Showing posts with label news. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news. Show all posts

Monday, July 5, 2010

Making the most of your commute through self-education

My work and travel over the past few years have made me spend a lot of time on the road: commuting to and from different jobs and classes, driving between cities to see family and friends, etc. Many Americans spend a great deal of time commuting to and from work on a daily basis, and some of the recent research on happiness (discussed in countless books such as Happiness: Lessons from a New Science and Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth) indicates that a long daily commute is one of the surest paths to a stressful and unhappy life.

Anyone who has been stuck in standstill traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway in Chicago (to give one example) will probably intuitively understand the truth behind such research findings. But many of us have no choice but to drive a great deal for work - and for home-owning commuters in many areas, the collapse in home prices in recent years has made it impractical to sell one's house to move closer to one's workplace.

But this is one area in which approaching life as a self-educator can make a person more happy and fulfilled. To the self-educator, the day-to-day "grind" of commuting, work, waiting, and errands can be at least partially transformed into a set of opportunities for learning and growth. Our daily schedules, which often seem so packed and overfilled with tasks and obligations, usually contain "hidden moments"* - or even hidden hours - that we are accustomed to wasting, but that can be put to work in the service of learning, goals, and growth.

Here are a few ways in which I have put my commute to use in the past or hope to put it to use in the future. If any of these ideas appeal to you, I encourage you to think about how you can modify it to suit your own tastes, interests, and circumstances.

-Visit your local public library and browse the audio book collection. Skip the latest bestsellers and challenge yourself with something you know will be valuable and cause you to grow and broaden your mind: a classic work of literature or a book of history, for example. Listen to these on the road. (Audio books I've listened to this year: James Joyce, Dubliners; Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft; Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged; Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers; Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam; Bob Woodward, State of Denial). Also, many libraries have some sort of interlibrary loan system that you can use to borrow audio CDs (as well as books and other materials) from libraries around your region. (See also: The case for reading good books and Self-education and language learning).

-Find out what your local NPR news station is, and listen to it. NPR has five minute news summaries every hour, and many of their daily programs offer incredibly valuable and in-depth interviews, commentaries, and features. Nothing else on the radio can compare. NPR programs regularly interview and profile people of all political persuasions, and the vast majority of NPR programming consists of informed debate and informative reporting, not opinion pieces.

-If you have an auxiliary audio jack with which you can attach an iPod, smartphone, or other mp3 player to your car stereo, download high-quality podcasts or audio files to your mp3 player and create a playlist to listen to in the car. Great podcasts with high educational value are put out by NPR, PBS, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other websites and media outlets. (Browse the iTunes Store's podcast collection here - nearly all podcasts are free.)

-Consider subscribing to audio versions of high-quality, educational magazines and newspapers. You can arrange to have these automatically downloaded to your digital audio player every morning in time for your commute. I particularly recommend the Economist, every article of which is made available each week in podcast/audio format for subscribers. Regularly reading the Economist over a period of years is, in my opinion, the single best way to gain a broad knowledge of current events around the world. And the Economist is not, its title notwithstanding, primarily a business magazine; its pages include news from around the world, in-depth special reports about a wide range of topics, business and economics news, science news, book reviews, and more.

Audible.com also offers audio subscriptions to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the U.S.'s top two newspapers.  The Times is better for in-depth investigative reporting about politics and international affairs, and its opinion pages are mostly liberal; the Journal has a business and finance focus, and its opinion pages are mostly conservative.

Read more »
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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Some RSS feeds to consider subscribing to

In my most recent post, I suggested that RSS feeds and a feed-reader such as Google Reader can be an incredibly useful tool for self-educators. But what feeds should you subscribe to?

A great little tool created by Geeky Weekly allows you to generate an HTML list of your Google Reader subscriptions. I've pasted a partial list of my subscriptions below to give you some ideas about feeds you might consider adding to your feed reader.

