge so that you can remember and access that knowledge when you need it again. In this sense, guilt and anxiety are the worst enemies of learning since they kill the interests. Wurman pointed out that people had different learning styles. He listed four of them: activist, reflector, theorist, and pragmatist. Some people learn when they can touch and manipulate the material; some people learn when they have some time to reflect and collect their thoughts; some people learn when they could form concepts and theories about what they observe and take in; some other people learn only if they see how they can apply what they are exposed to. The best learning is always self-discovered, self-paced, and personally relevant, in a way that is natural to each of our individual learning styles. And the ideal school is “a self-serve, two-way cafeteria of knowledge.” Under this ideal condition, even if you don’t have prior knowledge or training and you can’t relate the new things to what you already know right away, you can always find your way by “deciding what you want to gain from it and by being comfortable with your ignorance.”

Wurman made a list of fascinating self-education imaginary courses.

·        “Learning about learning." Experience and environment could condition us to learn in a way that is not natural to us. It’s worthwhile to rediscover how we learn best. We might not be able to use our preferred learning method/style in every situation. But with this self-knowledge, we can certainly get more out of our time and effort. Also by getting familiar with many principles and techniques about learning and memory and try to use them, we can enhance or complement our natural learning method.

·        “The Question and how to ask it.” Questions are often more important than solutions in life. Questions are so intertwined with our thinking. The quality of our questions frequently determines the quality of our thinking.

·        “What do you want?” Many people only know what they don’t want. They have some unexamined wishes and dreams. They might be scared if they really get what they think they want.

·        “A day in the life.” This is a study of all the details in a day of anything that strikes your fancy. It could be a dog, a bookstore, a bus, a flower, a school teacher, etc. This helps us understand what it means to be something else and who we are and what we are in comparison.

·        What are we to ants? This could help us find different perspectives and examine how things are related to each other.

·        “Time, fast and slow. If you studied all the things that take place in a minute or a day, or a week, or a year, or a thousand years, you would have a new framework for understanding and for cataloging information.” A few weeks ago, I watched an educational video about how plants grow. Using high speed film, it was shown with the time scale I can relate to. I still remember my amazement.

·        “The five-minute circle. What could you do or see in five minutes from where you are sitting?”  Hopefully, you don’t just notice the pile of unfinished work. J

·        “The five-mile circle. What could you do, see, and understand about sociology, the fabric of schools, urban life, and systems within five miles of where you are sitting?”

·        “This is your new world. If you were king of this five-mile world, how would you run it, change it, understand it, and communicate with it?”

·        “A person course.” Would it be fascinating to pick a person you find interesting and study this person’s life in detail? The list of people that I want to study is very long. If I only get to pick three, they would be Peter Drucker, Kurt Wick, and 曾国藩. (Sorry, I have to use his Chinese name. He was one of the most influential people in

China

in the 19^th century. I am not sure he is well known in the Western world.)

·        “Hailing failing.” This is the study for things that don’t work. Failed attempt could often shed some light on the real issue and open up some new investigation routes.

·         “How to explain something so your mother could understand it.” “We assume that others can understand the same things we can.” This is not always true.  So far in my entire life, I have met only one person who grasped immediately what I attempted to say every single time, and responded in ways that often enhanced my thinking. That is Tim Callaghan at Honeywell, whose intelligence and accomplishment I greatly admire. I have to remind myself often that my mother and other people are not necessarily dumber to not get it. What I need is not to dumb down in explaining, but to provide context and to show connections between what I want to say and what I think they already know.

·        “Wait-watching.” How can we better use the time we have to wait? I never have any problem with wait. I love the wait time, especially when I am alone or with interesting people. It is the time during which I feel entitled to pursue whatever interests me without guilt and anxiety.

·        “The difference between facts and truth. Facts are only meaningful when they can be tied to ideas and related to your experience, yet they are offered in place of the truth.”  

·        “The obvious and how to hug it. In our zeal to appear educated, not only do we often forget the obvious, we avoid it. Yet it is in the realm of the obvious that most solutions lie.”  This is not easy, at least for me. The obvious often appears in the hindsight or after other people have demonstrated it.

Another important things that Wurman pointed out is: “Learning is continuous.” We shouldn’t wait till we have a big chunk of time or could afford the time and money to go back to school or take classes. If we can accept and take advantage of moments of learning, opportunities are everywhere.

