Seeker4life

Seeker4life AKA Bruce Lande

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http://aplastic.livejournal.com/ - Link only for purposes of coordinating my efforts.

Objective:

Create a toolbox of learning tools. This user page compliments my efforts at expanding my personal knowledge base and in so doing may contribute something for others seeking to expand their personal ability to learn. If anyone actually stumbles across this page, I am seeking to further my personal education beyond what I learned in High School, College and life. Wikipeida seems to offer a great way to do this. I would certainly appreciate any guidance from others. I am particularly interested in becoming more efficient in educating myself. So as a start, I will look up education and see what insights may be provided:

The first suggestion was to reorient my objective to focus on "learning" rather than education and I like it! From Wikipedia article on learning: Learning is the acquisition and development of memories and behaviors, including skills, knowledge, understanding, values, and wisdom. It is the goal of education, and the product of experience.

And then, Learning "how to learn" is a skill, which can be taught to others, by example. Further reading and linkages then focus on "taxonomy" or "classification" which I have attempted to do in the past and actually think the overview of Wiki is a good way to approach the subject of learning. One of my personal challenges is staying focused whilst all this is going on. I go off on a tangent and forget the original objective or my mind races from thought to thought so fast I can't keep up with it. How do I correct or modify this behavior?

I also am looking for input on how to collect information, organize it, remember it, and/or retrieve it. For the record, I am attempting to stay within the guidelines of Wikipedica proper usage so if this is an inapporpirate forum, I guess someone can tell me and I will cease and desist. On the other hand, what is wrong with using this space to further my personal knowledge since it would seem that a free encyclopedia ought to allow me to expand my personal knowledge and improve my ability to learn.

I have started, stopped, restarted, given up, became charged up, set it aside, started over again more times than I can count so one of my first objectives is to develop a sustainable platform to enhance my personal life jouney. If anyone out there has suggestions, I am all ears. Conincidcentally, my 3 yr old grandson just stopped in and wanted a "toolbox" to hold his tools and I guess this page could become my personal toolbox for my learning tools?

Resources:

1) Study Guides and Strategies over 120 topics including learning, studying, classroom participation, learning with others, project management, reading, writing, test preparation and taking, research, maths, science, and webtruth in thirty languages* Explorations in Learning & Instruction: The Theory Into Practice Database

2) Learn More Now - Book - ISBN 0-471-27390-2 Wiley.com

3) 1master.xls - Specifically the Subject Workseet

Key Observations (4/26/2007 3:50 AM)

I need more FOCUSED learning and will be working on my ability to stay focused on a given subject. One of my constant issues is that I get good enough at something to "pass" and then I can't stay focused long enough to "excel". I am a "jack of all trades, master of none" - Guitar, art, woodworking, sales, consulting, etc. For example, I am leasrning bluegrass guitar, teaching myself about woodworking, drawing (slacking off a bit because I am at a typical plateau) studying world religions, and practicing yoga, writing a book on dealing with 21st century disease and "unlearning" philosophy so that I can relearn it with a very personal slant.

So a key question for me is "Is it OK to have multiple learnings threads going on at the same time? And my answer to myself is "Of course, think about when you were in High School and College - You had multiple "subjects" so it is OK to be studying multiple subjects and the challenge then is to devote an appropriate amount of time to each subject area.

I am also attempting to locate multiple journals both written and electronic to avoid the start over, redo, update syndrome.

Also have decided to keep a local copy of this effort in case something happens to this copy.

Liberal Arts

This looks like a good way to approach my education. Back when I was in a Liberal Arts college, I didn't evern really know what it was. In the United States, liberal arts colleges are still a particular kind of higher education institution that are typified by their rejection of more direct vocational education during undergraduate studies. Students at these schools typically have to take a set of general education requirements including natural science, social science, political science, history, writing or literature, mathematics, and art or music.[citation needed] Following completion of their undergraduate studies at liberal arts colleges, graduates often do obtain specialized training by going to other institutions, such as professional schools (for instance, in business, law, medicine, or theology) or graduate schools.

Science

I started out doing some investigation about what I thought of as the laws of nature loosley thinking of Murphy's Law as a way to discover them and then redirected to the Laws_of_science briefly passing through Scientific Theory and will now go back and read each of these areas in more detail.

