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.

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

Marie Antoinette and other great biographies

Posted on October 5, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser. We’re used to reading history books about compelling, intelligent men and women like Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, and Queen Isabella of Spain. We’re not-so-used-to reading books about apparent intellectual lightweights. And indeed, Marie Antoinette started her life as a coddled royal who successfully eluded attempts to, for example, teach her how to read. But despite her love of frivolity, Marie Antoinette had a great and good heart—you’d be hard put to find a woman who could face the worst and remain brave until the end.  Her ultimate, raw intelligence in front of the jury, with its pre-ordained verdict of guilt, is heartrending. This is the story of how dangerous “fake news” mobs—as easy to lead then as they are now—put Marie Antoinette under the guillotine. A spell-binding read. 

When the Culture War Comes for the Kids

This essay by George Packer in The Atlantic describes how some schools are beginning to see their mission as more oriented towards indoctrination than education. As Packer notes: “Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it…”   

The Dangers of Fluent Lectures 

This article by Colleen Flaherty in Inside Higher Education describes how “smooth-talking professors can lull students into thinking they’ve learned more than they actually have—potentially at the expense of active learning.  But what the associated research—“Measuring actual learning versus feeling of learning in response to being actively engaged in the classroom”—also perhaps reveals is the reason why students can sometimes be better off not actually attending classes, but instead using their time to study actively on their own. [Hat tip Mary Pringle.]

MOOC of the Week

Our friends at Cornell University have just created the new MOOC Teaching & Learning in the Diverse Classroom, taught by Mathew Ouellett and Melina Ivanchikova. The MOOC, which launches in November, is described in this Cornell Chronicle article by Caitlin Hayes.

Coursera’s New Expert Network

Coursera has launched their new expert network, where journalists can discover subject matter experts for news stories. You can hear intriguing discussions, such as Barb’s podcast with tips to help you learn.

Muscle Building, Exercise, and Cognition

Even if you aren’t an athlete, research reveals you can build muscle through resistance training, such as weight-lifting, at any age. And of course, we know exercise has stalwart effects on cognition as well as health. Don’t have time to exercise, or a nearby gym?  No worries—recent research has revealed that warming up with a few jumping jacks, squats and lunges and then climbing 60 steps (three flights of stairs) as quickly as possible, three times a day, increased aerobic fitness by 5%.

Science’s Dirty Little Secret—Self-Citation

Scientific hard data analyst John Ioannidis from Stanford University—he of the infamous, vitally important research article “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”—is back again with another hard-hitting study with the seemingly innocuous title of “A standardized citation metrics author database annotated for scientific field.” As Peter Dokrill’s article in ScienceAlert notes: “among the 100,000 most cited scientists between 1996 to 2017, there’s a stealthy pocket of researchers who represent “extreme self-citations and ‘citation farms’ (relatively small clusters of authors massively citing each other’s papers).”

Protecting Students from Themselves—An Emergency Room Physician’s Lecture

Dr. Louis Profeta wrote the viral essay, “A Sunday Talk on Sex, Drugs, Drinking, and Dying with the Frat Boys,” and since then, as he notes in his new essay, “I had been traveling the country speaking on campuses brave enough to have me. I hadn’t held anything back from the students. I warned them beforehand. I was coming from a different place, a place where doctors do rape exams, pump veins full of narcan and epinephrine, look at the clock and pronounce time of death and break horrible news to moms and dads. I had become kind of sick of it (giving out the bad news, I mean). It didn’t seem like much was working to change the tide of opiate abuse, reckless behavior, and other causes of death in young people so I figured I’d start going to the source and begging these students to, well, grow the fuck up.” 

This is a not-to-be-missed set of essays.

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

Your Happy First Draft/Mission Transition

Posted on September 27, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners from beautiful Almaty, Kazakhstan!

