Author: barboakley

Barbara Oakley, PhD, PE is a Professor of Engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan; Michigan’s Distinguished Professor of the Year; and Coursera’s inaugural “Innovation Instructor.” Her work focuses on the complex relationship between neuroscience and social behavior. Dr. Oakley’s research has been described as “revolutionary” in the Wall Street Journal. She is a New York Times best-selling author who has published in outlets as varied as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. She has won numerous teaching awards, including the American Society of Engineering Education’s Chester F. Carlson Award for technical innovation in engineering education and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers William E. Sayle II Award for Achievement in Education. Together with Terrence Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute, she co-teaches Coursera – UC San Diego’s “Learning How to Learn,” one of the world’s most popular massive open online courses with over three million registered students, along with a number of other leading MOOCs. Dr. Oakley has adventured widely through her lifetime. She rose from the ranks of Private to Captain in the U.S. Army, during which time she was recognized as a Distinguished Military Scholar. She also worked as a communications expert at the South Pole Station in Antarctica, and has served as a Russian translator on board Soviet trawlers on the Bering Sea. Dr. Oakley is an elected Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Hit Lit! Top books of 2019

Posted on December 12, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Hit Lit! Top Books of 2019 for Learning How to Learners!

Here are the books and tools that LHTLers have found to be most useful this year (not counting our own Learning How to Learn, A Mind for Numbers, and Mindshift, which of course ranked at the top!)

Learning Tools

LHTLers also find the following learning tools to be perennially useful: 

A video on Memes and an App to Help with Patients with Dementia

4-time US memory champion Nelson Dellis is back with a video about the origin of memes and our memories, with a little discussion of an Alzheimer’s app he is working on. (See Nelson’s great book Remember It! in our list above.)

The Overhyped College Dropout ‘Scandal’

It’s easy to read a “sky is falling!” type article about problems in academia and get sucked into the hype before your critical thinking skills kick in. This thoughtful article, “The Overhyped College Dropout ‘Scandal,’” by George Leef of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, will help you to take a step back and analyze whether or not high college dropout rates are really such a bad thing.

New Exercises for Parents and Teachers in the Learning How to Learn for Youth MOOC

Due to the popularity of the exercises for parents and teachers to help kids learn how to learn better— and the kindness of Professor Kenzen Chen of National Chiao Tung University—we’ve added some great new material to the Learning How to Learn for Youth MOOC teachers’ notes.  To access these exercises, go to any video in the MOOC, click on “Download” right beneath the video, and then download the file called “Teachers notes” (available as either pdf or Word documents).  

If you want to help your youngster(s) study more effectively and efficiently, try sitting and watching these LHTL for Youth videos together, one or two each day, during the holiday break. You’ll discover a shared vocabulary for learning that will help you to become a better coach! 

Constant Wonder podcast

Here’s Barb on the podcast Constant Wonder, talking with host Marcus Smith. Check out the other discussions on the podcast related to Napoleon’s exile on Elba and Lawrence of Arabia.  This is wide-ranging podcasting at its best.

An interactive chart that lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers

Type in any word or two word phrase you want into this online tool to get a sense of how often that word is used in reviews from RateMyProfessor.com, broken out by discipline and gender. This tool lets you see which disciplines are, for example, funniest.  (Sadly, Barb’s beloved engineering comes in dead last…. but education isn’t much better.) Read this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education to get a bigger sense of the tool and its implications.

Starting Is the Hardest Part—a Reflection on Procrastination

Here’s an interesting blog post from Dan Calamai that reminds of how procrastination can start—and how we can nip it in the bud.

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

Catch and Kill

Posted on December 6, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Barb’s just back from several days working with Novartis in Basel, Switzerland.  This post, by Chara Balasubramaniam, Head of Global Development University at Novartis, hints at the visionary work Novartis is doing related to learning at a corporate level.

Tell Us About Your Experiences in Our Learning How to Learn Course

Barb’s friend, Dr. Eulho Jung from Boise State University, wants to investigate your experiences on Learning How to Learn, MOOC online course. You are invited to participate in the study—click here to enter the survey. 

Book of the Month

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, by Ronan Farrow.  We’ve long been interested in the “successfully sinister” among us. These individuals can become so powerful that they can get away with virtually anything—that’s how they can destroy so many lives. Ronan Farrow is to be commended for pursuing the story of Harvey Weinstein and others of his ilk, despite the threats and imminent personal danger that put off so many for so long. Catch and Kill might as well be a thriller—we’ve become huge fans of Ronan and his fearless ability to uncover behavior of those who can feign doing good while doing so much harm.

The successfully sinister are the subject of Barb’s book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. For six years, while overtly working towards tenure as an assistant professor of engineering, she covertly delved into an analysis of the holes and flaws of the field of psychology. She remembers thinking “Why am I even doing this? Nobody’s going to read a book that’s focused on psychology, but written by an engineer.” Ultimately, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker called Evil Genes “A fascinating scientific and personal exploration of the roots of evil, filled with human insight and telling detail.” 

