In the last installment, I argued that sometimes we need to
learn (gotta start easy). In a couple of Quora answers, I’ve
been building up how we do that: an overview of effective
learning techniques and a deep look at perceptual chunks and
deliberate practice. What I’m slowly working toward is a
philosophy and framework for designing learning tools. Today I
want to talk more about a core tenant of this philosophy (hinted
at in the last paragraph of my deliberate practice answer as
well as a weekly review about Shuff’s philosophy): we are
naturally good at learning within our local environment.
However, we are increasingly living in a global, disconnected,
artificial world that requires artificial environments to act
and learn effectively. Consider the example from Design vs.
learning: my concern about my friend’s choices about bottled
water was not about perceivable effects in the local
environment, but rather the effects from its manufacturing
halfway around the world. Rather than naturally learning within
a