Books of the Week

Your Happy First Draft: A Practical and Painless Guide to Obliterating Writer’s Block, by Daphne Gray-Grant. This is the best book we’ve ever read about getting past writer’s block.  Daphne has been a writing coach for decades, and she’s seen it all—and helped people get past it all. As Daphne says:  “I started my working life as an editor and I was a good one. I had a natural instinct for figuring out what writers wanted to say and for helping to make their text better—more clear and more readable. I could even apply these skills to my own writing.

“But here was the problem: The qualities that made me a good editor made me a terrible writer. Even though I worked at a large metropolitan daily newspaper, I struggled to put a single word on the page. (Thank goodness I was an editor, so they let me get away with that not-so-charming shortcoming!)

“When I left the newspaper, I set up shop as a freelance writer and editor. As I had all my life, I loved editing. But I disliked writing. So I spent six months in abject misery, hating every word I produced. Then I spent another year figuring out how to take my hate and turn it into something approaching like, never figuring I could ever achieve love. After many false starts, my efforts finally paid off. And the very best news of all? I not only loved the process, I also managed to double my writing speed.”

Barb has enjoyed Daphne’s newsletters for years.  And she wrote the foreword for Daphne’s great book. If writing is a challenge for you, don’t miss Daphne’s book!

Mission Transition: Navigating the Opportunities and Obstacles to Your Post-Military Career, by Matthew J. Louis. This book is a special treat for those in the military, and military veterans. Nearly a quarter million leave the service each year, but transitioning to civilian life can be a challenge—as Barb knows, having shifted out of the Army to begin her engineering studies as a civilian. As the book cover notes: “Mission Transition is a practical guide to career change for service members considering leaving active duty. It attempts to address this primary question: How can transitioning veterans realize their full potential by avoiding false starts and suboptimal career choices following active duty? The book has been endorsed by Generals, Astronauts, Super Bowl winners, members of Congress, and best-selling authors.” We’re all in accord that this is an extraordinarily useful book!

The Rules of Studying 

Here are some handy downloadable, printable posters with great guidance for effective studying: 10 Rules of Good Studying; 10 Rules of Bad Studying (reprinted by permission from A Mind for Numbers).

Homophones in English

Karen writes “I was reading your page here, and I saw you were mentioning learningenglish.voanews.com. I have to be honest, I’m not a native English speaker, but this site helped me a lot with learning English—so I’m happy other people are recommending it! 🙂 

As for a recommendation, I wanted to share mine with you as a way of thanking you for sharing learningenglish.voanews.com.I recently found online a funny article about the English language (which made a lot of sense to me, as a non-native), and I’m pretty sure it will speak to your users as well.

Here it is. It’s about homophones and all these English words that can sometimes lead to mistakes when the context is unclear :)”

The Second Annual Sound Education conference

The second annual Sound Education conference is coming up Oct 10-13 at Harvard University and Boston University. The conference is for both educational podcasters and the people who love learning from them. There are some fantastic keynote speakers, such as Helen Zaltzman from The Allusionist—anyone who loves to learn would have a good time attending. Here’s the conference website, and the event registration.

Which Country’s Higher Education System Is Best?

Here is an interesting discussion by George Leef of a recent study published by the American Enterprise Institute, “International Higher Education Rankings” by Jason Delisle and Preston Cooper.  Leef compares education systems with laissez faire systems for, for example, physically fitness, noting “I have to take issue with Delisle and Cooper when they say in their subtitle, ‘no country’s higher education system can be the best.’ Every country can have the best system, which is to say, getting the most educational value for the least expenditure of resources.”

interview to Ignacio Despujol from the Universitat Politècnica de València (In Spanish)

Orland Trejo, the Lead of Aprendiendo a aprender (Learning How to Learn in Spanish), has conducted a Spanish language video interview (with English subtitles) with Ignacio Despujol as an optional lecture at the first week of Spanish LHTL. The interview dives into the experience of Universitat Politecnica de Valencia in online learning innovation, their strategies and discoveries, right up to becoming one of the top 5 European institutions in digital 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

