Practice-driven learning

Some idea I had, after a podcast's episode from a German podcasting guys.

First, you need to get your hands dirty by just using what you are trying to learn, without any theory lessons. After you got some experience, take some lessons, and you have a more profound understanding of the theory with practical experience.

It sounds stupid and a waste of time. But this is how I learned since I can remember. Pure theory isn't helping, typically, for me. Furthermore, theory with practical examples is not working best. It is working while you are doing it, but I forget a lot of stuff this way when I don't practice the learned much.

My typical way of learning something new is to face the problem, trying to solve it with my general knowledge. I learn the hard way how something works and read afterward how it actually should be or how it was intended to be.

For example, as I learned python, I came with my PHP+JavaScript knowledge and tried to pull this knowledge over to python. With force. Finally, it was stupid, in my PHP (XAMPP and ready-to-go hosted server) and JavaScript (Browser) world, you just put a file via FTP somewhere and it worked magically. In python, you need to start a server with WSGI support. This was new for me at the time. This is something I will always remember because, unaware of it, I did practice-driven learning. :D

I hope this makes sense for anyone.


43 of #100DaysToOffload

#log

Thoughts? Discuss...