How Blogging Supports Learning

We know that in order to commit knowledge to memory and to be able to recall it when needed and apply it to various contexts, we must put in effort. This effort can sometimes feel difficult, and according to the authors of "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning," if it's too easy for you to recall that information or skill, the less likely you are to retain that information or skill (Brown et.al., p. 79). In other words, easier isn't always better - despite how lovely it sounds to have everything come to you easily! 

Along with this effortful learning, there are many strategies that learners can employ to help them be more effective learners. One of them requires reflection on what you've learned. Reflection can occur in many ways. It can be a solitary practice where one simply reflects mentally on what they're learning; it can be a social practice where one reflects with a friend, partner, or colleague; it can also be a productive practice where one reflects by writing about what they have learned. This is where blogging or journaling comes in as the person is able to write about what they know, what they have yet to learn, and how they can make connections to prior knowledge and experiences. This mental effort of reflecting causes the learner to retrieve information and analyze that information (or experience!), and therefore, help them remember it better. 

As a life-long learner myself, I often find myself pausing as I'm reading something to allow time to think about what I've just read or listened to, and then to connect it to either something I already knew or to an experience that I've had in life. While this definitely takes more time and effort than simply breezing through a text, it helps ensure that I've actually read and understood it and that I will be able to recall it later when needed. I'm sure we can all relate to having read something and then getting to the end of the page and not remember a single thing that we've just read! Being deliberate with our reading and learning and allowing for reflection as we do so, can help us become more effective learners. The following is a long quote from the authors of "Make It Stick," but it essentially sums up the process of learning something:

Similarly, the process of learning something often starts out feeling disorganized and             unwieldy; the most important aspects are not always salient. Consolidation helps organize and solidify learning, and, notably, so does retrieval after a lapse of some time, because the act of retrieving a memory traces from long-term storage can both strengthen the memory traces and at the same time make them modifiable again, enabling them, for example, to    connect to more recent learning. (Brown et al., p. 74).