How to Become a Straight-A Student

Posted on September 19, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

How to Become a Straight-A Student: The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less, Cal Newport.  Oliver from Switzerland (see his inspiring email below) recommended Cal Newport’s book on studying—this book launched Cal’s authorial career.  We’ve actually read Cal’s book twice over the years. It’s a sound, common-sensical guide not only on how to study, but how to avoid some of the common pitfalls of study advice from well-intentioned “experts” who don’t think things through, such as giving a detailed 12-step process for reading a chapter (including coming up with 20 questions) and studying till 10pm every night, including on the biggest party nights of them all: Friday. In fact, one of the points we most appreciated about Cal’s book is his advice to set a strict quitting time each day. We’ve tried to keep to the approach each day, although we suppose it also depends on what’s meant by “quitting.” For us, that usually means diving into a book!  Also, don’t miss Cal’s Deep Work and Digital Minimalism.

An Inspiring Letter of Learning Success

Oliver from Switzerland writes: “I took your course, learning how to learn two years ago. I just wanted to say thank you for this excellent course and that it was available free of charge.

I dropped out of middle school almost 17 years ago. But I finally decided that I want to try to get my high school diploma at age 30 here in Switzerland. I had to start from zero at pretty much every subject and even learn a new required language (French). Though I quit my job 18 months ago and started studying full time, it seemed like a long shot, because unlike others I didn’t have the finances to attend a night school or get tutoring help. During the whole time I was worried, but for nothing. Thanks to you and some others, I officially passed all of my exams with flying colors.  Your book helped cement the strategies as well, and now I get to study at one of the best higher learning institutions in the world (ETHZ). For me, it was also more useful to stay on each subject for 3 to 4 Pomodoro’s (about two hours), and then switch subjects. It helped me a lot with scheduling my Pomodoros. For your newsletter, I would also like to to recommend Cal Newport’s How to Become a Straight-A Student. 

Your Coursera course helped me a lot in more ways than just learning. Because I found out how important sleep and exercise are, I even live much healthier nowadays. I started exercising only because I found out through learning how to learn, how important it is for memory. I changed my night owl schedule to sleep better, and this lead to me eating better and even quitting smoking (about 18 months too now). Best regards and with eternal gratitude.

Binaural Beats

One topic that trendy learners are often fascinated by is that of “binaural beats.”  In this unusual phenomenon, one frequency, say, 300 Hz, is fed into one ear, while another frequency, say, 325 Hz, is fed into the other ear.  Surprisingly, due to the intervening neural circuitry, a person only detects the frequency difference—in this case, 25 Hz. The binaural beat seems to entrain brain waves to go with the flow of the frequencies. Higher frequencies of 16-24 Hz appear to enhance focus , while lower frequencies of 8-13 Hz appear to promote relaxation.  Yes, the science is real—although this doesn’t appear to be a major effect. (Here’s a small study of the effects on long-term memory—20 Hz helps, while 5 Hz hinders. And here’s another study related to focus.) Binaural beats can be monotonous or even grating on their own, so they are often embedded in music or “pink” noise.  Does this perhaps mean that for learners with lower working memory capacity, the tradeoff of any potential increase in focus from binaural beats might be lost due to the effects of the music? Feel free to comment in the discussion forum here if you have any experience or recommended websites related to binaural beats.

Apprendre comment apprendre (ACA)

The French version of Learning How to Learn, Apprendre comment apprendre (ACA), will be launched later this fall.  Dr. Nicole Charest, French lead for ACA, and her team are currently looking for French speaking people who might be interested in participating in its beta-testing in October.  For more information please see the following communiqué. 

Guide the Founding of a Non-for-profit Organization to Encourage People to Read More Books

The father of a 16-year old boy, Steven Wang is doing a project to encourage teenagers and young adults to read books. With his encouragement, his son has read about 45 books within one year in Grade 10, including Learning How to Learn, Mindshift and A Mind for Numbers.  Steven says: “Most people seem to be spending too much time on social media, video games and screens. I am planning to co-found a non-for-profit organization to encourage people to read more great books.”  Steven asks if LHTLers might have any suggestions and ideas to startup the project.  If you might have any suggestions for Steven, please post in the discussion forum here.

