/r/autodidact

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A sub-reddit for self-directed learning

/r/autodidact

3,560 Subscribers

7

Do you take notes of the new things you learn? And do you prefer paper notebooks, digital documents, or other methods?

I'm interested in knowing how you guys write down the new stuff you learn and if you do it digitally what tools do you use to keep everything organised ?

Personally I use notion and organise different pages on each subjects (a sort of personal wiki)

2 Comments
2024/07/19
22:01 UTC
6

Autodidacts, what do you do for a living?

Hi everyone. It's really fun and great to be an autodidact, learning things on your own without attending any formal institution. However, if you attend a formal institute, you can learn things formally, which may lead to job opportunities in the future. However, autodidacts prefer learning things on their own. So, what type of job do you do to make a living and sustain yourself?

21 Comments
2024/05/28
05:42 UTC
4

Does anyone here use text to speech software or feature as a software engineer?

I've been wanting to use it and get a software engineer gig, but I don't know how reliability I can use it.

Things that come to mind:

Should I feel okay or feel weird using text to speech (TTS)?

Can I use TTS to go through documentation of APIs? Like Docs: API Reference, Tutorials, and Integration | Twilio

I can get through tutorials and posts on sites like this just okay without relying on TTS, but I feel like I could use TTS with unfamiliar documentation of APIs. It seems like there's potential for this to make my life very easy, and effortless even, but I can't get myself to use it.

I would really appreciate help on this. Thanks.

8 Comments
2024/04/21
03:08 UTC
9

What do you do with what you've learned as an autodidact?

Do you publish? Make speeches? Nothing?

19 Comments
2024/04/19
15:22 UTC
6

Do you use books as learning resources? If you do, please try my app and give me honest feedback!

Hello, autodidacts!

I created a reading tracker app for autodidacts called Readia.

I created this app because I'm an autodidact, and I want to read more, retain what I read, and build reading habits.

Books are my primary learning resource; I want to learn from them.

This app focuses on building reading habits and helps you to remember what you read.

I believe testing effects and spaced repetition are the keys to success as autodidacts. This app supports these techniques.

You can

  • Import Kindle books and highlights with ease
  • Generate Book Quiz from notes and highlights to remember more
  • Set review schedule
  • Set reading goals and see progress.

Your feedback is invaluable to me. I'm eager to hear your thoughts, whether positive or negative. Please don't hesitate to share anything that comes to mind!

  • What features are missing?
  • Why you don't like this?
  • How should I improve?
  • What improvements or features make you use this?

[website]

Readia

2 Comments
2024/04/18
03:51 UTC
7

Looking to talk to any autodidacts, self-learners or life-long learners.

This is not a sales pitch and I’m not trying to sell you anything; just looking for honest feedback.

l'm Collin, a founder at WorldClass (https://getworldclass.app/).

We're building a personalized AI learning companion for becoming your best intellectual self. Think Duolingo but for any topic, with a way to interact with your lessons in real-time and keep track of your knowledge as it grows. 

We're looking to collect some quick feedback from anyone who fits into one or more of the following categories:

  • Learn or like learning new things and diving into various topics online 
  • Have used or are currently using any learning apps (Udemy, Nibble, Duolingo, Coursera, LinkedIn Learning)
  • Have certain learning goals whether it be to grow your career or as a hobby
  • Believe that AI and technology in general can be a great benefit for learning
  • Cares about how they spend their time online
  • Is intellectually curious in nature  

If this sounds like you, please see the short survey linked below. 

Would love to hear from you! 

SURVEY LINK

Thank you!

2 Comments
2024/04/16
18:55 UTC
15

New column The Autodidact

Quiet here lately! I happened to run across this. Enjoy.

https://open.substack.com/pub/discoursemagazine/p/the-autodidact-to-improve-society

1 Comment
2024/02/23
14:36 UTC
12

Mentoring?

Autodidacts by definition are self-taught.

Personally I think any teacher worth their salt must be a continual lifelong learner. Since one can accumulate only so many degrees or credentials, that means teachers have to become autodidacts. I also happen to think that autodidacts make the best teachers! So it goes both ways. :)

But a teacher's job, by definition, is didactic, and their students are teacher-taught, not self-taught.

Per ZeroRott's comment from a previous thread (https://www.reddit.com/r/autodidact/comments/1aik3m3/comment/kpjoqhx/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) I wanted to start a new post.

What do you think of mentoring (or coaching) as a way for autodidacts to "teach" others in such a way that students become more autodidactic?

Have you personally had any great teachers who helped you become an independent learner? What did they do specifically?

9 Comments
2024/02/09
14:30 UTC
12

what subjects/topics have you studied?

