Reflective Learning

Many higher education institutions promote the concept of reflective learning analyzing what you're learning introspectively and retrospectively, deciding what's gone well and what hasn't, and planning changes to favor the good parts over the bad. Bearing in mind what we've seen in this chapter – that there are manifold sources of information and that different people learn well from different media, reflective learning is a good way to sort through all of this information and decide what works for you.

This is far from being a novel idea. In his book The Psychology of Computer Programming—http://www.geraldmweinberg.com/Site/Home.html, Gerald M. Weinberg describes how some programmers will learn well from lectures, some from books, and some from audio recordings. Some will—as we saw when discussing the Kolb cycle—want to start out with experimentation, whereas others will want to start with the theory. As he tells us to try...