Learning

One of my favourite blogs is a terrific blog by Katleena Kortesuo. In the blog, Ei oo totta, Katleena blogs with a personal flavour about mistakes she has done. One of her missions is to learn from her failures, and helping us, the readers, to learn how not to do the same mistakes.

In her blog, Katleena tells about her own experiences, taking a moment to stop to reflect on what happened. In her reflections, she studies her actions, thoughts and tries to emphasise how the other feel on her reactions.

Reflection is one of the critical parts of learning when considering learning as something that can be explained with Kolb cycle. Writing the result of the reflection on a paper/diary, or a blog, often helps us in creating structure to our thoughts and how we perceive the issues.

The other day, I read Katleena's blog on Tietokirjat ja koulutukset eivät opeta juuri mitään - roughly translated as 'Nonfiction books and trainings teach us nearly nothing'. In the post, she describes what they (writers and trainers) could try to make learning more efficient.

On the post, Katleena mentioned few specific thoughts: training courses should have more and more action and discussion based learning. What it means for us attending to the Special Course on Software Testing? First and foremost we have made a decision to limit the scope of our workout to contain only 4 topics. Those topics will be studied by you (action), presented to the audience by you (action, presenting & listening). Then we all get into real action and try to bring the learning into concrete actions (action). And every session is closed in a closing circle - one way of having a group reflection (discussion).

And not only that, we have given opportunity for us all to have a learning journal. Either in a blog like we, or a personal learning journal. I believe, while being time-consuming and hard, keeping a journal gives us an excuse to stop and reflect on our learning journey.

And there's a chance for lot of learning on this course. You (hopefully) learn something on finding information, presenting it efficiently, cooperating with fellow students and on reflection skills with a bigger group.

All important aspects also in work life.

And my own reflection as 'Wilderness Guide'? We have this blog that I haven't used that much. I do hope that I have learned since last year. I hope that I have learned the importance of reflections.

Maybe this would be a good time to stop and reflect on my reflection skills. Or lack thereof.

I don't eat my dog food. I drink my own champagne.