Priscilla Xu

Reading time: 7 minutes.

I thought learning in school was so boring. I hate to sit in class and try to stay awake when the professor spoon-feeds information. I feel like regurgitating on a test after studying for hours. After the test, I forget everything when I walk out of the testing room. However, I remembered one SAT word – abandoned because my soul was dry.

Traditional Method of Learning

Before the internet, access to pieces of knowledge comes at expensive costs. People need to access the authorities in colleges to learn. The old public education system is outdated because it developed when ability and books were rare. Distribution of knowledge was a very high cost, and people like to learn in private. I learned in a secluded environment.

Since the pandemic hit, I have had so much alone time. My only friends were my feeling and thoughts. Sitting in peace with them is a highly frustrating activity. So I was forced to find methods to distract myself.

The New Version of Learning

I turned to the internet for a distraction. The internet age shaped the new definition of “public education.” In Oxford’s learner dictionary, the second definition of “public education” is

the process of giving the public information or training about a particular subject

Oxford’s learner dictionary

Whether we want to realize it or not, humans are already cyborgs. We have an online persona on social media. We can reach anyone we want at our fingertips with a text or video conference. These functions with the internet are already beyond human’s physical abilities. So I have decided to make a commitment to building in public. The process is a new way to learn and take the distribution level of knowledge to the next level. Next is why it works.

Why building and learning in public the fastest?

The generation effect.

Do you feel you only know what you create? The phenomenon is called the generation effect. Scientists investigated this phenomenon by instructing participants to generate words from word fragments cues and explained the term as

a robust memory phenomenon in which actively producing material during encoding improves later memory performance.

The Generation Effect: Activating Broad Neural Circuits During Memory Encoding

Although the generation effect is so powerful, scientists have not found out why the generation effect works. However, the generation effect could still lose some of its powers without sleep-memory-dependent solid consolidation.

I WAS TERRIFIED when I started doing Youtube (2020 May) and website (2021 December). But, finally, I overcame the perfectionism trap that kept me from starting. After a year and a half, I have learned more about myself and the world from the process.

The upside of Constructing in Public

Traditional education sets me the foundation of accurate judgment. If I had no schooling and learned everything on the internet, it would be extraordinarily convoluted and unnecessary. This era is a merge between traditional education and building in public.

Public Commitment

My friends sometimes ask me, “Why are you able to be self-motivated?”. The answer is a public commitment — making a community agreement for sending out a piece of work at a particular time of the week. The power of social contracts and punishments is unbelievable. However, public commitment is also like a muscle. The strength of it increases as I produce more content out there. It becomes a positive feedback loop where the more I create, the more I want to develop and learn.

Build Mental Clarity

Learning how to think is problematic. It requires the diligent practice of testifying your opinions, considering the disagreeing party’s response, filtering through unnecessary information, and connecting ideas. Yet, I cannot see any of those thinking processes.

From creating a video to writing articles online, I can be frank with myself and realize that I still have many holes in my pieces of knowledge. I am not powerful enough to monitor all the crazy information bouncing around in my brain’s chemical soup. A better method is to externalize the thinking by writing notes and articles.

As I write, I often find myself researching and learning more profound. But, unfortunately, the easiest person to fool is me. Therefore, I must start from not to fool her.

The Dunning Kruger Effect

The famous Dunning Krugger effect is

a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge 

Britannica

In simpler terms, the more I do not know, the more I do not know. As I started my journey of practicing/learning/building in public, the more I learned, the more I did not know. The thirst for knowledge began to snowball.

Become the scientist of yourself.

I am at the age where I am still discovering my identity. The imagination of making fashion content on Youtube came from the experience and feelings I received after publishing fifty videos.

I have tried fashion, traveling, screenwriting, learning how to learn, and knowledge working in public.

From other people’s eyes, they might view waiting time and not sticking to one commitment. However, I live life like a scientist. Therefore, I try, fail, reflect, and change.

I have built a beginner’s mind and the courage to be disliked.

The Costs of Learning in public

You might want to build your online utopia until now. But, no matter how much of a magical cure it seems, there are always downsides. And I want to be honest with you and share my insights.

Abundance of choices

There are infinite domains of pieces of knowledge out there. For example, there are thirty different subfields within the field of neuroscience. The vast number of disciplines could lead a beginner to choice paralysis.

I constantly fall into the rabbit hole of never being satisfied with what I know already, but being on explore mode and learning on the go will not be sustainable. It will lead to burnout. So I have to be mindful and know why I am learning a new thing.

Internet misinformation

Information accuracy has been a rising problem with the booming amount of data on the internet. As a result, it can be difficult to identify sources to learn and extract your ideas. Exercising sound judgment and mental clarity are the antidote to misinformation. 

What are some red flags to spot misinformation? 

• Make sure the science paper is peer-reviewed
• The author’s educational background are unclear
• The sources cited are unclear
• Scientific terms and claims that have possible logical flaws

Methods to apply generation effect.

Learning from Projects

Once I started to create things on the internet, I began to see the world in an eye of a producer. So I ask questions such as “How does the creator’s life experiences develop into his or her style the creator’s inspirations?”.

As the old sayings go, “You are the combination of your five closest friends,” the same thing can happen with projects and “meeting” people on the internet.

• Your thinking patterns are the combination of the current five projects.
• Your edge of knowledge combines the top five creators that you follow.

The best way to learn is to absorb yourself in the intellectual giants’ environment. I’ll give you a few examples.

• If you want to learn about fashion, read about the brand histories of Chanel or Louis Vuitton. And ask yourself what you can do differently from the original designer if you were them? Then, create a video essay or write an article on your thought experiment.
• If you want to learn how to code, start a mini project that uses coding.

Finally, publish your work online.

How can building in public be applied to studying in high school or college?

You might feel that college and building in the online public are entirely separate things. I had the same thoughts before. The question of how I can make school enjoyable when I cannot change the antique system has been on the top of my mind for two years. Here are some actionable tips you can do right away.

1. Draw a flow chart, mindmap, or diagram. The brain’s visual cortex is evolutionary, much older than the text processing parts. The goal of a mindmap is to condense the information to recall the lead when we need it.

• Use arrows to show the flow of information
• Draw diagrams on how to represent bits of knowledge presented to you in words.
• Group and similar chunk report.

2. Teach an imaginary student. If someone has no ideas in your field of studies, how can you explain it to them? Then, as you formulate your words when you talk, you can observe your knowledge gaps in the field.

3. When your group study or meet someone who does not know about your studies, explain concepts to each other. This tip is an extension of the previous one. For example, when teaching an imaginary friend, you might tailor the explanation to the friend because you know their level of understanding of your field of studies. The second one will be even harder because you need to use analogies from daily life to explain concepts.

4. You built your knowledge playground with zettlekasten. These are knowledge management skills. As you learn more from basic science and move towards clinical sciences, it will be highly beneficial to tailor a library of information for yourself when you need it. It feels like I have a personal assistant with all the information I need at my fingertips.

Time to start.

I regained my passion from learning online, which fueled back into school. I began to take responsibility for my learning instead of blaming the professor. I decided to teach myself.

Building in public can feel overwhelming at first, but once you find what clicks with your heart. You will want to keep going. Don’t live a life with regret. If you have done it, you will never have to imagine what it is like for you to do it.