How to learn well?

This article is to share my learning from the recent book written by Prof. Daniel Willingham "Outsmart your brain"

Some useful tips I learned on how to get maximum lessons out of Lectures and trainings.

Organize the topics

Some lecturers and professors while teaching, might be providing the topics and sub-topics they are talking about. But in some cases, the lecture might be very linear for the student without any hierarchical organization of the topics & sub-topics.

Identify the keywords/ideas/Titles note them down and organize them with a hierarchy of the topics. Customize the hierarchy in the learner's preferred way like a tree or customized mind map diagrams can be created by the learner to give a whole picture of the subject and topics learned

Summarize what you have learned

After the lecture is completed it is very important to summarize what you have learned and find where it fits within the scope of the subject

Example: I am learning about a new Service in AWS. Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse product, I can connect this service as the data warehouse

Relating the topics learned to previous lectures

The next step is to recall the previous lectures and the relation between the topic learned in the previous and current lecture

Example: I am learning about a new Service in AWS. AWS Redshift Serverless. I will try to recall

Revisit the organization of the topics

Revisit the ordering & the hierarchy of topics and sub-topics at the end of each lecture. After covering several topics and covering most of the topics the subject will make sense like a Jigsaw puzzle which is almost completed with just a few pieces to be fitted in.

Role of Mind Map

Mind map of customized map diagrams can be created by the learner to give a whole picture of the subject and topics learned

Contextual understanding

Some subject needs contextual understanding about a few subjects on top of which this subject is built. Someone with knowledge of how technology has evolved historically from day 1 to the current day's latest version, has the advantage over someone who is learning a subject just by looking at the current version.

To learn new technology we don’t have to unlearn old ones, but look at the evolution of the technology and evolve our methodology to fit into the latest version before getting started. Some subjects might have a prerequisite of understanding about few concepts already before learning this.

For learning Databricks, if the learner already has a strong conceptual understanding of Big data, spark, Data lakes, RDBMS and Datawarehouse it makes it very easy to understand the Data Lakehouse framework

Without a contextual understanding of these subjects, it will be challenging to learn.

To understand cloud computing, try to understand it conceptually by looking at the real-world impact of cloud computing and how it changed businesses.

Happy Learning!