"Think Outside the Search Box": 10 Starting Points for Self-Directed Learning

When I invite my students to do self-directed learning, they sometimes default to a Wikipedia or Google search, or they go to some standard notes or homework-help type sources like Shmoop.

Those are not wrong things to do, per se, but they are not the only things that can be done. So, I'd like to encourage my students to "think outside the search box."

Assuming you've selected or been assigned a specific topic about which to learn, how could you then go about doing so in an interesting way?

Here are 10 suggested starting points for autodidacts (self-directed learners):

Talk to a human being.

Not a classmate, and not just your roommate or your mother. Maybe a librarian, or a relative, or an informed friend. Ask them what they know about ______ and how they learned about it.

Example: I'm curious about Artificial Intelligence. I could look it up on Wikipedia. But instead, I contact my friend Stephen in Idaho. He mentioned taking an online course in AI and he has probably got plenty to say about it. Talked to him. WOW. Now I am scared that the singularity is near... and I'm impressed with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. 

Visit a museum.
Could be a museum. Do you even know the cultural riches only minutes away from where you live?

Example: I'm interested in the printing press as a means of communication. I looked up local museums to see if there was anything. Bingo! The Crandall Printing Museum is walking distance away from me in Provo, Utah.

Make something physical.

Cook, carve, weave, sculpt, fashion, tinker, jerry-rig -- but somehow physically engage your topic.

Example: I read about Marie Antoinette in the French Revolution and the famous quip she purportedly made that showed how out of touch she was with the commoners: "If they don't have bread, then let them eat cake!" So I look up French cake from that period (late 18th century), and find this food history blog that talks all about French cooking and breads in the 18th century. The blog refers to the famous Encyclopedia edited by Diderot from that period, and conveniently links right to the article in that resource about baking.

From the "Boulanger" (baking) article in
Denis Diderot, L'Encyclopédie 

I find out that Marie Antoinette actually said "brioche," not "cake," (brioche is a sort of cross between cake and bread, it turns out, and was often served with uppity nosh like pâté or foie gras) so I hunted for a brioche recipe from that period, and found someone who had adapted a recipe from none other than the famous French chef from that period who was actually named after Marie Antoinette, Marie Antonin Careme. Apparently Chef Careme studied under the pastry chef Sylvain Bailly at the time of the French Revolution, so his recipe is legit. So, thanks to the 19th Century Foodie blog, I got not only this historical background, but a complete recipe for brioche along with step-by-step photos!

So...time to make my own!

Now I feel closer to Marie Antoinette and her high brow elitism than ever before. And along the way I learned a LOT about how seriously the French take their baked goods. I went down the rabbit hole on that one, finding a whole treatise on bread and flour called "The Perfect Baker; or, Complete Treatise on the Making and Marketing of Breads." (My translation - it was a chance to use my French. Check out the table of contents)

This really got me thinking about how much cuisine is tied to history. The Smithsonian actually did a whole article on my topic: "When Food Changed History: The French Revolution" and it mentioned another apt resource, Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People that I am going to have to give a second look.

So, yeah, both the quest to make the bread and the making itself add up to quite a rewarding bit of self-directed learning.

Compose something.

Get creative: dance, sing, paint, or write a poem. You think differently about a topic when approaching it as the source for creative expression.

Example: While studying devotional literature of the late Renaissance period, I really took to John Donne and his very heart-felt poems called his "holy sonnets" -- often quite dark, or at least earnest. One of these begins "Batter my heart." The poet goes on to tell God to rough him up, that God being sweet and gentle isn't working, so try something stronger.  Wow! Quite an interesting approach for something apparently devotional -- telling God to beat you up.

So, I thought I'd try to imitate that same approach. What if I wrote a sonnet, like Donne, and also tried to command God? Seemed a bit blasphemous. But Donne pulled it off. This is what I ended up with:

Commanding My God

Be opulent with grace, a gaudy god.
Spread saffron calm so frothy, thickly sweet
that slumber tumbles, yawning to the beat
of surfeit certainties, celestial grog.
Inebriate the heavens with a smog
of milky ways, galactic with relief
in supernova renovation, brief
as parallax precession, twice as broad.
Do not be wholly ghost, be cosmic, grand,
thy Son a fusion furnace boiling sun.
Command these elements to prick and sting;
with blue tsunamis, baptize where I stand;
Send comet clusters down these heaving lungs.
Be subtle as dull winters slapped to Spring.

