I find random learning a lot of fun. I love it when I’m presented with something to learn that I might not have otherwise sought out on my own. If you don’t engage in any conscious random learning, I encourage you to do so.
There are two ways I engage in random learning on a regular basis.
The first is Stumbleupon. This is a service that helps you discover and share great websites. You click their Stumble! icon and they deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of millions of other websurfers with interests similar to you. I also get periodic emails from Stumbleupon alerting me to web pages targeted at my own interests. It’s amazing how often I’ve found their recommendations incredibly well focused on what I enjoy learning about.
Another great random learning mechanism I use is Wikipedia’s Random Article feature. Visit Wikipedia’s Main Page and click on Random Article among the left hand navigation links. You’ll be presented with a random article from Wikipedia’s vast repository of knowledge articles.
Do you have any other ways you engage in random learning? I’d love to hear about them.
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I love spending my free time learning randomly and I can do it for hours. I often start in Wikipedia and follow links within articles to more articles and then take the new subjects to Google. I’m often criticized for having so many tabs open in my browser
I also love browsing my local public libraries. I just walk the stacks and pull books that look interesting. My newest way to learn randomly is using social news sites like Reddit.com. Reddit has a huge active community of users interested in everything you can think of. There’s a lot of fun media to get distracted with but many people also organize themselves into groups called Subreddits to share more educational resources and intellectual insight. It has been a great way to be introduced to new material while also being connected to users that are genuinely interested in discussing the material. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been grateful to have found a great article and then participate in a discussion in the comments to be exposed to a variety of insightful perspectives.
Here are some of my favorite subreddits:
http://reddit.com/r/lectures
http://reddit.com/r/truereddit
http://reddit.com/r/foodforthought
http://reddit.com/r/philosophyofscience