I love learning. I love being able to do something I'd never done before or to do something even better than before.

This week, I learned how to write a good set of low-level documentation using the doxygen tool, influence project decisions, test a website for accessibility, set up a digitizing tablet under Linux, sketch and edit my sketches, mindmap using a tablet, lay out a photobook, and answer some of J's old homework in French. I'm looking forward to learning even more over this long weekend!

Every time I learn or improve a skill, I like celebrating. I often write about what I learn on my blog, as it's a great way to not only share what I'm learning but also that sense of accomplishment in learning something new. Sometimes I take a moment to pat my own head, which alwas makes W- smile when he sees this. "Celebrating the little things?" he says. You bet!

Why shouldn't we celebrate these little victories? A baby's first smile, first word, and first step are all monumental milestones people celebrate. Growing up, we celebrate the first time we tie our shoes by ourselves, the first degree, the first paycheck. What if we never grew out of celebrating these milestones? What if we celebrated more?

Celebrating the little things keeps learning fun. What have you learned lately?

This reminds me of a point I've been wanting to think about for a while. =)

When people look at the way new generations or new hires immerse themselves in learning, they often think that they themselves could never do that, could never find the time to try out and learn all these different things.

If you've ever told yourself that or heard someone say that, I'd like to help you remember what it was like to be on the other side of the fence, and I'd like to remind my future self what it's like to be here.

Yes, being new means I have no bad habits to unlearn. That's part of it. But it's also true that I don't have as many good habits as you do, or even "good enough" habits that can get me through. That's one of the things that drives me to go out there and experiment. Because I don't have a "good" way of dealing with so many things, I need to try lots of different ways and see which ways work for me.

In other areas, where I've found things that work for me, I stick with them and get deeper and deeper into them. Someday, my mind might have been so shaped by the tools I've used that I won't see any need or potential beyond them, and it might be someone else's turn to explore even further.

I think that the trick, then, is to keep "breaking" things, keep stepping out of my comfort zone, so that I always feel the urge to learn something. For example, even though I've used Emacs for years, I'm always pushing it to do something new, and I'm always tinkering with other editors and other systems to see if I can steal any good ideas.

Helping other people also stops me from becoming complacent, becoming too comfortable with my current toolkit. When I'm helping people brainstorm, answering their questions, customizing systems to fit their needs, I learn more about them, the system, and myself. I learn in the process of teaching.

I'm not going to adopt every single thing that comes along, especially when I've already got something that works out quite well. (Look at how old my text editor is!) That's okay. That kind of exploration will naturally fit other people. What I can do, though, is:

• expand the breadth and depth of my tools so that I'm not just replacing interchangeable parts, but exploring new territory
• keep exploring the depths and the interconnections between different tools
• help people with as many tools as I can, especially if that takes me outside my toolkit
• borrow ideas from other tools

That's how I plan to mix being both new and experienced. =)

How do you keep yourself new?

So here are a few things that I want to learn more about, why I want to learn more about them, and how I'm currently learning about them. I'd appreciate your suggestions, and I'd love to hear about what you're learning!

Telling stories with words and images

A good story can make a point so much more effectively than charts or data can. I love listening to stories and showing people that they've learned something other people will find useful. I love collecting stories so that I can pick an appropriate story later. I love telling stories in my presentations, blog posts, and conversations, and I want to get better at it.

I want to get better at finding and telling stories because I believe it's a remarkably effective way to understand people's experiences and to communicate.

I practice telling stories with words and images by writing blog posts
and by including stories in my presentations. So far, I'm doing well,
but there's still so much more I can learn. When I grow up, I want to
be Dan Pink.

I want to get better at listening for hints of a story and bringing it out. I think I've read as much as I could about this, so it's really just a matter of getting out there and talking to people.

