Passive learning that works

Learning is hard. Mostly because you have to sit down and concentrate on your subject. Then you have to take notes and repeat it, while preferably do exercises and make use of it in everyday life. It turns out that there’s a better way.

In my experience, the best way to learn passively is by reading highly topical blogs. This allows you to study each day a topic in about 400 words with one single message. Depending on a blog, they have from a few posts a week to a few a day, but they’re all fairly short. Just enough to process during morning coffee or lunch break. As you continue reading them throughout a year, you’ll suddenly realize that you’ve learned a lot about the subject even though you never enrolled in a class or had to pay someone for it.

What about exercises? Since you’re interested in subject your studying (why study it otherwise?), you’ll also get plenty of opportunity to practice what these blogs teach you as they’ll often have little tasks you can do, or ask you to write your thoughts in their comments or even in a guest posts. You might not get to turn-in your term paper, but writing a good guest post or to participate in their forums might be the next best thing for thinking about subject at hand.

To get you started, here are a few good subjects and blogs on different topics:

Personal Development: Steve Pavlina, 

Frugal living and personal finances: Get Rich Slowly,  No Credit Needed

Information Design and data mining: Data Mining, 

Presentations: Presentation Zen

Usability: Adaptive Path, 

AJAX and Web 2.0 technologies: Ajaxian

Web 2.0 ecosystem: TechCrunch UK

Social Media: Chris Brogan

Running: Inside Nike Running, Complete Running Network

Healthy lifestyle: Dietriffic

Python development: The Py Side of Life

Youth Marketing: Y Pulse

So, what are the topics you’re learning about and which blogs? 🙂