Obviously, many of these will be of little interest to you. Some of them, such as those that I use to practice world languages, will be utterly useless to most readers. But I decided to keep these links of little interest in the list in the hope that they might give readers an idea of the range of uses to which they can put their feed reader. If you are studying a language, subscribe to the feed of a newspaper written in that language. If you want to keep up with local news in your current community or in other places you've lived or visited, subscribe to news sources in those areas. If you are trying to work out your political views or you want to broaden your understanding of alternative ideologies, subscribe to political blogs and news sites from across the spectrum.

Education

Politics

Literature

Language

Law

News

Friends

Arts
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Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Interview: Self-Educator Race Bannon (Part 2 of 2)

What do you see as the importance of reading? Is reading necessary to self-education, or could self-educators who dislike reading substitute other media and skip reading entirely? Must we still read books? How do you decide what to read?

This is a tough one. I am such a book person that I know my answer will be biased. There is a certain linear structure to the book form that presents information in a logical, progressive way that other forms may not. With that said, I think reading, in any form, is vital to learning. Why? Because I consider words to be the foundation of all learning. Yes, the spoken form can relay information without the need to read, but my instincts tell me incorporating the read and spoken word into a self-education regimen maximizes learning.

Other media certainly has its place though. And as technology increases those options I’m sure that books will take a seat alongside, rather than in front of, other learning options. As this happens I would personally continue to recommend the value of books, but I think I will have to succumb to the notion that true learning can take place without books.

I decide what to read in lots of ways. When bookstores were more common and contained broader selections than they do today, I would spend hours roaming the aisles and scanning the books. Nowadays I often do the same thing virtually on Amazon.com. I carry a notepad with me at all times and I write down titles and authors whenever I hear of something interesting.

What role do other people play in your self-education? Do you find that conversations and other exchanges with other people can be educative, and if so, do you seek out such exchanges?

For me, knowledge without human interactivity is useless knowledge. I’m not one who believes knowledge for its own sake is the ideal. Knowledge should serve mankind. Yes, there is value in learning about something simply to satisfy one’s own curiosity, but ultimately knowledge should serve some purpose even if only on the individual level.

My conversations with people do two specific things for me. First, they expose me to new subjects, new insights, new perspectives that I might not stumble upon on my own. This often instigates the beginning of a self-education project for me. Second, once I’ve embarked on a learning path, I use people with knowledge about something to help me fill in the blanks and to place that knowledge within a real-life context.

Do you follow current events, and if so, where do you get your news? Why did you select those sources? Do you feel that it is important to follow current events and/or participate in political debate, and if so, why?

I am somewhat of a news junkie. Passive listening to mainstream news outlets, on television in particular, do little to inform me in the robust way I need to be informed. My preferred method is to read and watch on the web and I try to mix up the sources. I start every morning with a scan of these sites: sfgate.com (for my local newspaper’s online edition), cnn.com (the closest thing we have to unbiased major news media in my opinion), huffingtonpost.com (for left-leaning news and blogs), thedailybest.com (for the moderate viewpoint), techcrunch.com, cnet.com and wired.com (for technology news). I also subscribe to Google newsfeeds on various topics and the summaries of related news shows up daily in my email inbox.

I feel it’s vital to follow current events and be part of the political debate because I consider it an individual’s responsibility in a civilized society.

What books, movies, music, art, websites, or other media would you recommend to other self-educators, that is, to other people who want to make a conscious effort to learn more, discover more, and expand their minds? List as many resources as you like, but be sure to place emphasis on those you most strongly recommend.

OK, I’ll get the blatant self promotion out of the way first and suggest my blog at artofselfeducation.com. Wikipedia.com is extremely useful. My favorite website of all time is ted.com and a great education can be achieved by simply listening to the presentations streamed from that site.

I also think everyone should become skilled at doing targeted advanced searches on web search engines. Most people only tap the most basic power of search engines and if they simply learned a few tricks to narrow and focus their searches the resources they’d come up with would be dramatically superior to the standard results.

I love so many books it’s hard to recommend even a few. What I do recommend is that people adopt the approach of reading a few books well rather than just reading a lot of books. A single good book read well and with thought and introspection is of far more value than a dozen books read quickly and without deep engagement and thought.

Other thoughts and insights?

None I can think of at the moment except to thank you for doing the work you’re doing. Fostering self-education in any way does society a great service.
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