Choosing the Best Resources
Let’s switch gears from Italian Renaissance art.
Assume I want to learn philosophy and have aggregated a list of resources to assist in that endeavor.
The philosophy books I discovered on Amazon weren’t related to my main purpose for learning the subject.
This shouldn’t be an issue, however, since most of my resources were in the form of blog posts and articles on the Web.
I also discovered several philosophy courses and tutorials, and now I’m going to analyze them to determine which ones are the best.
I need not go through every single resource that I collected; I can make my choices based on what appears to be the most suitable resource.
Remember, our goal here is to both organize these resources effectively to discover the best ones, as well as reduce the cost of purchasing too many.
The lack of books simplifies our task to a great degree.
While we do have the tutorials and courses to fall back on, I’ll need to skim through Google to discover some more resources as I’m utilizing the ones I already have.
One of the philosophical elements I wanted to learn was constructing arguments.
If I perform a cursory search for resources on constructing logically valid arguments, I’ll discover some relevant articles on this subject.
Though we’re not supposed to add new resources at this point, it’s acceptable to slightly bend the rules in this regard.
You will inevitably discover new resources as you learn.
The goal here is to have a core set of resources.
I’m fairly certain that among the resources that I’ll preserve are the long list of tutorials I discovered on argumentation and philosophy.
I’ll also keep some of the articles I read through earlier.
My intuition compels me to believe that between the tutorials and articles I’ve aggregated, I have enough resources to learn philosophical argumentation thoroughly.
However, if your set of resources includes books, you’ll need to apply some additional effort to determine which ones are the best for you.
I’ll also consider contacting some friends who majored in philosophy in college, or tracking down some contemporary philosophers on Twitter.
Their advice will act as a great resource in and of itself.
Another crucial point to remember about this step is that even if you’ve taken a wide set of resources and narrowed them down to the essentials, say to just a few books, it doesn’t follow that you need to read all of them cover to cover.
It is perfectly acceptable to simply read a few chapters from these books to gain the information most relevant for you.
The entire purpose of selecting these particular resources is for you to learn a specific topic that you chose earlier, not to take in all the information you’ve gathered.
Going through every resource in its entirety is not necessarily going to help you any more than selective learning.
In fact, the former will slow you down considerably.
Time is an important consideration throughout this process, and we want to stick to the information our resources provide that’s explicitly related to the content of our modules.
Step 7: Dive In
In the following set of steps, from 7 through to step 10, we need to apply each step to every individual module in our learning plan.
Once you’ve understood these steps, apply them to every successive module until you’ve completed your learning plan.
Step 7 entails learning enough about your topic or module to then grasp it more extensively.
In layman’s terms, this means that regardless of what your module is, you need to find some basic information before attempting to learn it in further depth.
Let’s assume you want to learn argumentation in philosophy.
In this case, you’ll want to know what a premise and conclusion are along with the structure of syllogisms.
These are the basic building blocks of an argument.
Here, it is crucial not to get too specific, since we only need rudimentary information to get started.
The next step grants us more freedom in how we approach learning, since we’ll attempt to learn things on our own there.
Thus, the purpose of this step is simply to gain a basic familiarity with a particular module so that you can explore it independently in the next step.
Spend a minimal amount of time here.
The bare minimum needed to start learning about a module will suffice.
Demonstrating Step 7
To demonstrate this step, I’ll take the example of my first module in the learning plan I created for philosophy, which was to learn how to construct logically valid arguments.
My primary concern here is to cover the basic components of a sound argument.
I simply need enough information to understand what a valid argument consists of, and the different ways in which a sound argument can be structured.
Later, I can then explore these different ways and components to determine my favorite methods of arguing.
To begin with, I’ll simply search for philosophical argumentation again.
This will inevitably lead me to the tutorials I discovered earlier, some of which I’ll go through.
Within the various tutorials, I’ll try to observe the different ways in which these guides construct a valid argument and why they choose a particular method.
One common subheading is “Where Do I Start”?, which presumably prescribes the best way to start learning about argumentation—our goal in this step.
Most tutorials outline some basic concepts that anyone can grasp to learn how to argue better.
The resources we’re consulting at this stage are all completely free of cost, a factor that doesn’t affect their quality as learning guides.
As mentioned, they list some basic concepts we can familiarize ourselves with to understand what argumentation is about.
As I listen to them, I’ll make a note of the concepts that seem to be the most relevant to my module.
I’ll also scan through some of the other resources I aggregated to observe the ways they recommend starting the process of learning argumentation.
Next, I’ll contact some friends or acquaintances who are more familiar with this topic.
I’ll ask them: What methods did they learn? How best can I understand argumentation in the simplest way? My goal here is to only understand the basics of argumentation so that I’m prepared for the next step.
At this point, I’m not learning how to actually construct a valid argument.
I simply want to know what comprises a sound argument so that I can explore various methods in the next step.
Step 8: Exploration
As promised earlier, this step entails independent exploration.
In fact, step 8 is affectionately called “play around.” The primary goal here is to simply explore based on your instincts without attempting to achieve any particular purpose.
This experimentation is obviously with respect to the particular module you’re focusing on.
If your modules focus on some technology- oriented topic, then this step will perhaps be easier to complete since you simply have to play around with different software.
If it involves the use of software or programs, your main objective is to familiarize yourself with these different tools to understand the ways in which they function.
If your topic is something less tangible and more theoretical, for example history or philosophy, this is the point where you need to ponder what exactly you want to learn about and then form some hypotheses about how those concepts or processes manifest themselves, and the best way you can start learning them.
Why Play Around?
The crucial goal of this step is to stimulate our mind to start asking the right questions about our modules.
These questions will be the most important outcome of this step.
In the next step, when we actually proceed to learn about the content of our module in concrete ways, we’ll attempt to answer these questions.
Your mind is more adept at remembering information in the form of questions and answers rather than when it is simply presented with a wall of text or data.
This is why our focus in the previous step was restricted to gathering the most basic information on our modules, because we don’t want to start learning about a topic without having framed some suitably related questions.
That also makes this step critical to the larger process.
Having said that, the point is still to just “play around.” There isn’t a particular goal you need to remember while framing these questions.
The idea is to simply explore till your mind develops some questions organically about the module you’re focusing on.