Young people need to understand technical subjects in today’s world

Here’s an interview by Caroline Smrstik Gentner in BOLD (the Blog on Learning and Development). Key grafs:

“Clearly society believes learning is important, because so many countries devote 12 to 16 years to giving people an education. But there are never any courses in how to learn effectively. It’s like: we’re going to throw all this information at you and see what sticks. And if nothing sticks, that’s too bad for you.

“Worse yet, we put the onus on teachers to teach the kids, with some help from parents. But how can we expect children to learn effectively if we don’t teach them how?

“Children who are lucky enough to be in a strong family, with access to good schools, can pick up effective learning by example or, to some degree, on their own. But what about the others? Their lives are predetermined by the first six to eight years of education. If they get a bad education—especially a bad math education—it can’t just be fixed with a simple remedial course later.”

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

Grapes of Math

Posted on September 13, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Grapes of Math, by Greg Tang. We’ve recently become aware of Greg’s work as a math educator. He came about his calling through a circuitous path—first earning a B.A. and M.A. degrees in Economics from Harvard, and later an M.A. degree in Math Education from New York University. Greg is certified as a middle and high school math teacher. His books, including the Grapes of Math, Math-terpieces, the Best of Times, and many more, are cleverly designed to allow young people to learn and become excited about math, and to learn how to problem-solve in creative ways.  Enjoy!

Science Progresses One Funeral at a Time. 

We’ve had our eye out since 2015 on an important working paper by Pierre Azoulay, professor of management at MIT, and his colleagues. The working paper has finally gone into print in the American Economic Review as “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?” An excellent summary of the study by Colleen Flaherty can be found in Inside Higher Education. Basically, the “funeral” study describes how major stars in a field can come to dominate and lock out any other approaches to that field, no matter how logically suitable those approaches might be.  Azoulay points out that, although he focused on biology, this work is relevant to many fields. As Flaherty notes:

“Following the deaths of star scientists, subfields saw an 8.6 percent increase in articles published by those scientists who had not previously collaborated with the late luminaries. Those papers were disproportionately likely to be highly cited. All effects are compared to control subfields, which are associated with superstars who did not die.

“The effects were more pronounced for those who were previously ‘outsiders’ to the subfields. 

“‘To our surprise, it is not competitors from within a subfield that assume the mantle of leadership, but rather entrants from other fields that step in to fill the void created by a star’s absence,’ the paper says. ‘Importantly, this surge in contributions from outsiders draws upon a different scientific corpus and is disproportionately likely to be highly cited…’

“Christopher Koivisto, assistant professor in biochemistry and molecular biology at the Medical University of South Carolina, said he thinks there’s ‘a dangerous tendency among scientists to become overly dogmatic within their respective field.’ And when an “outsider makes an observation or conclusion that challenges their dogma, they are reluctant to accept it.

“Too often, he said, editors and chairs of grant review committees yield to the ‘dogmatic experts.’ Scientists should ‘first evaluate the methodology,’ and if that’s ‘sound and sufficient, then we should accept the new data and interpretations that challenge our current state of knowledge.’”

We believe this paper is particularly relevant to the insular approaches sometimes seen in education.

My Childhood Schooling In The Soviet Union Was Better Than My Kids’ In U.S. Public Schools Today

This thoughtful essay by Katya Sedgwick perfectly captures some of the problems in US school systems today. She writes “…I am forever thankful to this country for taking me in and for giving me liberty. Yet when I talk to people in our community about their wishes and anxieties, they always express discontentment with U.S. schools. ‘How is it,’ some ask, ‘that we are all engineers, but our children can’t do basic math?’”

