Know your knowledge

I love learning new stuff. About me, about the world around me, about things that support my career and hobbies, about what makes people tick. I’m the sort that would read a chunky document for that one snippet of something. I will Google how to do things. I will ask others how they did that.

I am currently trying to lose some weight, not that its working but that’s more to do with my commitment than anything else, so I invested in Noom. The app that uses psychology to support weight loss. It takes you through a raft of new skills learning and understanding your own responses to food. I have finished all the modules and now its taking me through development of a self experiment in order to determine factors that will support and sustain my weight loss. This morning’s “lesson” was all about knowledge.

There are different types of knowledge that we all experience from time to time:

1. A priori – things we just know that don’t require life experience to be considered true, like 2+2=4. No one argues about it. Its just true.
2. A posteriori – experiential knowledge gained through some basic level of understanding, like we know the earth orbits the sun.
3. Explicit – that knowledge gained through learning, reading around a subject.
4. Tacit – the stuff that you just know, like all the lyrics to ABBA or Queen songs that seemed to be hardwired at birth.
5. Propositional – the knowledge of facts that can be declared as statement, like the sun is larger than the earth.
6. Non- propositional – procedural knowledge that can be explained and used, like knowing how to walk.

We probably experience all of those methods virtually every day.

I remember a talk at a #bellringing event demonstrating the different ways people learn. The speaker had brought in his kayak and used people of different ages to demonstrate the different ways.

He used C as the older learner where he just verbally explained what to do and C got on with it (auditory). Then he used someone in their 20s and showed them what to do (visual). Then he used R, who must have been about 10 or so, and he demonstrated, then sat with her and did it together (kinesthetic).

I think I am a mix of all three. I can take verbal instruction, so long as its not overly complex, I can watch something then copy it as I have done many times recreating cakes. And I learn through working together through a problem. I guess it depends on what the problem is.

What type of knowledge have you learned from and what type of learner are you?