As I have already made clear in my last two postings, the kind of education I am preoccupied with at the moment is my own, in the arcane art of blog "management". I have just spent the afternoon copying everything associated with this blog into my not-for-public-consumption fake blog where I can try out all the little tweaks and polishings that will eventually occur here. Later I can make this fake blog the basis of my Culture Blog. I of course live in terror of having done damage to this real blog, and if I have, grovelling apologies. In theory I was only copying from this. But in such an exercise one is only one click from catastrophe, or so it seems.

The good news is that I can feel my knowledge of this stuff starting seriously to grow.

When it comes to matters computerised, I don't have the willpower to learn things by sitting down and learning them, as if for an exam. Not unless I actually am taking an exam, and so far I have managed to avoid any computer skills exams. From time to time I do sit down and try to "learn" a programme, in an abstract, useless sort of way, with a view later to being able to do things with it, but this never works. The only way I actually learn is by doing a real job with the programme, but very slowly and with lots of mistakes and backtrackings.

I think I know why, and it has to do with the absurdly huge number of things that computers are able to do. Because of this, you want to be sure that the tiny trickle of things you do learn are things that you are actually going to be able to use. If you merely try to "learn a programme", you risk wasting huge amounts of time learning how to do several dozen completely useless things. But if you are hacking your way through a computer task which you actually want done, there is a definite chance that what you end up learning will also end up being stuff you actually wanted to learn.

One other point. When you learn in this learning-by-doing way, you seldom do things from scratch. Usually what you are doing is modifying something, rather than creating it from nothing. That way, by contemplating what you are mucking about with and by watching what it does, and then what it does when you change it, you learn how you might one day create one of these things all by yourself, from nothing.

At the risk of changing the subject too radically for comfort, I recall reading an article – in the BBC Music Magazine I think it was – about the contrast between two kinds of musician, the classicals and the popsters. The classicals learned their art by mastering abstract but at first musically empty skills, and then gradually assembling what they had learned into real music-making. The popsters, on the other hand, started out by simply copying their heroes, and just as soon as they could thrash their way through a real piece of music, even if they were only faking it, then by golly they did. The gist of the piece was that the classicals were mostly a joyless bunch of time-servers, while the popsters actually got to enjoy their lives. The classicals ended up "knowing more", but the popsters hung on to their love of music. (Although I'm sure the money difference made a difference too.)

There are many morals in among the above, but I'll leave you people to tease them out for yourselves. I'm back to my blog-managing.

Which I am enjoying very much.