Basic Research on the Self

Tag Archives: active learning

Learning in public

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As mentioned in the last post, what follows is something I wrote over a year ago. I decided not to publish it then because … I don’t know, I guess because the subject made me uncomfortable. It asks the question: Is it OK for me to be a complete amateur in public? The answer when I originally wrote this was no, but I might want to do it anyway. The answer now is yes, let’s get on with it.

Sitting in lecture

How students learn best

Back in 1990, a physics professor at Harvard (Eric Mazur) noticed that his students were learning “next to nothing.” After studying physics for an entire semester, their erroneous conceptions of how the physical world actually worked were firmly intact. So one day Mazur tried an experiment. After several unsuccessful attempts to clarify a concept, he suggested to the class (of 150 students) that they discuss the matter among themselves. It worked. He reports: “within three minutes, they had figured it out.” Read more

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The self-conscious blogger

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I blog therefore I amBlogging makes me uncomfortable, but it’s a discomfort that interests me. It’s not the discomfort itself I find interesting (especially my own), but the experience of being a self in a public space, the self-consciousness that engenders, and the reflection that provokes on what it’s like to be a conscious self.

When I first started blogging, I didn’t feel self-conscious. I was probably too preoccupied with identifying and pursuing my subject matter. Within the first year, however, the idea of “the self-conscious blogger” started to appear regularly in my private journal. Why am I doing this? Should I be accomplishing something? How much should I care about not accomplishing what I only vaguely perceive as my intention?

Self-consciousness is usually associated with self-presentation: How am I perceived by others? How does that make me feel? I had no interest in blogging about my personal self, i.e., my private life. By the time I’d accumulated a year’s worth of posts, however, I could see that 1) my choice of subject matter revealed my interests and 2) what my interests conveyed was an incomplete picture of how I understood myself. Read more

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Why the self?

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As I mentioned in the last post, it was my personal experience of healthism that motivated me to start a previous blog. When I now ask myself why I want to start a blog on the self, I find multiple motivations.

I decided to write a few initial posts where I talk about this. I’m admittedly not aware of all that motivates me, but I should at least be able to reveal some of the personal prejudices I bring to the subject matter. As it turned out, the idea of a “few initial posts” got a bit out of hand, and I now have 24 “introductory” posts. To help you locate what might be of interest, I’ve summarized those posts below.

Washing hands

The self-conscious blogger
Blogging makes me uncomfortable, but it’s a discomfort I find interesting. To blog – to participate in social media — is to be a self in a public space. This creates self-consciousness and stimulates reflection on self-presentation. It turns out what I needed to do to alleviate my self-conscious discomfort about blogging was to acknowledge that learning in public is the best way for me to learn new things. That doesn’t make it any more comfortable, but – I tell myself – it’s only a blog.

Learning in public
For me, writing is a way to pursue new interests and incorporate new knowledge – a type of active learning. As an ex-academic, however, am I willing to be seen learning in public — warts, insufficiencies, and all? After considerable initial hesitation, I’ve changed my mind about this. Read more

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