As one correspondent recently wrote Barb, “Reading your outstanding book [Evil Genes] today…. I work with organizational behavior, reading a lot recently about narcissism. Everything I just learned is in your book. From my work with others and most recent personal experience of aggression directed at me and accepted by a Board, I asked myself the questions that you did years ago to write your book. Seems like the Me Too movement exposes this everyday behavior…”

Yes, the Me Too movement does expose this type of behavior, which, sadly, is equal opportunity and can be found in women as well as men.  The hypocrisy of news organizations like NBC reporting on sexual abuse in organizations such as the church, while killing stories that might incidentally be related to their own sordid abuses, or the horrific behavior of their favored people or politicians, is a perfect example of Conquest’s third law of politics: “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” Sadly, we feel Conquest’s insight is relevant to the field of education.

Looking for an Extra Credit Assignment? How about Learning How to Learn?

Math professor Jeffery Parent notes: “I just finished grading a bunch of extra credit assignments from my students this semester.  The assignment was to watch Barb’s Google Talk and find at least 10 things in it that students thought that they could use to benefit their own studying. I have seldom had such a successful extra credit assignment as this one. It was gratifying to see all the nice things my students had to say about the talk. I am sure that it will help them moving forward in their studies.”

Direct Instruction Is Still Necessary in a Problem Based Learning Classroom

This thoughtful article by Professor John Spencer, a “former middle school teacher and current college professor on a quest to transform schools into bastions of creativity and wonder.”  Spencer notes: “Early on in my project-based learning journey, I made a vow to go 100% project-based. My students would learn everything through exploration and discovery. I would remain the guide on the side observing the process and helping out only when necessary. After leading students through a highly-structured documentary project, I decided to pull back entirely. This would be more student-centered and authentic.

“Then it tanked.

“Not a week later or a month later. Two days into the project, I realized my mistake…”

It’s worth pointing once more to cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist David Geary, who has concluded, “It is unlikely that teacher-directed, peer-assisted, or self- discovery alone will be the most effective way to learn secondary academic material” (p. 224), and that “only empirical studies will allow us to determine the best mix of methods for different academic domains and for different children”(p. 224). [“Secondary academic material” means material that humans have not done for evolutionarily lengthy periods of time.] 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

The Obesity Code

Posted on November 28, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss, by Jason Fung. We’ve met several friends lately who have shifted to eating only one meal a day—whatever they want during that meal—and have successfully lost, and kept off, dozens of pounds. One friend finally clued us into The Obesity Code, which has helped them a great deal to provide a good background and framework for this type of semi-fasting lifestyle.  We have to say, after a month’s tryout, we’re finding this lifestyle has done a lot for helping keep us alert, even while we still enjoy our meals and knock off a few pounds.  The Obesity Code is a wonderfully thoughtful book—if you are having trouble with losing pounds that creep back, even while you’re trying to keep your cognition in tip-top shape, give this approach a try.  (It works great except on days where Barb’s giving major presentations and can’t eat until late!)f you’re in a hurry, just read the final chapters on how to set up this lifestyle.

Pointing Out the Elephant in the Room in Teaching Math to Children

Dan Willingham has written a controversial article in the Los Angeles Times: “Math scares your child’s elementary school teacher — and that should frighten you.”  Predictably, elementary school teachers have recoiled against Willingham’s suggested breaches to their kingdom. Barry Garelick writes an interesting reaction from more traditional perspectives.

Why We Love Closed Captioning

We’ve found ourselves relying more and more often on closed captioning to help us stay focused on videos we’re listening to.  We also enjoy the chance to quickly read through podcast scripts to grab the key ideas—these captions are a benefit that the Deaf Community has offered to the hearing community when it comes to focused learning. It seems we’re not alone in our admiration for closed captioning, as explained in this fine article by Lance Ulanoff in Medium. In it, adolescent psychiatrist Andrew Kent notes: “I believe auditory processing is more easily impacted upon by distractions, and that they need to read [captions] to stay focused.” [Hat tip: Katie Murch]

Questions that Students Commonly Ask about Learning

Barb’s friend Jocelyn Roberts, the Principal at Holland Park State High School, Brisbane, Australia, has set up a wonderful website where students can ask Barb questions about their challenges in learning.  Here are some typical questions (the answers are posted on the website):

  • I try to study by reading my notes or the textbook a few times but I find I don’t remember it very well. Can you help?
  • I like it when the teacher gives us a weekly homework sheet. That way, I can do it all in one session on the weekend and have the week free to do other things. Is this a good way to tackle homework practice? I am passing my subjects but I do forget how to do stuff by the end of the week.
  • I really need to listen to music through my earphones when I study—I can work for longer that way. Is this a good study technique?

You may wish to make posters with some of these questions and answers for your school—many of these are very common student questions around the world! 

Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Down the Drain in Misguided Efforts to Improve Literacy

In yet another sad story of how simply throwing money at education isn’t necessarily the answer, this article notes, “Colorado has spent hundreds of millions to help kids read. Now, it will spend up to $5.2 million to find out why it’s not working.”

What happens in our brain when we are learning?

Watch Barb’s interview with ESIC’s La HoraTech to hear her thoughts.

Socrates and Retrieval Practice

Learning How to Learner Drew Stegmaier observes “Socrates’s famous method of teaching by asking questions has become well known and timeless as a teaching modality.  I suspect it’s because it utilizes recall (which we know is a fantastic way to learn) and engages students by forcing them to problem solve a concept before being fully introduced to it, allowing the question to marinate in the background over the course of a lecture or discussion.”

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar

Posted on November 21, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Today, Barb’s giving the opening keynote for the Harvard-MIT-Dana Alliance Science of Learning Conference at 1:15 PM – 2:15 PM at The Westin Copley Place, Boston, MA; with an advanced workshop that builds on these ideas at 3:45 PM – 5:15 PM.  If you’re near Boston, don’t miss it!

Book of the Week

Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore. This extraordinarily well-researched volume reveals what can happen when a vicious, brutal, but charming-whenever-necessary killer climbs to power in a system that has nothing by way of checks and balances.  Even Churchill—no fool when it came to Hitler’s intentions, was wowed by Stalin—a man who enjoyed the mental as well as physical torture of all who opposed him. Montefiore describes the strange family and public life of a man who led one of history’s greatest democides. It’s hard to convey just how difficult life was for anyone who thought independently, or even anyone who made a simple joke, in Stalin’s time—Montefiore does an outstanding job at this virtually indescribable task. An extraordinary book. 

Tell Us about Your Experiences in Our Learning How to Learn Course

Barb’s friend, Dr. Eulho Jung from Boise State University, wants to investigate your experiences on Learning How to Learn, MOOC online course. You are invited to participate in the study—click here to enter the survey.

How the amount and spacing of retrieval practice affect the retention of mathematics knowledge

This fascinating recent paper by Lyle et al in Educational Psychology Review tackles the specifics of how often and how much retrieval practice is most helpful in math (a pre-calculus) class, as assessed in part by subsequent performance in the following calculus course. “We assessed retention of precalculus knowledge at two educationally relevant time points: the end of the precalculus course (within-semester) and the beginning of a calculus course 4 weeks later (across-semester). Within-semester retention benefited significantly from practicing more and from spacing out practice, although some evidence suggested that the effect of amount of practice was less robust than the effect of spacing. Across-semester retention benefited exclusively from increasing spacing. Given that retaining precalculus knowledge across semesters is crucial for success in higher-level mathematics, these findings support increasing spacing in real-world mathematics education.”

And Speaking of Retrieving—Here’s a Fine Article on Optimal Processes for Creating Flashcards

One of our favorite writers on learning, David Handel, MD, has written “How to Create and Practice Flashcards Like a Boss.” Even if you think you are an expert at flashcard use, you will learn new and useful ideas from this brilliant article. And be sure to check out IDoRecall, which we’ve begun using and like very much.

Study Shows the Brains of Girls and Boys are Similar, Producing Equal Math Ability

This paper, “Gender Similarities in the Brain during Mathematics Development,” in the journal npj Science of Learning, led by Jessica Cantlon at Carnegie Mellon University, is aptly summarized here: “Cantlon and her team conducted the first neuroimaging study to evaluate biological gender differences in math aptitude of young children.

“Her team used functional MRI to measure the brain activity in 104 young children (3- to 10-years-old; 55 girls) while watching an educational video covering early math topics, like counting and addition. The researchers compared scans from the boys and girls to evaluate brain similarity. In addition, the team examined brain maturity by comparing the children’s scans to those taken from a group of adults (63 adults; 25 women) who watched the same math videos.

“After numerous statistical comparisons, Cantlon and her team found no difference in the brain development of girls and boys. In addition, the researchers found no difference in how boys and girls processed math skills and were equally engaged while watching the educational videos. Finally, boys’ and girls’ brain maturity were statistically equivalent when compared to either men or women in the adult group.” [Hat tip: Rick]

On Second Thought, Maybe Male and Female Brains Really Aren’t So Similar…

Interestingly, the above study sticks assiduously to mathematics and makes no note of differences in girls’ and boys’ average verbal abilities—which can have a significant impact on a child’s ultimate interests and career preferences. This is a perfect example of the streetlight effect, the observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. The above study also ignores salient work such as this fine paper, “Sex differences in academic achievement are not related to political, economic, or social equality,” by Stoet and Geary, which observes “… when it comes to choices made by individual students, mean sex differences in mathematics or reading may not be as important as whether they are, as individuals, better at mathematics than verbal competencies, including reading, or vice versa.” (Girls, it appears, often have an early verbal advantage over boys.)  

