There are 4 basic types of learners: hearing(or auditory), visual, kinesthetic & tactual. Hearing learners learn by listening to others, visual learners learn by reading text or using images, kinesthetic learner learn by doing things, and tactual learners learn by thinking & planning.
It's not that easy to find out what type of learning style works for you. And indeed, can take time to get a firm answer. As for me, I'm a mix of all four, eventhough I'm ground up a tactual learner. Meaning that I have to "take action' just to learn something new rather than reading out of eHow.com or listening to an expert on Youtube. For example, I thought that I could just learn how to fly a remote control airplane by reading online, but I proved wrong, and crashed my toy RC plane so many times the motor started to ween down and be too weak to push the poor airplane. And mind you, that was over 5 years ago and I grounded myself. Then recently, I got the opportunity to learn from an expert instructor who set up a "buddy box" system for me(basically his radio is connected to mine so he can take control anytime). Now I fly like a master, even though getting my house back in shape after the flood is chewing up my freetime.
I managed to respect myself as a kinesthetic learner, learning by action & experience. Another example is from video games. The RC flight sim has honed my RC flying skills over time. At the moment, I'm well addicted to Worms Armageddon, and the idea is simple: earth worms shooting each other. But there's a lot of strategy involved in playing this game because you control a WHOLE team of worms. And you can't just shoot a pistol at any location, you have to watch enemy worms, use different weapons for different scenarios, and of course, planning!
When I checked out the training section in the game for the first time(after ignoring it for a while), my first practice mission was to throw grenades at three targets within one minute. If the time ran out, I would fail and have to start the stage all over again. After 2-3 go's, I passed the first stage. Then, I decided to take a break and played the single player part. And to my amazement, I found it easier to bust other worms with grenades! Something I couldn't do so well before!
So okay, that was just a video game. But how about reality? Seconds after I defeated the other worm team badly, I heard basketball bounces outside my house, my dad was playing basketball as usual. I went out to join. I stood quite well 20 feet away from the net and swooshed it. As the ball traveled according to it's trajectory, I was instantly reminded of the Worms game, when I was practicing with the grenades & targets. Basketball was the exact same thing. Practice and fail until your get it! But I knew that I had dropped my bombshell when I went out to play basket that afternoon: my learning techniques in the game can be used for real!
The method I used may not work for everyone. If it does, good. If it doesn't, there's a whole bunch of ways to improve one's learning abilities. It took many years to properly find a usable learning method for myself and that is that I have to "do something" to learn something!
So, how do YOU learn? Do you learn the same way I do?
No comments:
Post a Comment