Internet has been around for more than 20 years. It connects people from all over the world and makes knowledge sharing easier than ever. However, it doesn’t mean all the knowledge just come to you. Over the past few years, I’ve been thinking and learning the ways to gain knowledge from the powerful Internet, and I would like to share some of the best ways with you.
Two ways of gaining knowledge
I think there are 2 ways of gaining knowledge. The first way is actively gaining knowledge by searching the Web. This is when you wants to know something and you would like to utilize the power of Internet to do that. We’ll talk about the second way, which is passively gaining knowledge from various information source. It means that you arent’ specifically looking for anything, but you want to learn new stuff from what others are sharing. I’ll list a few good ways below.
Passively gaining knowledge
Newsletters
Newsletter is a good way of obtaining new information. You subscribe to a newsletter with your email address. And then they will send you a email every week with certain content. Personally, as a computer science student, I subscribed to several programming newsletters which provide lots of interesting articles for learning concepts about programming.
RSS / Blogging Platforms
Using RSS and blogging platforms is a great way to get the latest updates from your favorite writers. Usually blogs will provide RSS feature which enables you to subscribe to it and receive any updates available. And you can also follow your favorite bloggers on blogging platforms such as Medium. By using these, you don’t have to keep browsing your favorite blogs for updates. The updates come to you instead.
Q&A Websites
By Q&A websites, I’m refering to sites like Quora and Zhihu. On these websites, people post questions and get answers to them. Usually you can select some topics you find interesting and the site will generate a stream for you including popular questions from those topics. You could also follow certain people and their answers and answers upvoted by them will appear in your stream too. There are many high-quality questions and answers on those sites and I often learn something new from those.
Podcasts
Podcast is yet another great way to gain knowledge. It’s usually available in audio format, which is different from all other sources discusses in this post. Compared to reading, listening requires much less concentration. You could listen to podcasts when you are walking, commuting, and laying on the bed. Like RSS, you could subscribe to certain podcasts and get the latest updates when available. There are many good podcasts talking about various knowledge.
Conclusion
In this blog post, I talked about several ways of gaining knowledge from the Internet. I hope that these sources will help you gain more professional knowledge in your working field.
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