Antidote to information anxiety

Do you suffer information anxiety from time to time? How big is your reading material pile that you think you should get through but you never got around? In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman prompted us to figure out the possible sources of our information anxiety. A few of them he identified are: we don’t know what information we truly want and let in too much what we feel we should absorb, we don’t know how to find what we want, we are over stimulated and we don’t have “a way station to stop and think”, and lastly we don’t have effective strategies to extract the meanings of information. Here is Wurman’s big idea.  Raw data, facts, and figures are not information. Information is not knowledge.  Knowledge can not be mass produced. It came through time-consuming thoughts in the individual minds where the value judgment was made and the irrelevant was separated out. Wurman’s antidote for information anxiety is simply: learn how to ask the right questions, determine to follow our interest paths, have confidence in our own understanding, and take the time to make connections, to relate the new information to what we already know.

Full Review: http://yingtan.typepad.com/big_idea_of_the_week/2008/06/information-anxiety-part-1.html

Information Anxiety Part 1

I thought I have finished reading Richard Saul Wurman’s book Information Anxiety last week but I kept going back. I spent hours pondering what the book really said and how I can use it. The book was first published in 1989 and it is almost 20 years old now. However, its message can’t be more relevant today.

Wurman defined the information anxiety on the book cover. He said: “Information anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand and what we think we should understand. It is the black hole between data and knowledge, and it happens when information doesn’t tell us what we want or need to know.”

Scattered around the book, Wurman identified five causes for our information anxiety.

·        The amount of information we think we should absorb is overwhelming. Even with careful selection, my reading list is still miles long. It’s impossible for anyone to know it all.

·        Overstimulation. In our lives, the transition from one activity to another is not valued. Nobody seems to have a “way station” to stop and think on a regular basis.

·        We are not clear about what information we truly need or want.

·        In the cases we do know what we want, we don’t always know how to find it.

·        Ineffective strategies and methods to extract meanings buried in a sea of noise.

We can find antidote in three categories.

·        Improve our information search skill, this is a topic of its own and this book barely touched on it.

·        Accept ignorance and limit the information we take in to the most relevant to our lives.

·        Take time and effort to understand and try to communicate in the way that promotes understanding.

The bulk of this book is devoted to understanding and communicating. Wurman told us that he was in the information understanding business.

Wurman pointed out that all information is interpretation. To be true to this spirit, here is my understanding of Wurman’s system for achieving or enhancing understanding.

“Find personal pathways.” Wurman put great emphasis on questions, interests, and connections.  

·        Questions. Right questions could help us clarify what we really want to accomplish before we pursue the “how” and “more”. They could also help us develop confidence in our own understanding by cultivating the ability to judge and evaluate both our own ideas and other people’s ideas. Moreover, they could prevent us from accepting anything without thought so that we don’t lose the power to change.

·        Interests. We can never go wrong in understanding or learning if we follow our interests. Understanding sometimes demands processing the information in multiple ways and in many rounds of reviews, strong interests will keep us at our task. The hard part is to distinguish our true interests from our obligations and guilt and be able to find a way to connect our various interests. Self-knowledge is the key to our interests. The more we know what our life’s work is and what we do now and next, and the more comfortable we feel about our self-images and what we want others to think we do, the more we can see our true interests. We can’t rely on the external reward. If we do, we “depend on someone else’s vision of success”.  We will have to “compete against our own aspiration”. The essential requirement for following the interest path is to accept our ignorance and give ourselves permission to try, even try the opposite or do things the wrong way.

·        Connections. We understand something new only when we could relate it to something we already know.  To let the ideas sink in, we need to put things in perspective. The best way to dig out all the relevant connections is to mix doing and thinking and combine reasoning and imagining. The proper management and analysis of the failures are also significant in forging connections and associations in our mind. Setbacks make us aware of the success-failure cycles and the breakpoints define the boundaries and limits.

 “Take ownership of the information.” I know I own the information if I

·        know where to find it

·        know its framework and organizing structure

·        know its background and context

·        know what it means to me

·        know where it fits in my knowledge map and how it is connected to my personal experiences

·        have simplified it and imposed some kind of order to it

 “Select the pertinent from the superfluous.” Wurman separated information in five rings, from the most relevant to the least. By evaluating our needs in these five areas, we can judge whether a particular piece of information meets our needs.

·        Internal. This is the information our bodies possess. There is probably not much I can do about it at this point.

·        Conversational. This is the information accessible to our conscious thoughts. We can talk about it, manipulate it to enhance our understanding, or explain it others. This is the  most personally relevant to us.

·        Reference. Obviously, this is what we don’t normally carry in our head. It’s sufficient if we know what it can do and where to find it.

