The art of “learning in-between” (2. time)
In this piece of “learning in-between,” we will look at different concepts of “time” and their relationship to learning, and more specifically to our own personal, subjective learning. Time is culturally dependent and the different usage of it is significant and substantial, however, for the purpose of “learning in-between” we will refer only to its application for learning as this series is focusing on what learning has become in this century. Elvin Toffler’s quote from Future Shock which was published more than 50 years ago (in 1970) stating that “by instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education”, is so powerful that he rephrased it thirty years later at the threshold of the 21st century to this iconic sentence: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.” Time plays an important role in our ability to learn, unlearn and relearn, and actually, that is what the majority of us are doing on a daily basis, we just need to play it right and also to play the right things… elaboration is following.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides multiple definitions of time, let’s look at those which shed light on our “in-between” times, the moments we are out of our regular and fixed daily responsibilities. The first definition that caught my mind was “…a nonspatial continuum that is measured in terms of events which succeed one another from past through present to future.” This understanding of time is both dynamic and meaningful as it includes practical content, things that are important to a person or a group of people who are the actors in these events. Also the reference to the future “…past through present to future” demonstrates its continuum, in our case “learning in-between” which is a continuous process in time, continuous events separated by time in an iterative spiral of past-present-future. Another definition of Merriam-Webster summarizes the above discussion bluntly, “…the measured or measurable period during which an action, process, or condition exists or continues”. Time is associated with action in space (our next piece) so we should now go deeper to elaborate on the nature of these events in time, events that are defined by action but all have unique characteristics that actually bring different meanings to the role of time in “learning in-between”. Time is also contextual and usually define the framework or the outline of action, for example, time is over, it’s time to go, we are ahead of time, it is just a matter of time, having a wonderful time, in no time, maybe some other time, one at a time, run out of time, don’t waste your time, a race against time, any time… and we can go on and on. Normally when we use these phrases of “time” in our daily language, we are not really fully aware of the meaning or the consequences of what we are saying and why should we. We cannot constantly be aware of every moment of our daily existence. Nevertheless, there are some moments during the day that we ought to be aware of, and we can utilize technology for that, not just as a reminder or notification for a to-do list, or for taking medicine, or to go to eat… there are some moments (which as mentioned before are associated with space) that we can spare for learning, these are short in time (bite-size) and unique in occasion, i.e. the point or period when something occurs. Let me be more direct. If we engage in learning a skill, or more likely one component of a skill we must be aware in order to place the learning of the components in the past through the present to future iterations. Let’s have a practical example: we engage in learning about types of problems which is one component needed to be understood in the journey to acquire the whole skill of problem-solving. It would be far more effective if we get a short, 2–3 minutes introduction in the morning (could be a short video clip), take the acquired knowledge with us as we start our day; receive a reminder sometime during the morning for another 3–4 minutes of a gamified system to play with types of problems; and accept a task in the afternoon to look and find different types of problems and document them, using the mobile device camera for example (here again time is connected with space), spending 5–6 minutes of our time at the most. We were involved, during the day, three times in this example in bite-sized learning, in a process of continuous learning utilizing the time in a rather new way which is more effective to internalize and absorb just one component of a whole concept and begin the process of constructing or building the knowledge in our brain (to simplify the description). This process of learning is supported by the Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory which “…suggests that the brain uses a ’neocortical’ and a ’hippocampal’ learning system to achieve complex behavior. These two systems are complementary in that the ’neocortical’ system relies on slow learning of distributed representations while the ’hippocampal’ system relies on fast learning of pattern-separated representations. Both of these systems project to the striatum, which is a key neural structure in the brain’s implementation of Reinforcement Learning (RL).” Relying on this theory, I will argue that by the end of the day, before bedtime, a 2–3 minutes of a recap of our three short-time slices of “learning in-between” would complement what the theory calls reinforcement learning.
Albert Einstein said that “the only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” We need time and we need to use it in the past through present to future “in-between”.
Next week we will add the concept of space and continue the journey of “Learning in-between” one more step forward.