As I continue to research Aplastic and MDS, will be investigating Molecular Biology, Biochemistry and Genetics and their interrelationships.

Physics

In modern physics, there are four fundamental interactions (forces): gravitation, electromagnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction. Their magnitude and behavior vary greatly, as described in the table below.

Chemistry

Chemistry (from Egyptian kēme (chem), meaning "earth"[1]) is the science treating matter at the atomic to macromolecular scale, the reactions, transformations and aggregations of matter, as well as accompanying energy and entropy changes during these processes. In short, chemistry studies molecules, crystals, and metal/nonmetals and is concerned with the composition and statistical properties of such structures, as well as their transformations and interactions to become materials encountered in everyday life. According to modern chemistry, the physical properties of materials are generally determined by their structure at the molecular or atomic scale, which is itself defined by interatomic electromagnetic forces, and laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics from various fields of physics. Robert Boyle (1661), Antoine Lavoisier (1787), and John Dalton (1808) can be considered the three fathers of modern chemistry,[2] while some consider the earlier chemist Geber (d. 815) to be the "father of chemistry".[3][4][5]

Literature

The Well Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer is my guide. It is an excellent resource. One of the first recommendations is to understand that reading serious literature is hard work, requires discipline and the need to learn how to study. Research Isaac Watts and Mortimer Adler. Studying literature is a great compliment to the study of history.

Religion

Hey this is getting to be fun and making some sense. Whilst I was studying science, and scientific theory I decided to check out some of the theories, one of which was the theory of evolution and that in turn caused me to check out creationism which of course led me to traducianism and then to the Portal:Christianity so I have two serious threads going right now (Science and Religion) and expect that as I get better at it I can add many more. Tonight actually started with the Study Guide and Strategies mentioned early on in this monologue.

Music

Singer Song Writers

One of my favorite pastimes is listening to and researching music. Who wrote that song? Today's discovery was Three Dog Night 's "Never been to Spain" by Hoyt Axton. Another singer songwriter at a relatively young age along with John Denver, Jim Croce, Townes Van Zandt and countless others. Seems like at least 50% of the "who wrote that songs" that I look up died at a young age. Interestingly, Hoyt also wrote Greenback Dollar which is one of my all time favorites.

History

So then I got into reading about the Decline of the Roman Empire and decided history would be a pretty good major topic. History is the study of events in time, in relation to humanity. It is divided into and encompasses many sub and ancillary fields, such as chronology, historiography, genealogy, paleography, and cliometrics. The profession in which people study it is called a historian.

Electricity

Electricity has four basic characteristics: Voltage (Pressure), Amperes (Flow), Ohms (Resistance), and Watts (Power). The flow of electrons through a circuit can (and commonly is) be compared to the flow of water through a pipe. The rate of flow of water is analogous to Amperes, Ohms to pipe diameter, water pressure to Voltage, and Watts to gallons of water. We can talk about each of these individually, and then discuss specific types of electrical circuits such as Series Circuits and Parallel Circuits.

Education and Learning

Or better stated, education and learning for their own purpose. Similar to tools, I am discovering various links that are extremely helpful in my quest but the challenge continues to be trying to stay focused while being bombarded with new thoughts. For example, I disovered this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_laws_named_after_people and am not familiar with more than a few. I could spend a lifetime trying to understand them. Each click results in more mystery. Started with Ohm's law after discussion with Jack and just can't seem to get my mind around it. Why? How do I get better at this. I vaguely remember bing in High School Physics and having the cloud come over my ability to pursue such ideas and still don't know how to lift the cloud!

Following Threads Wherever They May Lead as a Learning Style

So just as I was getting organized I starting bouncing all over but hopefully this is still in the spirit of expanding my knowledge within a given arena? I bounced from Religion, Christianity, to Constantine to the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire mostly as a result of Al Baker's comments about Constantine in Sunday's bible study. So this could be considered filling in the blanks maybe? Need to decide on whether or not this makes sense. I guess it dones because one of the purported values of Wikipedia is the ability to bounce around using internal and external links. My challenge is remembering why I was here in the first place so I end up with multiple tabs and multiple browsers open but I guess that's why they invented tabs and bookmarks and multi-tasking in the first place?

Time for a retun to bed - It's 2:00 in the AM but I will leave all my windows open for a return to learning in the morning.

Seeker4life 15:40, 19 April 2007 (UTC)