·        News. For people like me who don’t watch TV and don’t read or listen to news much, this should really be put in the outer ring after cultural.

·        Cultural. This is something we are vaguely aware of and we are influenced by it in a subconscious way.

 “Transform data into information.” The fundamental difference between data and information is that raw data are not structured or connected to render meanings. To transform data into information, we can

·        Compare components in the data set to see whether there are any connections.

·        Organize the data in different ways to see whether they tell different stories.

·        Slice the data to help us “understand what we cannot grasp as a whole”, if the whole is too big or too complicated

 “Extract the full measure of meaning.” We need to stand higher and grant ourselves an overview to do that. Specifically, we can

·        Test/examine the information from different vantage points. Think how many ways we can interpret and misinterpret this, and whether there is “a fresh way to represent what we always see.”

·        Put the information in the context and see what surrounds it, what supports it, and what opposes it. Furthermore, try to figure out whether and how the data relate to something we already know.

 “Improve power of reception.”

·        Use personal maps to tell us where we are in relation to the information surrounding us. Background information and experiences could enrich our perception. In that sense, being aware of what we don’t know is as important as being aware of what we do.

·        Cultivate our habit and ability to take into account the context and the connections whenever we need to understand something. For example, pay attention to the orientation and location, if we want to understand an important event.  With experiences, we can detect the themes and variations of the ideas and knowledge. The more variations we can see for a particular theme, the easier it is for us to understand its meaning.

·        Be aware of and accept that ideas/theories come before our understanding of the facts. We all carry our biases and exaggerations from our selective attentions. All accounts of the facts and events are subjective.

·        Know how things are organized and classified.

·        Recognize what is understandable and what is there due to pure aesthetic seduction. Nurture the ability to differentiate between methods and results and know how the methods could shape the results.

·        Increase our knowledge of the language and learn how to use it appropriately.

·        Model conversation. The major advantage of the conversational model is the shared control of idea flow. We can “adjust directions, emphasis, and level of details.”

“Find the appropriate organizing principles for different subjects.” Wurman said there were only five basic ways of organizing information

·        Time. If we want to observe the change over time.

·        Location. If we want to compare things from different places

·        Category. If everything in the collection is of equal importance.

·        Alphabet. If we have a large body of information and the audience across the whole spectrum could not easily understand other means of classification.

·        Continuum. If in the collection, the order of importance is different for different parts, numbers or units in continuum is the way to go.

Depth and breadth in learning

The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin is a deeply moving book. Waitzkin is the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fisher. He holds many national and world championship titles in both chess and martial arts. This book is his reflection on his own learning process across the two fields. He discussed why pursuing excellence, not the fame and glory, is rewarding and worthwhile. He also talked about his learning theory, his vision of how to achieve mastery in any disciplines, and the mental and emotional side of the learning process. Here is Josh Waitzkin’s big idea. In pursuing excellence, “depth beats breadth any day of the week.” When we understand the ideas and the principles deeply and practice each technique until we feel its essence, the ideas/principles/techniques become internalized and put away in our mental files as interconnected chunks. This kind of chunked information is accessible to our unconscious mind. And this is the foundation of the intuition. With deep presence, masters can zoom in with great precision with their conscious mind while maintain a sharp awareness of the surrounding with their unconscious mind. That is usually when a leap of understanding or creative solution surfaces.

Full review: http://yingtan.typepad.com/big_idea_of_the_week/2008/03/the-art-of-lear.html

Learning by doing

In The Reflective Practitioner, Donald A. Schön identified reflection-in-action as the core of professional competency. In the following book “Educating the Reflective Practitioner”, his big idea is: Professional competency, the kind that is needed to solve problems with uncertainties, uniqueness, and with conflicting values, can not be passed on through classroom teaching. The way to acquire the skill is through “learning by doing”, with the help of competent coaches, plus exposure and immersion. In a good coaching relationship, it is essential that both the coach and the student strive to make the learning process describable and discussable. Schön called it reciprocal reflection. The students need to nurture the ability to voice their confusions, to describe explicitly what they already know, and what they have made of the coach’s help. The coach needs to reflect on his own instructions, demonstrations, questions, and criticism, together with what he hears from the student, to make sure that he pays attention to all three important areas of coaching: dealing with the real performance problem of a design-like task, addressing the specific needs and difficulties of a particular student, and building a productive relationship with the student that makes learning possible and effective.

Full review: http://yingtan.typepad.com/big_idea_of_the_week/2008/03/educating-the-r.html