Girls’ comparative advantage in reading can largely explain the gender gap in math-related fields

This fascinating Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences article by Thomas Breda and Clotilde Napp finds that “Women remain strongly underrepresented in math-related fields. This phenomenon is problematic because it contributes to gender inequalities in the labor market and can reflect a loss of talent. The current state of the art is that students’ abilities are not able to explain gender differences in educational and career choices. Relying on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data, we show that female students who are good at math are much more likely than male students to be even better in reading. As a consequence, the difference between 15-y-old students’ math and reading abilities, which is likely to be determined by earlier socialization processes, can explain up to 80% of the gender gap in intentions to pursue math-studies and careers.” These findings are right in line with Barb’s New York Times op-ed “Make Your Daughter Practice Math, She’ll Thank You Later,” which some reform educators, mired as they can sadly be in dated approaches with little grounding in broadly replicated science, were quick to criticize. [Hat tip Kelly Papapavlou via Dynamic Ecology.]

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

A story of persecution & perseverance

Posted on September 6, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners

Book of the Week

The Wrong Kind of Muslim: An Untold Story of Persecution & Perseverance, by Qazim Rashid. This is a soul-searching book about one man’s attempt to discover why people would want to die for their faith. Not in the sense of being suicide bombers, but exactly the opposite: How can one be willing to stand fast for one’s beliefs even when faced with torture or death?  Qazim is a member of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which is deeply persecuted as heretical within Pakistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Qazim notes the Prophet Muhammad’s words that “Faith is a restraint against all violence, let no believer commit violence.” He also notes that “Islam champions universal freedom of conscience for all people of all faiths, and for all people of no faith.”  Unfortunately, as Qazim relates, pointing out these kinds of ideas nowadays, in certain places, does indeed make him The Wrong Kind of Muslim. 

This book describes little known facts such as how the first Pakistani and first Muslim to be awarded the Nobel Prize in the sciences, Abdus Salam, was disavowed by his own country for being an Ahmadi Muslim. A real eye-opener about what can happen when discrimination becomes law.

Review of Three Short Online Courses

Here’s another wonderful set of reviews from Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success. Note in particular the 20-minute course Write for Rights—a Short Guide. If you believe someone has been wrongly imprisoned, you can write to the relevant authorities to encourage their release.

Remembering What You Read

Here’s a first-rate article by polymath physician David Handel on how to read and remember what you are studying.  David’s practically useful observations are well-grounded in neuroscience—you’ll find much of use in his article.

Movie Palace Technique (Yup—that’s “Movie,” not “Memory”)

4-time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis is out with a new video on how to memorize a recipe using a variation of the memory palace technique (instead of a palace, you use the scenes from a movie). Now we’re going to have to figure out how to use this technique with Office Space (one of Barb’s all-time favorite movies).

Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale

We’ve been fans of Bobby McFerrin for decades, and this video snippet shows why. Bobby’s video is part of “Notes and Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus,” to answer the question as to whether our response to music is hard-wired or culturally determined. 

As music teacher Kurt Meyer (a friend of Barb’s from nearby Lake Orion who sent along the link) notes: When I introduce my new students to my teaching program I try to convince them that everyone is musical. Many think it is just a sales gimmick, but Bobby proves me right here.” Kurt goes on to observe: “One thing I have noticed is that everyone learns piano at about the same pace initially. I have just started with a 60-year-old woman and she was complaining that she was moving slowly. I told her that she was doing well, but I didn’t tell her that her pace matched that of a 5-year-old. My adult learners are newbies just like the kids. They seem to universally think that they should progress faster because they are adults. That can be one of the biggest barriers to them progressing. Sometimes they give up when they are doing just fine for the number of lessons they have taken.”

How One School’s Kids Tackled Math

This article describes the strong math foundation, including great “math bee” performances, that helped Strong School to “earn state recognition as a ‘School of Distinction,’ an honor given to only 160 schools in Connecticut, for its rapid growth in math scores among high-needs students.” 

“Over the past two years, Strong has focused on what experts call “math facts.” Just as in language arts, where readers are eventually supposed to recognize about 200 common words on sight without having to sound them out, students are expected to also be able to do basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division problems almost automatically.

