Journaling for Learning: Exploration, Experience, Memory, Capture, Creativity

Collecting and Capturing Experiences: Using our capture techniques and technologies to “look back,” rebuild, recast, deepen and create from our experiences.

This topic is very big: big in importance, big in topical interest and big in implications for how we experience our lives and even “who” we are. So we’re going to take our time and build from the ground up.

To get us started let’s take a quick look at a case that most of us run into: When we want to “look back” and capture parts of a recent experiences.

  • So, several days or weeks have gone by since your experience. Is it too late to journal about your experience? No. In fact, while it is different than more immediate methods, there are similarities and even new opportunities.

  • “Isn’t it better to record my impressions at the time?”

    Yes. There are things that you will capture about your experience at the time that you cannot recreate, in exact form, later. Here are a few. What does the place sound like? What does it smell like? What does the weather feel like? How did I feel?

    We can capture more and more sensory information with our devices and wearables. But there will always be something, some stream of information, internal or external, which we can’t capture with a device or sensor.

    Additionally, when we are having our experience our nervous system and brain are bringing all of these sensory streams, objective and subjective, internal and external, into one richly associated, ephemeral and transitory “experience.” The sum total of all our capture devices can not generate or regenerate that. (By the way, if you are thinking about this you are right now diving very deep into fascinated questions about human cognition and the human condition! That’s pretty awesome!)

    However, we can use the information that we have captured (records, journals, notes, images, recordings, our own and other people’s) to re-approach, approximate and move toward re-entering a version of our experience.

    There is another extremely interesting opportunity here. The person looking back over the records of your experience, the “Current You,” is different from the You who was present at the time. How are you different? Thousands of ways. To some degree you have now emotionally, psychologically and intellectually processed and integrated some the experience that you were having. You have internalized and in some ways been changed by the experience. You probably went on to do more things after the moments or events that you were recording. If that is the case, you now have a different context in which to place the impressions you were having at the time.

    In what ways are you different? How does this impact your interaction with your memory and new information that which to process as we work on your memory of our experience? More soon!

    

Other opportunities as we process what we have captured and collected (more soon on all of them)

  • Theming: Looking for the golden threads that wove together our experience (some “visible” to us at the time, some not!). Tagging, theming, evolving and emergent narratives.

  • Serving: building community and relationships by being a memory keeper.

  • Research: Now you may have more opportunity to follow up on things which might have stimulated your curiosity, interests or creativity at the time.

    • We are constantly creating “notes to self,” in our heads as we go move around in life. These moments of curiosity and interest, things that catch our attention, make us think, or makes us aware of something we would like to know, remember or thing more deeply about are going through our minds with surprising frequency. In times of novel and intense experience they are occurring as fast as one a minute or, at very least, serval per hour. Why don’t we remember them? Many many reasons. First, we might not think of them as “notes to self” at all – maybe they are just felt internally as “Wow”, “Cool,” or whatever we say to ourselves. Second, they can be bumped off our consciousness, our attention, by the next thing! That is the way it is supposed to work – your brain is designed to keep you immediately alive to important things that are happening now! In general, you don’t want to miss the current moment because you are busy processing one the previous ones.

  • Growing Awareness: Using our most recent experiences to be more alive to new experiences in the future! Reverse engineering prompts and aids for mindfulness, awareness, perspective-taking and self-exploration, creativity and growth.

Other topics on the way

  • Knowing What You Don't Know

    • Getting ready to listen

    • Noise Cancelation

  • Experience

    • Inside Out

    • Infinities

  • Capture

    • Recording

    • Note taking

    • Collecting

  • Learning Teams

  • Building a Learning Community

Special Enriched Learning Environments

Reading

  • How To Read Slowly

  • Collaborative Reading

Course Taking

Travel and Cross-Cultural

  • Perspective Taking: Mind Tripping

  • Journaling: Collecting Seashells

  • Focus

  • The 3 Lb Carry on

  • Getting Ready To “Listen”

  • Getting Ready to Respect

  • Getting Ready to Love

  • Getting Ready to Change

  • Tuning Out and Tuning in

  • Communicating Back