I want to improve my visual literacy. I often have a hard time thinking of a good image that can illustrate an abstract idea, and an even harder time finding an image that fits. I've used Creative Commons-licensed pictures from Flickr and stock photography from low-cost photo sites, and I've seen how they can make presentations much richer. I want to develop my ability to think of illustrations and either sketch them myself or find good stock photos. In order to improve that, I:

• read books about presentation design and cartooning
• flip through graphic novels and compilations of comic strips
• browse presentations on SlideShare.net
• sketch on my Nintendo DS

I think I just need to expose myself to a whole lot of images so that I can start making associations in my brain. =)

Helping new hires connect with the rest of the organization (and vice versa) through Web 2.0

Yes, that's pretty specific. =) I'm also curious about how individual employees can use social media to grow their networks and provide more value, how communities can use social media to support their activities, and how companies can incorporate social technologies into their strategies, but I'm particularly passionate about helping new hires connect. I think it'll not only make a big difference in employee retention and satisfaction, it'll also help companies get more value from what new hires know and what new hires are learning.

I want to get better at communicating the benefits and needed actions to experienced people. To practice this, I've joined a community that helps colleagues learn about Web 2.0 and use our internal tools effectively.

I want to improve my ability to show new hires the benefits and help them get started. I'm working on some materials for new hires, and I've gotten involved with our local new hire network.

Experience will help me learn a lot, and I'll also get to provide a lot of value along the way. =)

Sharing what I'm learning

I want to get better at figuring things out and sharing what I've learned. I'm practicing this by blogging and by talking to people. I can improve this in several ways:

• I can learn about more things
• I can improve my writing skills to help me write faster, clearer, and more effectively
• I can make it easier for you to find other things you might be interested in.

I want to get better at mapping what I know. If you know what I know, then you can make better use of it. I've got too many blog posts for someone to go and read all of them, but a good map of that - and a map of things I've learned but haven't written about yet - can help you find things you might find interesting.

Helping people change

The thing I enjoy about technology evangelism isn't convincing people to change, it's helping people who already want to change. I want to get better at helping people understand their options, figure out how to get started, and learn how to be more effective. I'm practicing by helping people at work and on my blog, and I'm learning more by talking to other people who have a similar urge to help others learn and grow.

Nurturing relationships over a distance

I'm here in Canada because my significant other is here and he can't move to the Philippines with me. My family and my old friends are half a world away. Being split between worlds is the biggest source of pain in my life. It's hard to stay in touch when you don't get to share as many experiences. It's hard to deal with expectations - both mine and other people's. It hurts because I don't want to go for either extreme. I don't want to give up on this wonderful relationship and focus instead on my duty to my family and my country. I don't want to focus only on this relationship and forget my roots.

I need to connect with other young first-generation folks. How do other people manage it?

I'd also like to nurture my old friendships, because I'd gotten to know some really incredible people over there. Some friends are easier to keep in touch with than others–they blog, they chat… Through them, I get to hear about other friends, too. I still need to think about how I can do this better.

I also want to learn how to nurture connections with people around the world - coworkers, acquaintances, people I've gotten to know through blogs… I currently practice that by responding to mail and by reading other people's blogs.

Learning how to nurture relationships over a distance is difficult, but I need to learn.

Being more practical

There are a lot of little things in life that I still need to learn. Driving, sewing, gardening, stuff like that. No substitute for experience - I just have to do it.

—

So those are a few of the things I'm working on learning these days. I'd love to hear your tips. How about you? What are you learning?

If you're planning to learn Japanese, I have some Japanese-related bookmarks on del.icio.us that you might find useful. =) You might also want to check out what other people have bookmarked for japanese+language.

I particularly recommend this quick and dirty guide to Japanese, Jim Breen's WWWJDIC and the example sentence search. You can download the examples file from the FTP server for totally awesome local lookup. I wrote some code in Emacs to make this easier (and to insert random taglines into my blog posts =) ).

Good luck and have fun!

I'm going to go on a bit of a rant because I feel that it's important to expose students to choices that they might not otherwise encounter on their own. I agree with Didith's main point at the end - that it's not about the tools - but my particular bone here is that university's also where students should learn to abstract general principles.