And this recent study, “Sex differences in brain correlates of STEM anxiety,” finds neural differences in male and female reactions to studying STEM.  “We found sex differences in STEM-related and clinical anxiety, with longitudinal increases in science anxiety observed for both female and male students. Sex-specific relationships between STEM anxiety and brain connectivity emerged, with male students exhibiting distinct inter-network connectivity for STEM and clinical anxiety and female students demonstrating no significant within-sex correlations. Anxiety was negatively correlated with academic performance in sex-specific ways at both pre- and post-instruction. Moreover, math anxiety in male students mediated the relation between default mode-salience connectivity and course grade. Together, these results reveal complex sex differences in the neural mechanisms driving how anxiety is related to STEM learning.”

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

Babel No More

Posted on November 15, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, by Michael Erard.  For years, Barb has thought she would like to write a book about language superlearners. Babel No More is what she had in mind. This fascinating book begins with the story of legendary linguist Giuseppe Mezzofanti, the Italian cardinal who was said to speak 72 languages. It goes on to share dozens of interesting language learning tidbits. Although in 2012 (when this book was published), neuroimaging techniques weren’t as advanced as they are today, Erard does a fine job of exploring how the brain of language superlearners might be different from those of more ordinary learners.  Interestingly, “..individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brainpower.” 

We particularly liked learning how the common mentality that you only speak a language if you are a native or near-native speaker is actually not a reasonable measure. “[People think] that when you really know a language, you think in it. In fact, the brain doesn’t think in any language. What people refer to as ‘thinking in a language’ comes from being able to speak more immediately in a language without rehearsing it or translating it from a language one might know better; the spoken thought feels as if it’s closer to its source in the brain.”

If you’re interested in language-learning, and want some inspiration, you’ll find it here in this book.

How Schools of Education Became a Bastion of Bad Ideas

This important, hard-hitting article by Erik Gilbert in The Chronicle of Higher Education (behind paywall), describes the inertial, anti-scientific ways of typical schools of education.  The beginning of the article gives hints of what’s to come (it’s worth subscribing to The Chronicle to read the whole thing): 

“A few years ago, when I was on my university’s Graduate Council, a new course proposal came to us from our College of Education. The proposal referred to the different learning styles of students, something that struck me as odd — I remembered having heard years before that the learning-styles theory had been discredited. Trusting my colleagues’ expertise, I kept my mouth shut and, assuming that learning styles must have been rehabilitated by new research, voted to pass the proposal.

“I later polled the education majors in one of my history classes: Not only did they know about learning styles, they all knew the acronym ‘VARK,’ which stands for visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinesthetic — the four alleged learning styles. The theory, it seemed, was alive and well.

Then I sought out the supporting research. Instead, I quickly came across a New York Times article on the curious persistence of learning styles — curious because of widespread evidence debunking the theory (The Atlantic has since published a similar piece). Despite all this, learning styles still apparently pervade colleges of education. A 2014 article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the topic of “neuromyths” found that over 90 percent of teachers it surveyed believed in learning styles.

“Another disturbing example of ed-school thinking involves the way reading is taught. According to a 2018 report by American Public Media:

“The prevailing approaches to reading instruction in American schools are inconsistent with basic things scientists have discovered about how children learn to read. Many educators don’t know the science, and in some cases actively resist it. The resistance is the result of beliefs about reading that have been deeply held in the educational establishment for decades, even though those beliefs have been proven wrong by scientists over and over again….”

Busuu Language Learning App

Although we’re fans of Duolingo (300+ million users), we’ve recently learned of another popular language learning app, Busuu (90+ million users). If you’d like to compare the two, comment on the discussion forum here.

The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas

Here’s a wonderful explanation by mathematician Dan Rockmore in the New Yorker on how to generate new ideas.  The secret? Hard focused work combined with diffuse mode breaks.  We may have already known that, but we didn’t know how to write it as beautifully as Dan Rockmore. (On a side note, though, the exercise probably matters more than he thinks…) [Hat tip: Steven Cooke, Lead Mentor LHTL.) 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

Patient H. M.

Posted on November 8, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Mайстер-клас від Барбари Оуклі

Barb’s just wrapping up her work for IE University in Madrid, Spain this week and, after a weekend visiting historic and beautiful Toledo, is off to Kyiv, Ukraine to work with and speak for  Оsvitoria! 

Book of the Week

Patient H.M. A Story of Memory, Madness, and Family Secrets, by Luke Dittrich.  H.M., that is, Henry Molaison, rivals only Phineas Gage as one of the world’s most famous brain patients.  As it turns out, Dittrich’s grandfather, neurosurgeon William Beecher Scoville, performed the notorious surgery that removed Molaison’s hippocampuses and helped spur extraordinary bodies of research on memory. Dittrich’s family history means he has an unparalleled perspective to share on what actually happened to Molaison and what type of man Scoville actually was (hint—there are many dark secrets). This can sometimes be a bit graphic about what can happen during brain surgery, as well as what happens when people undertake to do experiments on people, but its final revelations are astonishing.

