This week, I stumbled upon a new blog I was not familiar with, Upside Learning Blog. In one of their articles, I found the term "unlearning." Like always, I ran to Google to see if unlearn or unlearning was an actual term (I had not been familiar with it or heard it used in a sentence before). And sure enough there it was:
As it turns out, the article mentions this a is new(ish) term that is becoming popular in the ID field. "Basically "unlearning" refers to learning what you may already know, in order to understand it better and from a different perspective."
I skimmed the rest of the article but found myself coming back to the quote above. So, my interpretation of this quote is to relearn something in order to understand it better. OK. Do I go through my Master's Program again to learn all of the ID skills and knowledge to make me a better IDer? Well, no. But I can revisit the topics I learned and find other sources in which to understand them. For example, if I learned about a theory via online lecture (video), I could spend extra time reading the text or other articles that are on the same learning theory. Or if I read something in a book, I could use online resources, articles, activities to build my knowledge from a different perspective.
In the past few weeks, I've played around with screen readers and making sure our documents ADA compliant. In testing our documents, I've found that by having the screen reader read my documents I'm able to find more mistakes and correct issues that I did not know were there. In a sense, I was unlearning about the topic at hand. I stepped back and learned about it from a different perspective and then was able to understand it better.
How do you unlearn? Have you heard this term before? Curious to see other's thoughts on this topic.
Until next week,
-h