“To help reinforce those fundamentals, Strong School has been running ‘math bees’ throughout the year. Along with a new teaching method, added after-school tutoring and a slew of other programs, those drills have helped the school nearly double its math proficiency rates in one year…” 

For Parents Looking to Help Their Child to Succeed in Math

Incidentally, if you are a parent looking to help your child build a strong math foundation, we highly recommend Smartick.

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

Horses!

Posted on August 29, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Books of the Week

Over the past few weeks, as she works on her upcoming books, Barb & her Hero Hubby Phil have been traveling the Northeast in their little trailer. (Adventurous friends from Spain are living in the Oakley house this late summer through fall to give their children a semester’s experience in US schools—try to consider doing something like this if it is in any way practicable with your family and career.)  Among the sights Barb & Phil have visited? Read on here….

Reach for your cell phone at your own risk: The cognitive costs of media choice for breaks

This intriguing study cautions against cell phone addiction—just as Cal Newport’s brilliant book Digital Minimalism has warned.   The abstract neatly summarizes the findings: “Since there is steady increase in cell phone addiction, the act of reaching for a phone between tasks, or even mid-task, is becoming more commonplace, without a true understanding about the potential cognitive costs of taking a break in this way as opposed to taking a breakthrough another medium. Methods: This experimental study included 414 participants who completed a cognitively demanding task (solving anagrams) either on paper or on a computer screen. Participants in three of four randomly assigned conditions engaged in a break task (selecting items for a hypothetical shopping list) either on a cell phone, a larger computer screen, or on a paper in the middle of the task. The fourth condition had participants engaging in both halves of the cognitive task with no break. Results: The results show that using cell phone for a break did not allow brain to recharge as effectively as the other types of breaks, both in terms of being able to perform quickly and efficiently in the second half of the task (how long it took to complete), and in terms of performance (how many anagrams were successfully solved in the second half). Discussion and conclusions: As people are increasingly addicted to their cell phones, it is important to know the unintended costs associated with reaching for this device every spare minute. Although people may assume that it is not different from any other kind of interaction or break, this study shows that the phone might be more cognitively taxing than expected.”

At Weber State University in Utah September 18th, 2019

If you live near Ogden, Utah, don’t miss Barb’s talks at Weber State University on September 18th, 2019. More information here.

Keynoting at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas Sep 19th-20th, 2019

Barb will be sharing about active learning and what it really means from a neuroscientific perspective at the Digital Education Summit 2019 at SHSU on Sep 19-20. 

Keynoting in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, September 11th, 2019

Perhaps Brazil’s biggest and most important ed-tech conference, FIRE, will be featuring Barb on September 11th. 

In Kazakhstan September 24-28, 2019

Barb will be in Almaty and Nur-Sultan (Astana) speaking on behalf of the wonderful EdGravity team in Kazakhstan. Here are the event links in English and Russian. As always, Barb would love to meet you!

In Moscow, September 30th and October 1st

Yes, Barb will be headlining for EdCrunch, the biggest ed-tech conference in Russia. Don’t miss the extended pre-conference workshop she’ll be giving on September 30th.

In Madrid, October 3rd and 4th, 2019

She’s headlining for EnlightEd, an extraordinary conference that she also spoke for last year. Big hugs in advance to her friends—and new friends-to-be!—in Spain. (Details on more events in Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia to come.)

In Kyiv, Ukraine, November 12-17, 2019

Barb is excited to help the wonderful Osvitoria Hub Grand Opening. Stay tuned for more details.

In New York City and Boston, November 19-22

Don’t miss Barb at the Harvard-MIT-Dana Alliance “Learning and the Brain” conference on November 22. She’ll also be at Touro College on Nov 20th, and KIPP Star Harlem on Nov 19th.

Skipping Ahead: In South Korea next April, 2020

Barb is looking forward to sharing at POSTECH in Pohang, South Korea on April 22, 2020.  She has one more day available in Korea on Friday, April 24—please contact Saxton Speakers Bureau at 1300 799 823 or info@saxton.com.au for inquiries.