This is how I understand the educational system's _supposed_ to work: people who want to learn about specific things go to vocational schools and workshops, and people who want to learn about abstractions and things they'd never encounter on their own go to university.

We shouldn't teach Microsoft Word. We should teach writing (note: not even word processing). We shouldn't teach Microsoft Powerpoint. We should teach presentation. We shouldn't teach Microsoft Excel. We should teach data analysis.

The problems these students face go _way_ beyond the tools. You can inflict death by bullet point in OpenOffice.org Impress just as easily as you can in Microsoft Powerpoint. So why not spend valuable class time talking about the principles of the thing instead of the tools? (Oh, if I had a dime for every word someone's read off the slides...)

Here's a quote that captures what I think:

Fill them with the longing to write wonderful articles and make effective presentations! Inspire them through your examples! Help them reach out through their words! As long as students write only for their teachers and their classmates, you'll see bad prose and hear people read off slides. Show them examples, point out common mistakes and show them how they can improve, and put them in front of audiences that care about what they're interested in... If you can set them on fire, they'll _learn_ about all the nifty tricks hidden in whatever software they use - and it will be about the result, not the tool!

Note to self: I need to learn how to write really, really well. I also need to learn how to present really, really well. Then I need to figure out how to teach this while inspiring by example. I _so_ want to run a class on "Communication for Geeks", or something like that. ;)

But wait! Wasn't this supposed to be a rant about open source in education and how students should be exposed to open source alternatives?

I've written a fair bit about this in the past, but let's look at the Atenean case more closely. For the sake of argument, let's assume that there _aren't_ financial reasons to choose open source. The stereotype of the Atenean student is a middle-class or rich student who can well afford to buy legitimate versions of Microsoft Office. Truth is, quite a few people are on scholarships. Besides, most people quite happily pirate software or use whatever their computer dealer "bundled" with their computer because they just don't care about software rights or they don't think Microsoft deserves even _more_ money.

So let's ditch the financial and ethical incentives, and talk about the pedagogical one instead.

I taught for a short while, and even that short a while was enough to make me feel the pressure to cover everything in the curriculum. If a teacher's already having a hard enough time covering all the little features of one thing or another, how on earth is that teacher going to find time to explore and discuss alternatives? Won't that confuse the students and make them lose confidence?

I feel quite strongly that we should drag people out of their comfort zones every so often, particularly in university when they can mess up without losing money. I suspect that one of the best ways to check whether students can abstract the notion of, say, emphasizing text is to throw them at an unfamiliar but usable word processor like OpenOffice.org and see if they can figure out what to do. (Open source geeks can substitute "Microsoft Word" or "Emacs" as appropriate.)

I _want_ to make students feel a little bit uncomfortable. That discomfort is what drives learning in the future, where it's most important. I don't want students to stick only to what they know how to do. They should keep learning!

This belief is probably not going to make me very popular with students, most of whom would like to get through school with as little effort as possible - but we need to help them develop critical thinking and abstraction, and we need to help them figure out how to figure things out.

I think that to know one thing is to know that one thing, but to know two things is to know two things, their similarities and differences - _and_ to know that I can learn more.

It doesn't even have to be open vs closed source. It could be two closed source ways of doing things, two open ways of doing things, whatever. But it has to be sufficiently different to force the students to think about their abstractions and to expose bugs in their understandings... =)

Hey, would _you_ test a program with only one test case? ;)

On Technorati: learning, teaching, oss, opensource, communication

Random Japanese sentence: 「いいえ、ぼくです！、ぼくです！、ぼくです！」 百匹のねこ、千匹のねこ、百万匹、一億、一兆匹のねこがいいました。どのね こも自分が一番美しいとおもっていたのです。 No, I am! I am! I am! Cried hundreds and thousands and millions and billions and trillions of voices, for each cat thought itself the prettiest. [M]