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Episode One – Season One
Welcome to the autodidactic podcast with your host, Rick Dearman.
Hello and Welcome to Episode one.
The first question you’re probably asking yourself is; What is an auto didactic? Well, it’s pretty simple an auto didactic is a self taught person, so a self learner, somebody who’s taught themselves the subject in great detail, but did it without necessarily classroom or a teacher.
Generally, autodidactics are individuals who choose the subject they want to study. They’ve chosen their studying material. They study rhythm, and the time is of their choosing, and the depth to which they study and gain knowledge is also completely up to them now.
In addition, many people who are autodidactic are also polymaths. A polymath is a person who’s knowledge spans a significant number of subjects. So this is somebody who’s learned not just maths, but violin or some scientific endeavour or language. Now many people have been polymaths or autodidactic. This list includes John Steinback, Mark Twain, David Bowie, Frank Zappa, Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln and Frank Lloyd Wright and many, many, many others.
According to a recent poll of software developers, it seems that about 69.1% of all software developers are also self taught.
Now, the role of self directed learning continues to be investigated in many learning approaches, and it’s constantly evolving. Thanks to the Internet, we have colleges and universities offering more distance learning degree programs and technology providing numerous resource is to enable people to have a self directed learning experience.
So on this show, we want to discuss ways means, methods, resources and things that will help you become autodidactic. Also, hopefully, to build a community who can share resources and also talk to each other and give tips and advice about becoming a self learner, a self directed learner.
Now how do you go about becoming an auto didactic? Well, the very first step is determine what it is you want to study and commit to active learning. Now active learning occurs when a person takes control of your learning experience. Since understanding the information that you’re given as a key aspect of learning, it’s important for self directed learners to recognize what they understand, what they do not understand and how to take corrective action.
Basically, this is a form of learner autonomy, which was a phrase coined by Henry Olek in 1981. And it’s practice quite frequently in language learning, but it’s useful far, far beyond just learning a language.
This autonomy means moving the focus from the teacher to the learner and from the teaching to the learning process. The autonomy affords maximum possible influence for the learner. So it’s the learner who’s directing what needs to come next, autonomy that encourages and yet needs peer support and cooperation. You need others to talk to, others to bounce ideas off, and to learn from. And this autonomy makes use of your own self or peer assessment.
Because you’re not gonna be given a test at the end of the semester, you’re going to have to determine how much you know and how much you’ve learned by yourself. Which means you really need to be very self aware when you’re learning and to have the ability to look at what you’re doing and understand that you don’t understand this portion. You need greater clarification or some way to work on that, and that’s just part of learning how to learn OK, but a lot of the characteristics which are generally associated with autonomous learning or autodidactic or polymaths are basic resourcefulness, initiative and persistence.
Now, the most important point here is persistence. And, like our tagline says; You don’t have to be perfect just better than yesterday. But this is because we all want to be better, and we need to strive forward and be better. But we, as human beings, have a tendency to judge ourselves a bit too harshly, right? And so 90% of being auto didactic is just showing up and doing the work. Now, over the course of the next few episodes over this season, we’re gonna talk about the various things you need in order to become autodidact.
So we’re gonna have episodes on how to gather. Resource is for various types of learning, you know? How do you get textbooks? Where do you sign up for classes? How do you get books? How do you meet peers? How do you find a tutor? Et cetera?
A lot of these resource is will be free, but a lot of them you would have to pay for. So this isn’t an exercise in teaching you how to learn for free. But it is an exercise in discovering resources for learning. We’re gonna touch on how to learn languages. I do another podcast where I talk about language learning with a fellow language learner called the Lollygagging podcast.
I run a forum for language learners, which is called forum.language-learners.org where there are almost 12,000 people who are learning various languages all around the world. And there’s loads of resource is tips, tricks and things you can do to learn languages. And we’ll cover most of the important points in those episodes, and they’re probably going to be more than one episode simply because there’s so much to cover when talking about learning languages.
In another episode, I want to talk about technology skills and how to learn them. Now, for example, I’ve learned a number of programming languages at least a dozen C, C++, PERL, Python, TCL/TK You know, just loads of various programming languages, and I’ve taught myself, all of them and you know, it doesn’t surprise me that 69.1% of all software developers. Or the majority of software developers, in any case are self taught because learning a new programming language is literally just learning the syntax of the language. Once you know how to program in either object orientated programming or linear programming, learning another language isn’t that difficult as far as programming goes.
I want to cover on episode where we talk about my time management techniques. So you know, when am I going to get time to learn all this stuff? How am I gonna chop up my time if I want to learn more than one subject? How do I cover different aspects of learning in the time I’ve got allotted? How do I steal the minutes from my day to add to my knowledge and capabilities?
And then I want to cover things like, how do I find tests to see how much I’ve learned? How do I get an evaluation? How can I do a self evaluation to discover? Well am I any good at this or not?
So those are just a few of the many topics that we’re going to cover in this season. Certainly, and I would really appreciate it if you could spend a bit of time and send me your feedback topics you would like to cover areas that you would like to explore, and I’ll try and help you as best I can to understand what it is you need to do to help progress yourself learning.
And I want to become your peer so that we share ideas with each other and with the audience as a whole. So to do that, you can feel free to email me, and then we will go on this journey forward together, getting more more information and getting better at what it is we do.
Now you’re probably asking yourself. Okay, well, what is it you’re learning at the moment? You’re that you’re the podcast host. What is it you’re learning? Well, I’ve actually got a shelf of over 17 books on mathematics ranging from fundamental mathematics to differential calculus. And I’m slowly making my way through all of those books a little bit at a time.
I’ve taught myself French and Italian, and I’m continuing to do more vocabulary work and more work with those languages, and I’m teaching myself Mandarin at the moment as well. I’m pursuing to programming languages one Rust, which is a new language and the other called Flutter, which is language used for developing applications on smartphones, tablets and televisions.
So that’s basically what I’m doing at the moment. And I’d like to review what I’m doing with you. Discuss things that I found that are working and things that I found that don’t work. Quite frequently it’s the things that don’t work that teach you how you as a person as an individual learn rather than some instruction. So as a person you need to be constantly evaluating what it is you’re doing and how you’re doing it, how you’re planning your study time, what you’re doing with that study time. What’s giving you benefit and what isn’t.
Some of the things that will look at is methods for tracking what you’re learning. So find a spreadsheet and track the number of hours that you spend on learning or track the number of modules that you’ve completed in a book. Various things that basically keep you on track and keep you on schedule, because without a plan, you’re not really going to get anywhere, and it’s okay to say; Oh, I’m going to study Mandarin for half an hour every day, but what exactly is it that you’re going to study? What materials are you going to use? And how will you know when you’re completed with that material, what the next material is going to be.
Or are you going to mix materials together? Are you going to be using a textbook, some native audio and some other form of study? So these are the sorts of things that we want to explore some of the things that we’re going to need to look into and actually get going.
So in this podcast, I really want to be as helpful and as interactive as we possibly can be. So please feel free to email me put comments on the website, and any suggestion is more than welcome.
So to sum up this obviously quite short introduction, I just like to say that I hope you join me for the entire first season. And I hope we cover the things that you want to learn that will help you become a self directed learner an autodidactic. So thank you very much for listening, and I’ll see you at the next episode.
Thank you for listening to the auto didactic podcast with your host Rick Dearman, if you enjoy this podcast, please consider giving a donation by PayPal. Thank you very much.