Learning About Focused and Diffuse Modes

Barb’s good friend Professor Kenzen Chen of National Chiao-Tung University hosted a fascinating meetup. One of Kenzen’s new TAs, Jenny Wu, made two crafted pinball machines, one representing the diffuse mode, and another representing the focused mode. She wrapped aluminum foil on the board, connected screws to the anode and the foil to the cathode. When the pinball kicks the screw, an electric circuit is formed and the light bulb blinks. Participants were excited and the handmade machine prompted them to compare and think about how the two modes are different! These two images convey something of the excitement!

How Deep Sleep May Help The Brain Clear Alzheimer’s Toxins

This article by Jon Hamilton, in NPR’s health news section, discusses the role of deep sleep in clearing toxins (which may affect Alzheimer’s). It also includes a marvelous animation so you can more clearly see the phenomenon taking place. [Hat tip: Carolyn Patterson]

First Common Core High School Grads Worst-Prepared For College In 15 Years

This article, by Joy Pullmann in The Federalist, observes “For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report…. This is the opposite of what we were told would happen with trillions of taxpayer dollars and an entire generation of children who deserve not to have been guinea pigs in a failed national experiment.” This article in U.S. News & World Report echoes the findings.

Learning is optimized when we fail 15% of the time

As this Neuroscience News article describes: “Learning is optimized in computer models when there is an error rate of 15%. Researchers say the 85% accuracy rule may also apply to humans for optimal perceptual learning.” [Hat tip: brandonrox10.]

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

 

Crisis in the Red Zone

Posted on October 31, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Crisis in the Red Zone: The Story of the Deadliest Ebola Outbreak in History, and of the Outbreaks to Come, by Robert Preston. We’ve been fans of Robert Preston ever since his gripping New York Times best-seller The Hot Zone first came out. Crisis in the Red Zone focuses on Ebola—Preston traces its origin back to a little boy playing in the forest, probably touching a bat. Ebola got its initial foothold in humanity largely because of lack of education—most people simply couldn’t believe that the love and care that is at the heart of our humanity is what allows the contagion to take place. The bravery of the nurses and doctors on the front lines of this epidemic, and the potential danger to humanity of these types of diseases, is something everyone should know more about.  Don’t miss this edge-of-your-seat thriller.

Living With—and Learning From—ADHD

In this thought-provoking article by Sarah Stein Lubrano, a DPhil student at the University of Oxford, she describes how she learned to make distraction work for her.

Key graf: “I work in instructional design, which is the practice of developing engaging and effective educational products and experiences to help others learn. In creating interactive classes and workshops, my aim is to cultivate the learners’ attention and focus, but one of the first things I learned was that this is incredibly difficult, for everyone – neurotypical or otherwise. In fact, there are common rules of thumb that reflect how universally short attention spans really are: one is that even 10 minutes of lecturing is too long for some people to follow (think of the number of times that you’ve caught yourself, or someone near you, wilting during a long meeting, presentation or conference paper). The trick is to intersperse lectures with exercises and discussions. Moreover, research increasingly suggests that people are more likely to take in new ideas and information when it relates to something they already care about. All of this is magnified for people diagnosed with ADHD, who lack focus, unless there’s a strong and clear connection to their immediate concerns, but who can nonetheless focus profoundly when this element of deep interest is present.” [Hat tip: Tom Busk]

Busting the attention span myth

Here’s an article on attention by Simon Maybin in BBC News that’s also worth your attention. Key grafs: “In the always-connected world of social media, smartphones and hyperlinks in the middle of everything you read, it can feel that much harder to stay focused. And there are statistics too. They say that the average attention span is down from 12 seconds in the year 2000 to eight seconds now…. But the sources are infuriatingly vague… And when I contact the listed sources – the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine, and the Associated Press – neither can find any record of research that backs up the stats. My attempts to contact Statistic Brain came to nothing too. I have spoken to various people who dedicate their working lives to studying human attention and they have no idea where the numbers come from either. 

“In fact, they think the idea that attention spans are getting shorter is plain wrong.” [Hat tip Enrique Planells]

How to Really Listen

This video, featuring deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie, explores how we can inadvertently become limited in the possibilities of sound—and of life.  [Hat tip: Kurt Meyer.]

Newly Discovered Brain Cells Help Us Recall Where We Last Saw Objects

This fascinating article by Jason Arunn Murugesu in the New Scientist (well worth subscribing to), describes how newly discovered “vector trace cells” in the brain depend more on the objects in the environment rather than the environment itself.

Key graf: “The vector trace cells become active when we see an object. They help us judge how far that object is from us and also its relative distance to other objects we can see.

“But vector trace cells are active even when the object they have been tracking is no longer visible or has been removed by someone else, and they can remain in this active state for hours. In other words, these cells – assuming they are present in the human brain – may help us remember where we last saw an object.”

