Pro tips for a better learning process

Revision as of 13:17, 16 October 2012

With the advances of the Internet and computers, searching for information is easier and faster than ever, so there is absolutely no need to use the outdated method of memorization and repetition to try to learn new stuff, that is just silly, what is really important for any student is to understand how things works, try to understand it principles of function, how one thing interact with the others, how things can be used as a tool for our own benefit, and of course learn about the existence of such tools memorize them is optional.

For this topic we got a great quote from the physicist Dr. Michio kaku about the the outdated education process that most people, schools and universities use:

video source

Textual quote:

If you take a look at our educational system, you'll realize that all of us are born scientists. All of us are born wondering why does the sun shine? Where did I come from? What's out there? How big is the world anyway? All of us are born scientists until we hit the danger years. When we hit about 13, 14, 15, those are the danger years and we start to lose these young scientists left and right. So, by the time they graduate from high school, we have only a tiny, tiny fraction of the original 100% of young people who are born scientists. They drop like flies. What's wrong?

Well, many things are wrong. But among that is the way that we teach science. We teach science as a list of facts and figures to memorize and we crush, literally crush, any curiosity and spirit of innovation and imagination from young children. For example, my daughter once took the New York State Regional Exam. She took the exam in geology, and I had a chance to tutor her by looking at this manual. And I realized that the entire manual consisted mainly of memorizing the names of crystals, the names of minerals, hundreds of them, and of course, all the things that you are going to forget the day after your exam. So, it's not that our students are stupid, they can memorize these things. They are so smart. They've figured out that this material is totally useless. Our students are so smart they’ve figured out they're never going to see these things ever again. They just have to memorize it once in their life, throw away their book, and they're absolutely right. They will never, ever see these hundreds of minerals, crystals, again in their life.

With the actual technology and easy of access to fast information there is no need to use the memorization to much, use it only for few key things, you can always have access to complete manuals and documented reference about all your tools, programming languages and applications any time, for example, lets imagine you are a novice web developer who need to apply some color and background image to one of your web sites, at some point in your learning course you read something about CSS with stand for Cascading Style Sheets, this language is used to setup the visual aspects for many object in web pages, CSS have something called "selectors" and "declarations" and when you join both you will get a rule as show below.

selectors + declarations = rule

A selector as it name indicates "selects" and element in your web page to apply visual styles to it, and a declaration is actually the visual property you want to configure, you can always set more than one declaration per rule like this:

selector {declaration; declaration; declaration; ...}

In any website there is an element called "body" which as it names indicates it is the body of your website, so as you can see so far lot of stuff have clever names to help you understand what they are, in this order of ideas the CSS selector to select the body is also called "body" so to apply some color to the body of the website we need to write down this CSS rule:

body {background: blue;}

That CSS rule will turn your website's background to blue, but we also can do the same thing using this other alternatives and all of them are valid CSS

body {background: blue;}
body {background-color: blue;}
body {background: #0000FF;}
body {background-color: #0000FF;}
body {background: #0000FF;}
body {background-color: #0000FF;}
body {background: rgb(0,0,255);}
body {background-color: rgb(0,0,255);}

You may be wondering "which one should I use?", simple, use any of then that does the job or makes you happier because all of them are completely valid.

CSS are able to define visual characteristics of the elements of your website, one of the elements of any website is the body