13 Comments
2024/02/07
21:32 UTC
10

Generalist or specialist?

Would you consider yourself a generalist, i.e. interested in many different subject areas? Or a specialist, with deep expertise in one or a few closely related topics or skills?

Do you think autodidactism is more closely related to one than the other?

(I can see this going either way.)

Optional further questions:

What would be the benefits of one or the other: personally, professionally, to society?

Do you think leaning towards specialization or being a generalist is more a matter of personality or more a matter of experience and education?

11 Comments
2024/02/06
16:36 UTC
17

Self learning frameworks

The question of creating a framework for self-learning that is sustainable and flexible enough to last me for years and decades on my self-learning journey has been on my mind for a long time. I was curious to know how others have approached this.

Here is what I would expect from such a "framework"

  1. Track both long and short term goals, syllabi, book lists, courses, and papers.
  2. Ability to jot down my own notes.
  3. A way to set reminders.
  4. The ability to create mindmaps to visually represent important points.
  5. A way to link disparate media that I can store in the system, and also with external resources (e.g. on the internet)
  6. Look at my overall progress at a glance, especially if I need to be away from learning for a while (weeks, months) and have to get back after that.

I currently use a mix of Notion, Trello, Google calender and sheets, Gmail for quick notes that I process later, and Miro for mindmaps, but it seems very haphazard and distributed. There is also the concern of one or more of these softwares shutting shop tomorrow (and users having to move their data elsewhere).

Perhaps wishing for a single tool to do this is asking for too much unless one were to build it themselves.

What do you use?

22 Comments
2024/02/04
09:29 UTC
27

Greatest Autodidact Challenges?

What are your greatest challenges in being an autodidact?

Just to get the ball rolling, my three greatest challenges are the following:

  1. Keeping track of all my reading (and videos, various resources) and actually coming back to ALL the things I save "for later."
  2. Not getting distracted by all the new and interesting things in the world to learn! What would it even mean to "finish" a particular study or topic, and how do you get to that finish line without wandering off to something else -- YET also keeping track of those further rabbit trails that are so appealing?
  3. How to put knowledge to "work" in the world? Whether for writing or other kinds of content creation, or a job, or teaching, or working toward a degree or certification, or something else. (See also "how do you define success?")

Does anyone relate to these three?

What other challenges do you face?

Do you have ideas for how to cope with any of these? (Feel free to start a new post.)

44 Comments
2024/02/01
15:06 UTC
10

Wikiversity - University by all for all!

There isn't a huge collection there right now, but it's also not small, and I've been contributing to this:

wikiversity.org

If there's anything you wish were there but isn't ... make it!

4 Comments
2024/01/30
02:39 UTC
8

How do you define success?

What are your goals for self-learning? How do you define success? Until you know what you're trying to achieve, it's not clear whether self-learning can substitute for formal learning in whole or in part. Or even what kind of self-learning would be most appropriate.

Are you aiming at "success in the world"? Or simply "meaningful work," whether anyone else cares or not, or would pay you? Are you preparing for the future? Do you need to earn a living or support a family now?

Your life circumstances and stage in life matter a great deal in approaching this question.

I'd love to hear what your primary goals are in pursuing self-learning, vis a vis formal education/degree -- or not, or in combination.

2 Comments
2024/01/29
17:40 UTC
4

Ray Dalio on College or Not

1 Comment
2024/01/29
17:31 UTC
10

Am I right to say most of you aren't into college or planning not to get into?

23 Comments
2024/01/26
15:17 UTC
11

What are you studying right now? Why?

5 Comments
2024/01/19
18:12 UTC
7

What's your preferred medium to teach yourself from?

Personally I'm team textbooks :)

View Poll

3 Comments
2024/01/16
00:48 UTC
38

So how are we going to resurrect this subreddit?

I don't know about you, but I would find a community dedicated to autodidactism really helpful for discussing routines, syllabi, motivation, etc. Actually, I do know about you; apparently there's at least 3,000 people who feel similar.

Unfortunately, this is the most active location online that I've found, with a whopping 5 posts in the last 2 years. Clearly though, there is a small demand, because although 3,000 isn't a lot, it's not completely insignificant either.

So what's with the lack of posts? There's heaps and heaps of things about the topic for us to discuss; honestly when I searched 'autodidact' I was expecting to see something with like 2 million members. Any ideas? Active mods with suggestions?

23 Comments
2024/01/14
06:26 UTC
44

I made a website for autodidacts

Being a autodidact, I always struggled with wanting to learn everything but not being able to
(1) find a starting point
(2) see how the things I learn are connected
(3) manage my learning (mark the concepts that I already know so I can skip them in the future) and
(4) fit my learning into my busy schedule.