So, now you can blame your vector trace cells when you can’t find your keys…

Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s Tips on How to Write a Great Science Paper

Here’s an article in Nature describing literary genius Cormac McCarthy’s approach to editing scientific articles. Barb can vouch for the fact that Cormac McCarthy is not only tremendously altruistic, but a tremendous editor—he edited her books Evil Genes and Cold-Blooded Kindness, and the books were much the better for it.

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

Powerful Teaching

Posted on October 24, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Greetings from Moscow, where Barb is speaking about learning for Sberbank. (Fun fact: if you’re sitting in the Radisson Collection Hotel in downtown Moscow, and type in “Your location” on Google Maps, you’ll see the location showing up as 40 kilometers away, at the Sheremetyevo Airport.)

Book of the Year

Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning by Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D. and Patrice M. Bain, Ed.S. If we had to select a single book to recommend to instructors of any kind, it would be this masterpiece—the best book on teaching that we’ve ever read.  

In Powerful Teaching, Agarwal and Bain provide a tour de force of practical ideas and explanations involving retrieval practice, explaining how this vital topic is related to concepts such as interleaving, deliberate practice, formative assessments. 

Retrieval practice is so much deeper than simple memorization: As Powerful Teaching notes: “we typically focus on getting information into students’ heads. On the contrary, one of the most robust findings from cognitive science research is the importance of getting information out of students’ heads. Based on a century of research, in order to transform learning, we must focus on getting information out – a strategy called retrieval practice.”  

If you are a K-12 teacher or university instructor, or a parent, don’t miss this teaching book for the ages. Think retrieval practice is only for plebeian facts? Think again—as Agarwal and Bain note: “When it comes to retrieval practice, how far up the pyramid can we move student learning? If we want students to think on a higher-order level, then we should make sure our retrieval questions are basic and higher-order. It’s shortsighted to think, ‘Gee, well, if I have students retrieve a vocabulary word, they should be able to apply this in a higher-order example or a higher-order type of material.’ Based on research, provide a mix of fact-based retrieval and higher-order retrieval if that’s the type of learning you want to see in your students.” 

Part of what we love about this book is the simplicity of its explanations—not only is it well-researched, it’s elegantly written. Looking for a Christmas present for a parent or teacher friend, or for yourself? This is it.

Class Central’s Latest List of New Courses

Check out Class Central’s popular list of 200 universities that have just launched 620+ free online courses. Here’s the full list.

College Students Just Want Normal Libraries

As this article by Alia Wong in The Atlantic notes, “Schools have been on a mission to reinvent campus libraries—even though students just want the basics.” Key graf: “Likely in the hopes of proving that they have more to offer than a simple internet connection does, many college libraries are pouring resources into interior-design updates and building renovations, or into ‘glitzy technology,’ such as 3-D printers and green screens, that is often housed in ‘media centers’ or ‘makerspaces’…. Yet much of the glitz may be just that—glitz. Survey data and experts suggest that students generally appreciate libraries most for their simple, traditional offerings: a quiet place to study or collaborate on a group project, the ability to print research papers, and access to books.”

Yet Another Reason Sleep Is Important

This article by Naama Barak in Israel21c describes how individual “sleeping cells” have chromosomes that move almost twice as much during sleep, which helps with the performance of nuclear maintenance. Prof. Lior Appelbaum, one of the study’s co-authors, points out: “We’ve found a causal link between sleep, chromosome dynamics, neuronal activity and DNA damage and repair with direct physiological relevance to the entire organism… Sleep gives an opportunity to reduce DNA damage accumulated in the brain during wakefulness.” [Hat tip Rex Freriks.]

Looking for a Good Translator?

Although we’ve long used Google Translate as our “go to” on the spot translator, we’ve lately heard about “DeepL” as doing a better translation job.  If you need translations, you might want to check it out.

We checked it out against an in-depth description by Venezuelan Victor Niebla of what is happening in Venezuela. (Just paste in the entire copied document, and delete Spanish paragraphs as you read.)  Key grafs: “Venezuela has never finished applying a serious economic plan because the governments ‘wrinkle’ halfway through the plan, when they see their popularity plummet, then the economic measures change and they become populist, indebting the country again, and we repeat the cycle of crisis with the next president. In short, we Venezuelans are the cause of our own economic misfortune, both in government and in society….. In these strong moments that we are going through, there are still people believing in the country, people who refuse to leave, something that I personally find incredible and worthy of admiration.

“There are people creating food, farming, soap, shampoo, biscuits, milk, cakes, everything. Venezuelans are characterized by not losing hope…” 

Optimal Learning Strategies

Justin T asks what the optimal timeframes for various aspects of learning might be.  He notes: “I’ve been playing with 10 min focused, 2 min recall, and subsequent 3 minutes eyes-closed mindfulness (see, hear, sense, feel free-form awareness tracking).” We think Justin’s approach is quite interesting. There’s nothing definitive that we’re aware of from research about this—but if you have any thoughts, please comment on the discussion forum here.

