Is pieced learning that bad?
(Originally posted on Zhihu)
People have been discussing about pieced learning too much in the past few years. When I wrote this title down, I doubted for a second if I’m going to write a cliche already.
However, I recently read this book — “Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room” — that made me rethink about the concept everyone has been too familiar with: Knowledge. Now, let me show you what I have thought / rethought about it.
What is knowledge?
In the world of internet, knowledge is not in books, it’s not in our brains, but rather, it’s in the network itself.
If we go all the way to an ultimate origin of how people learn and obtain knowledge, it’s a pyramid shape. The “experts” define the first version of truths, and educate them downwards. With internet coming up, that pyramid is flattend. Knowledge almost overflows from tons of web links (and even gives our society a big issue of “information overload”). It’s not neccesary to store knowledge in any physical format anymore, but rather, knowledge exists within the relationships between people.
What’s wrong with books?
Books, as a traditional carrier of knowledge , has two problems:
- Books nail author’s thoughts into physical paper. If an author comes up with new or updated thoughts, although he can publish updated versions of that book with new copies, what a reader reads from a particular copy at a particular moment would never evolve.
- Books are a one-way road. Thoughts are delivered from author to reader. But it better be a two-way bridge which enables communications and thus improvements on both sides.
Knowledge doesn’t need a physical carrier
With the emerging scenario of fragmented time comes fragmented (or pieced) learning. Thoughts and fragmented knowledge from every single one of us are connected in our network with each other to form a shapeless Knowledge-Net.
Spreading knowledge from person to person has been a traditional and successful way of teaching/learning through out human history. Within that network of us, fragmented knowledge is more easily spreadable. Internet helps with that spreading even further. It breaks the barrier between different groups of people, and let people from different areas think about a same problem from different points of views. This kind of “crossover” mindset is crucial to revealing the nature of things and solving real problems, no matter what you are doing.
The mystery of structured learning
A natural way of learning should be structured internally, not externally.
Pieced Learning is actually better?
I have this habit of listening to audio books and podcasts before bed. As you probably expect, the more complicated and professional the audio is, the shorter my “fall-asleep” time is. With the fun and interesting audios, I get involved quickly and become more and more excited, even after the audio ends.
Why are the podcasts so fun to listen to? It might be because the podcasters think for me. They sort through the structure and logic to form a content that goes along listeners’ thinking path. I, as a listener, simply follow along. It’s that easy. This kind of content is what I call externally structured knowledge.
Pieced knowledge, on the other hand, doesn’t belong to a specific structure. Therefore, it requires learners to consume it such that it internally belongs to a structure/system that the learner already forms from the inside. Such a process actually encourages structured knowledge, in a proactive way.
If pieced knowledge is “better”, why am I still writing this “structured” article?
When inputting knowledge, format is not the most important thing. Like I explained above, no matter if it’s already structured knowledge from other people, or if it’s pieced knowledge that requires you to structure it, they are both beneficial for your learning. However, putting that knowledge into the right place within your already formed knowledge system is important and necessary. Therefore, when we output our own knowledge, it’s already structured internally. At this step, whether to output it as a relatively complete and structured content(by writing an article/book, for example), OR to output it as pieced content without structure, is a case-by-case choice.
