Intro
Learning technical concepts on your own is very different from how they were taught to you in school. I’ve experienced this with CS and software as most of it is self-taught… However, there’s no one, right way of doing it. So I’ll be exploring different methods from different sources.
Marina Wyss’ Method
She recommends a method based on her experiences working in AI & ML and how she often learns complex concepts for work. Using a 5 step methodology. I think it’s more of a 5 phase general workflow than concrete steps to pursue.
Prime The Topic
Read and/or watch overviews of the topic to get a general sense. Don’t worry about details for now.
Ready Your Environment
Remove distractions such as your phone, social media, games, etc.
Multiple Modalities
She recommends studying from different sources, not just in content but also medium. And I agree, often when researching a topic or learning something, I’d watch some YouTube videos, read articles and papers, check out a tutorial, try practical hands on guide and examples, etc.
The diversity helps reveal information that one source might glance over, while also helping your brain recognize and cement concepts. It also prevents you from getting bored, by cycling through the sources per topic.
Integration
Throughout the previous steps you’ve likely made notes, jotted down questions, outlined clarifications, and more. This is the time to bring it all together into one document/location.
This step is crucial, not only for organizational purposes but because it gauges how well you understand the topic and its concepts and how they all fit together. While consolidating your notes you’ll see connections that you might’ve missed the first time around. I’ve been doing this for a while now. It’s why I started with Obsidian in the first place.
Fetch and Retrieve
The good old closed-book info dump. Get some paper or flash cards and just start writing everything you know about the topic, try to maintain a clear line of thought and write things in a logical order.
When you hit a dead end, take note of it and backtrack, then continue. When you’re done, take the notes of the things you got stuck on and review them to enforce understanding.
Scheduling and Repetition
One time sessions aren’t enough, you need to recall concept frequently. An interesting method that Marina recommends is scheduling recall sessions that increase in intervals. For example, on the first review day spend 30 min, next time spend 35 min, then 40 min, etc. // There's a limit to the increases, of course... By scheduling them and repeating the process your brain begins to commit the information into LongTermMemory.