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 Knowledge Gap

Posted on August 23, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Books of the Month

The Knowledge Gap: The hidden cause of America’s broken education system—and how to fix it, by Natalie Wexler. If you are a teacher, parent, or in any way involved in the US school system, this book should move to the very top of your list to be read today. We can’t help but quote Amazon reviewer Emily, whose review nails the subject: “Essentially, the majority of US elementary schools use language arts curriculum that attempts to teach vague ‘skills’ like ‘finding a main idea,’ ‘finding supporting evidence’ or ‘drawing conclusions’ from texts. Wexler summarizes the substantial evidence showing that reading comprehension depends on a person’s background knowledge on the subject. Students from advantaged backgrounds will pick up some background knowledge at home, topics related to history, geography, science. But these subjects have been pushed out of elementary schools to make more time for reading instruction (for testing purposes). Children from disadvantaged homes suffer disproportionately with this system. It is truly a matter of social justice.”

We were struck by examples of children confusing “civil rights” and “Civil War,” or “conservation” and “condensation” because, although they could read the terms, they had no real knowledge in long-term memory of what lay behind those terms.  This highly readable book was often hard to put down. What’s especially encouraging is that, as Wexler describes, there are solutions—great knowledge-based curricula have been developed and are being used in more and more schools.  If your school isn’t using Core Knowledge or Wit and Wisdom, it’s time to explore the possibility of change!

Nursery Rhymes for Modern Times Vol I: The Great Americans, by Philo F. Willetts, Jr. This wonderful slim volume uses some of the best of what we know about learning to help kids remember key ideas and concepts—just as Wexler recommends in The Knowledge Gap. Our brains are ‘wired’ to remember rhymes, and kids are inspired by the qualities and achievements of great people. This book is packed with great stories and information, including excerpts from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream!” Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and many more, including Barb’s personal favorite historical figure, Sequoyah. Here’s a witty excerpt on Dolly Madison:

She made enemies like one another
By inviting those who hated each other
To eat at the Madison’s table
And be as nice as they were able.

She planned her table’s seatings,
So all had friendly meetings.
Her dinners weren’t just for fun.
She got important agreements done.

Incidentally, Barb has been commanded by her daughter to spend an hour a day for several weeks at the beginning of December teaching some English to her son-in-law’s Spanish-speaking-only (at present) little brother. She’ll be using this wonderful book to help with the task. (And if you have any other advice for Barb in her first job teaching English as a second language, to help make the learning more interesting and fun, comment in the forums, here.)

I Do Recall—One of the Smartest Flashcard Apps We’ve Seen

David Handel was a mediocre student in high school, but in his second year of college he figured out some fantastic learning techniques to help him excel—he ended up graduating top in his class in medical school. You can read his story here. David has developed an app called I Do Recall (we’ve mentioned it before)—here is a demo of the even more powerful new version, which is spectacular (the app itself is here). As David writes: “The magic of iDR is that you can upload your learning materials into the app and read them there. As you come across concepts and facts that you want to remember, create a spaced-rep flashcard linked to the nugget of knowledge. When you practice the flashcard, if you struggle with the answer, click a link and the source document or video opens at the exact relevant location so you can refresh your memory.”

Barb in Delaware at Tower Hill School in Delaware and at KIPP STAR Harlem on Nov 19th

Barb will be giving four hours of lecture and workshop insights on “How Neuroscience Is Changing What We Know about Learning: Practical Insights for Instructors” at Tower Hill School —one of the nation’s finest private college preparatory schools—in Wilmington, Delaware on August 27th. And she’ll be excitedly sharing similar insights at KIPP STAR Harlem Middle School in New York City on November 19th!

Class Central’s updated ranking of top courses of all time, based on 60,000 learner reviews

Class Central has just updated its rankings to now include the top 100 courses. (Here’s the methodology behind the list.) If you’re trying to spot the best MOOCs to take, this is a great way to find guidance. And—fantastic news—all three of Barb & Terry’s courses (Learning How to Learn, Learning How to Learn for Youth, and Mindshift) have made the list! 

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