“Lifelong learning” has been elusive and difficult. You got to choose from three less than satisfactory options.
There was learning on someone else’s schedule. I tried night school after a full day of work. I went to training classes scheduled by companies. I attended full- and half-day programs offered by for-profit training companies.
A lot of training is still like that. You need to go to where the training is offered, when it is offered. Then you have to pick out the pieces that matter to you and make sure you put them into practice when you get back on the job. It’s not very efficient, especially if you only need to learn a simple task or two.
I tried teaching myself, following Isaac Watt’s advice for the improvement of my mind.
“It is of vast advantage to have the most proper books for reading recommended by a judicious friend.”
That was fulfilling and rewarding, but it wasn’t easy. Judicious friends were often helpful for simple tasks as well as major projects. But I still depended on their availability, ability, and willingness to help.
I wasn’t the only one who noticed these problems. Many pundits suggested that technology was the answer.
There was the dream of a great teaching machine that would offer individualized instruction. B. F. Skinner actually built one in the 1950’s, but the promise was always greater than the reality. And, of course, there was “educational television,” which usually meant an instructor lecturing to a camera.
Recently, though, things have gotten much better. Technology may be riding to the rescue.
If you want to learn one specific thing there are thousands of short, single-purpose instructional videos available. If you’ve got a room to paint this weekend, you can choose from several. There are amateur videos and professional pieces, usually sponsored by large firms. If one doesn’t quite do what you need, you can view another one.
The Kahn Academy offers “over 3,100 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice.” This is not the old “educational television” model. Salman Khan tries to replicate the experience of sitting next to someone who’s showing how to, for example, do an algebra problem.
If it’s a much larger subject you want to learn about, universities are stepping up to the plate. First there was MIT’s Open Courseware. More recently Sebastian Thrun and David Evans have starting offering courses on Udacity.
Check these examples out. Then think about how you can use this kind of learning to drive increased productivity and job satisfaction.