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

Chernobyl

Posted on October 18, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham. This extraordinary book tells of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—but it is also a powerful testament to how governmental propaganda and secrecy can cause these types of global-scale disasters to unfold. 

The surprisingly positive upshot of the disaster is that far safer nuclear power is being developed.  As Higginbotham notes: “Less than a month before the explosion of [Chernobyl] Reactor Number Four in 1986, a team of nuclear engineers at Argonne National Laboratory–West in Idaho had quietly succeeded in demonstrating that … the integral fast reactor … was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island 2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fueled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in a reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground. In 2015 Microsoft founder Bill Gates had begun funding research projects similar to these fourth-generation reactors in a quest to create a carbon-neutral power source for the future. By then, the Chinese government had already set seven hundred scientists on a crash program to build the world’s first industrial thorium reactor as part of a war on pollution. ‘The problem of coal has become clear,’ the engineering director of the project said. ‘Nuclear power provides the only solution.’” [Hat tip: Mary O’Dea] 

We read Midnight in Chernobyl in conjunction with watching the HBO documentary Chernobyl.  Television doesn’t get better than this.

Neurons Form Cliques of Various Sizes 

This fascinating article in ScienceAlert discovered that neurons develop into highly connected groups. As article author Signe Dean notes: “Algebraic topology provides mathematical tools for discerning details of the neural network both in a close-up view at the level of individual neurons, and a grander scale of the brain structure as a whole…. By connecting these two levels, the researchers could discern high-dimensional geometric structures in the brain, formed by collections of tightly connected neurons (cliques) and the empty spaces (cavities) between them… Those clearings or cavities seem to be critically important for brain function. When researchers gave their virtual brain tissue a stimulus, they saw that neurons were reacting to it in a highly organised manner.

“It is as if the brain reacts to a stimulus by building [and] then razing a tower of multi-dimensional blocks, starting with rods (1D), then planks (2D), then cubes (3D), and then more complex geometries with 4D, 5D, etc,” said one of the team, mathematician Ran Levi from Aberdeen University in Scotland.

“The progression of activity through the brain resembles a multi-dimensional sandcastle that materialises out of the sand and then disintegrates.”

Sound Body, Sound Mind: Physically Fit People Have Stronger, Sharper Brains

John Anderer in Study Finds describes recent research revealing that keeping oneself physically fit is also associated with better brain structure and functioning in young adults. As study team leader Dr. Jonathan Repple observes: “It surprised us to see that even in a young population cognitive performance decreases as fitness levels drop. We knew how this might be important in an elderly population which does not necessarily have good health, but to see this happening in 30-year-olds is surprising. This leads us to believe that a basic level of fitness seems to be a preventable risk factor for brain health.”

Your Undivided Attention Podcast

LHTLer Marta Pulley has recommended the new “Your Undivided Attention Podcast.”  We’ve read the transcripts from some of the episodes—this is a riveting and important new source to learn more about how “Technology companies are locked in an arms race to seize your attention, and that race is tearing apart our shared social fabric. In this inaugural podcast from the Center for Humane Technology, hosts Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin will expose the hidden designs that have the power to hijack our attention, manipulate our choices and destabilize our real-world communities. They’ll explore what it means to become sophisticated about human nature, by interviewing hypnotists, magicians, experts on the dynamics of cults and election hacking and the powers of persuasion. How can we escape this unrelenting race to the bottom of the brain stem? Learn more with our new podcast, Your Undivided Attention.”

Wonderful Forgiveness Weekend

Our friend Mary Hayes Grieco, who has just run a forgiveness session in Azerbaijan, is running another forgiveness session in the Twin Cities on Nov 15-17, 2019. It’s a great opportunity for anyone who is trying to get over an emotionally difficult story. If you know someone who has been suffering too long with a loss, disappointment, or a resentment, you may wish to pass this self-healing information along. It’s something to learn in a weekend and use for a lifetime. 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

 

The Great Degeneration

Posted on October 11, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, by Niall Ferguson.  One experience that struck Barb when she worked as a translator on Soviet trawlers was just how easy it was to convince people to go along with certain ideas, no matter how bizarre they might be. Once you get enough people thinking in the same way, that’s enough to get them to blithely hurdle themselves, lemming-like, off a societal cliff.  

Ferguson’s book is a prescient reminder of how countries get themselves into terrible trouble when society turns a blind eye to profligate overspending. In 2010, Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, and Jennifer Dorn, President and Chief Executive Officer of the National Academy of Public Administration, jointly wrote: “Much is at stake. If we as a nation do not grapple promptly and wisely with the changes needed to put the federal budget on a sustainable course, all of us will find that the public goals we most value are at risk.” (See also Pathological Altruism and “Concepts and implications of altruism bias and pathological altruism.”)

Ferguson’s book gives an overview of a future that could still be changed through the will of a well-educated populace. 