It felt odd to write a prayer-like poem filled with commands, rather than requests, but doing so connected me with that Reformation-era soul searching that was at the heart of great devotional poetry by writers like Donne or George Herbert. 

You don't have to compose something great when trying something like this. The point is not the product, but the process. Even the failure to engage or adapt some source to another medium can get you thinking seriously, and learning much, along the way.

Travel.

Make a purposeful visit to some site connected to what you are learning about. 

Example: If I am studying the role of the Catholic church in history, how about making a visit to a Catholic site? Can't make it to a great European cathedral? What about that historical Catholic church not so far from you that you've never visited? Near me, in Salt Lake City, is the Cathedral of the Madeleine. I took its online pictorial tour, and found some great pictures of it, too:

The Cathedral of the Madeleine
Salt Lake City, Utah

But these online previews merely whet the appetite. What really made Catholicism come alive for me in a new way was going to an organ concert there. Sitting there under that vast vaulted roof on a church pew, listening to the deep pipes echo over the stone -- now that made me sense, in a physical way, a kind of immersive worship that many Catholics have enjoyed in comparable buildings for centuries. You can't get that kind of learning experience online! But, it so happens, I could get it 40 minutes from my home.

Enjoy a Library Exhibit.
Oh, we do love how it's easy to access library catalogs and digital materials through these magical computing devices. But physically going to a library is a way of experiencing knowledge in a different way -- especially when special exhibits have been curated that showcase rare books or artifacts.

from the Walt Whitman /
Maynard Dixon exhibit at
BYU's Harold B. Lee Library

Today I took shelter from a rainstorm inside our university library, and my eye caught a poster referring to an exhibit related to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Since we're currently studying Romanticism in my history of civilization class, I went to take a look. It featured interesting illustrations from Maynard Dixon, an artist I admire, and so as I read familiar passages from Leaves of Grass juxtaposed against these very intriguing illustrations, it gave me a more engaging sense of the poetry in that famous book.

Librarians do a good job of pulling together relevant stuff and signaling the significance of the items you find on the walls or in the glass cases of an exhibit. I aw an exhibit about the railroad in this region, too! That one was interesting to me because it brought a general topic of US history and gave it a regional flavor: the golden spike was driven in Ogden Utah 150 years ago. So, the exhibit featured letters from Brigham Young as he proposed and later helped to manage Mormon labor for the railroad coming through.

Exhibits have the advantage of being quite accessible to a general public, well set up and curated by the library personnel, and angled to be of local interest.

Copy out Quotes by Hand.
Somehow when you use your fingers, pen, and paper you are able to grasp things -- both literally and metaphorically -- in ways that aren't as tangibly real any other way. Sure, I have my smartphone and digital notes aplenty. But I also have paper notebooks, and I copy into these thoughts and quotations that are personally meaningful to me -- like this one from Joseph Addison:

Draw.
I decided to learn to draw, having no native talent for it. My drawings are still pretty amateur, but I'm so glad that I have tried to draw. It makes me think about the world in a different way. It gives me patience in how I attend to the visible world and especially to art.  As I sat in London's National Gallery sketching this lovely painting by William Turner, hosts of people walked through, spending mere seconds at this painting. I saw and felt its dimensions and nuances because I looked, really looked at it, for that 90 minutes it took me to sketch my version of it.

Drawing a William Turner painting at London's
National Gallery.

I've also enjoyed just sketching from my imagination:

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A post shared by Gideon Burton (@gideon.o.burton) on Jun 26, 2017 at 2:41pm PDT

At one point I started to learn calligraphy, and then thought a great way of deepening my appreciation of scripture would be to copy it out by hand. This was the first installment of the prospective project:

Drawing can engage you in engaged, experiential learning if you let it.

Do Data.

Whatever subject you are studying, there is something related to it that can involve a scientific approach. So, get empirical (that means to observe, measure, and record). This can mean developing a miniature, informal experiment based on a question that you develop. Or, it could mean getting analytical, drawing conclusions from data that others have already gathered.

Journal your topic.
Ask yourself what you know about a given topic, or outline or sketch out your ideas (not those you might look up from others). Ask yourself how it could matter to you. Argue with yourself over any aspect of your topic. Spend time in reflective thought before jumping into easy online resources. Sharpen your ignorance into the best questions you can ask of yourself, others, or search engines.