Knowledge of group learners grows multifold than lone learners. This is understood by many college students where group study is common. I as a student, part of a group, divided subjects among ourselves, study the reading materials, understand it, condense it and present it back to the group. In this way every one understood the crux of what is to be learnt in a short amount of time. Somewhere I read ‘the moment we get a job, we stop learning’. That is because, learning is a conscious activity and when we don’t learn together, it becomes too tough to continue learning and many just don’t learn anymore.

Majority of the books have some fluff, it is to comply with the publisher’s mandate for the thickness of the book to justify a price. It is difficult to sift through the pages and mine the wisdom we want from it. It takes time  and speed reading is not easy for a lot of people. In a group setting it is ideal to read a book, summarise the learnings and present it back to the group either as a summary or the application of the learnings. If it evokes enough curiosity, then people will make some time to read it in detail.

The above applies to videos, courses and any other learning form or material. What about the blogs, they are short, can we just forward the links? There are lots of ways in which we receive links; twitter, hacker news, reddit so on. If we merely forward the links that interests us to our groups, it has no bigger impact than people who have already subscribed to the feeds. What will be beneficial to people who receive our link would be, a short description of what it is, how did I apply (or can apply), why this would be beneficial, next steps if possible.

By making it easy for people to understand many topics in a condensed form, we improve the breadth of the knowledge of the whole group. If anyone is curious then they can deep dive for the depth in a particular subject. It is impossible to get out of date in a group that is continuously learning.

Birds that flock, seem to learn faster. They increase their chances to survive and evolve more quickly

Learning together requires effort, it won’t happen if we don’t do it consciously.