MOOC of the Month: Hacking Exercise for Health

Getting fit is confusing.  Who can you believe when there are so many “experts”? What’s the right mix of exercise between cardio and strength? How do you know if you’re working out hard enough? What’s better, heavy or light weights? These questions and more are addressed through a new course offered by world-renowned exercise physiologists Martin Gibala and Stuart Phillips of McMaster University. Stu and Marty will offer insight and evidence into the surprising new science of cardio fitness and strength-building—and then provide you with hacks to get fit and strong (and healthy!) virtually anywhere and in less time than you ever thought possible. Sign up for the course here! (Barb & her hero hubby Phil are currently part way through this fantastic course, and loving it!)

Coursera just launched “Coursera for Campus”

Coursera’s fantastic new program is explained in the first hour of this video. Basically, ANY campus can use Coursera for Campus to meld together with their learning management system to create courses for a far broader pool of students than the university has normally ever reached—including alumni, staff, and of course, students. Universities that prosper in the future will be those that use tools like Coursera for Campus to build their outreach to the tremendous pool of older students who desire training and retraining.

How to RE-LEARN how to learn

When Barb was at Weber State in Ogden, Utah recently (a shoutout for their vision regarding the online world!), she was fortunate enough to meet Dr. Scott Moore. His story is incredible—here it is in his own words.

“I was at the top of my game; an ironman triathlete and straight A student in medical school serving in the Air Force. It was all taken away in an instant. CRASH! After waking up from a coma a month and a half later, I found out that I was hit by a car on my bicycle and was lucky to be alive. My heart was beating, I was breathing, my wounds were healing, but some injuries take years to repair. To best analogize my brain injury; imagine standing in front of a perfectly-functioning switchboard and then pulling all the wires out. Does the switchboard still have all of its parts? Yes. Does it work? No. All the hardware is still there, but nothing is connected anymore. A similar thing happened in my brain as the neurons and axons were separated. I had forgotten nearly everything! In order to go back to med school, I first needed to pass Step 2 of the US Medical Licensing Exam. It was slow re-learning at first, but through dedication, and laser-like focus, I passed the exam on the first try a year after my accident.

“Even though I passed the exam and was back in school, I still couldn’t speak comfortably with people. I heard about Learning how to Learn, which intrigued me. The educational strategies that I regained, helped me to learn at an accelerated rate as my brain was recovering and the synapses were reforming. More interestingly though, Learning How to Learn shares evidence-based lifestyle habits that are not-so-apparent contributors to education. Through much of my own research and personal experience, I have been able to verify the truth of these beneficial lifestyle patterns. Learning How to Learn has given me a renewed desire to ensure that I get a full night’s sleep, continue to exercise, and eat a healthy diet full of fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains. The learning strategies and lifestyle tips that are introduced in Learning How to Learn, have enabled me to achieve successes that I had not previously imagined. I was able to regain my ability to speak cohesive sentences, think clearly, graduate from medical school, get a spot in a competitive pathology residency program, and eventually become an Assistant Professor of Medical Laboratory Sciences teaching clinical chemistry at my alma mater. I will be forever grateful to Barb and Terry for creating Learning How to Learn and helping me re-learn how to learn. This knowledge is truly empowering and encouraged me to create the physiologic environment best suited for learning.”

Remodeling the Brain after Injury—Learning Makes a World of Difference

Here is a wonderful paper by researchers Jeffrey Kleim and Teresa Jones, “Principles of Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity: Implications for Rehabilitation After Brain Damage” that reaffirms Dr. Moore’s personal experiences. As the key graf notes:

“Neuroscience research has made major advances in understanding the brain, but we are far from understanding brain circuitry at the level needed to place new neurons and neural connections in just the right places to restore a lost function. Fortunately, there is another way to create functionally appropriate neural connections. We can capitalize upon the way the brain normally does this—that is, via learning. There is overwhelming evidence to indicate that the brain continuously remodels its neural circuitry in order to encode new experiences and enable behavioral change… Research on the neurobiology of learning and memory suggests that, for each new learning event, there is some necessary and sufficient change in the nervous system that supports the learning… This neuroplasticity is, itself, driven by changes in behavioral, sensory, and cognitive experiences. In our view, this endogenous process of functionally appropriate reorganization in healthy brains is also the key to promoting reorganization of remaining tissue in the damaged brain. This approach of using the process of learning, alone and in combination with other therapies, to promote adaptive neural plasticity is a growing focus of research….”

Barb at the Fire Festival in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Here’s Barb speaking of learning, and creating great online learning materials, after spending 40 hours in airports and on planes. Can you tell she is actually a walking zombie?

Kazakhstan—a Place of Burgeoning Edtech

Here’s a nice article in the Astana Times about Barb’s fantastic recent trip to Kazakhstan under the auspices of EdGravity and Academia.kz. She’s in Spain for the coming month, enjoying the great people and awesome food!

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team