So I end up building a website (https://afaik.io/) for myself and folks like me. The goal is to learn a bit of everything on daily bases for free. Here's a few things you can do with it:
(1) Atomic learning: The minimal unit is called a "brick", which takes about 10 minutes to learn. You can go to a focus learning mode by clicking "Start learning".
(2) Knowledge Management: You can mark a brick as "learned" or "interested" to keep track of your learning.
(3) See the big picture: The map shows how subjects are interconnected (see how calculus connects machine learning and physical science as a bridge!), and golden dots (bricks) are interdisciplinary ones.
(4) See knowledge connections: A bunch of bricks make a "brickset" (think about how Lego bricks make a brickset!), and if you click the map on the sidebar you can see how bricksets are connected (which shows prerequisite relationship of these knowledge). For example, the prerequisites for RNN (Recurrent Neural Networks): https://afaik.io/nebula?category=brickset&id=GbnNbw6W&mode=dagre
(5) Personalization: It sends you daily brick recommendations based on what you learned, making sure that you learn adaptively.
(6) Follow a learning path: Blueprints is a syllabus that provides you a learning path.

I hope this is a useful tool for autodidacts like me, and any suggestions and feedback are appreciated.

19 Comments
2024/01/10
15:40 UTC
3

Seeking feedback for a new educational video search tool

Hey, autodidact community!

I'm excited to share a project I've been working on. It's a free tool for educators to find engaging, curriculum-relevant educational videos easily. With over 50,000 curated videos from YouTube, the goal is to save teachers time and make lesson planning more efficient.

As a child of a hardworking high school teacher, I've seen the challenges of finding quality video content for classes. Hulahoop uses machine learning to filter videos by age, relevance, and educational value and even suggests comprehension/discussion questions.

It's still a work in progress, and your feedback is crucial to improve Hulahoop. Check it out at hulahoop.ai, and let me know your thoughts.

P.S. This is my first post here, so please be kind! Happy teaching! 🍎📚

2 Comments
2024/01/09
18:04 UTC
44

I made a list of educational YouTube channels.

The full list with a table of contents is available on GitHub.

Biology:

Physics:

Chemistry:

General Science:

Anatomy/Medicine:

Science Experiments and Building Stuff:

Math:

Electronics:

Engineering:

Computer Science:

Coding:

Space:

Lectures:

General Explanation:

Music:

Chill:

Outdoors:

Travel:

History:

Documentaries:

Workshop:

Blue Collar:

Philosophy:

Cooking:

Other:

Podcasts:

Useful Websites:

Online Learning:

9 Comments
2023/11/25
19:48 UTC
22

What are the best books on autodidacticism that don't focus on teenagers

Goodread's list on autodidacticism contains mostly books targeted for teenagers or businesses. I'm looking for a more general book on mastering autoditacticism, particularly on how to succeed in academia as an autodidact.

What are your suggestions?

8 Comments
2021/12/10
16:18 UTC
3

Book access when independent and not by robust library?

1 Comment
2021/12/10
14:02 UTC
7

Note-Taking Apps

could you please fill this survey it will help develop an App am working on it will take one min of your time?

We are a project development team. We did this study to improve the quality of note-taking applications. We need you to fill out this survey to know the needs of users. Thank you for your cooperation.‏https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/W3BXHCV

1- How will the data that people provide to you be used? Who will see it? Where will it be stored? If/when will it be deleted? Please be as specific as possible.

just we need this data to enhance our App and the personal information no one will have an access to it just the maker of the survey and it will be deleted after we have enough responses.

2-Who is conducting this survey? You can answer with your Reddit username, business name, etc. Please make sure that everyone conducting the survey is mentioned (For example, if the survey is being conducted by a group, answer the group name or mention everyone in the group).

we are a small company from Saudi Arabia we want to launch a new Application for note-taking and Flashcard.

3-How long do you estimate it will take to fill out your survey?

it needs just one minute of your time.

4-What are you hoping to accomplish by posting your survey here?

to understand what is the need of our potential users and to make a successful platform.

0 Comments
2021/11/17
10:34 UTC
17

Reading the Classics Self Study Group

I'm reading through and embarking on a self study of the classics (in five disciplines - novels, memoirs, history, drama, and science). The list I am using as a basis of my study is the one in Susan Wise Bauer's "The Well Educated Mind."

If anyone would like to join in on discussion for one or more of the books, I've set up a Good Reads discussion group. Feel free to join in!

2 Comments
2021/11/06
16:19 UTC
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