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.

No Easy Answers

Posted on March 22, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Books of the Week

In keeping with the Quillette article below, we did some background reading this week into dysfunctional people and school environments. School environments (and people!) in many parts of the US are admirable, but even supposedly well-to-do environments can have problems if administrators turn a blind eye to bullying. The seeds for bullying are fertilized when any group is privileged above others.

  • A Mother’s Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy. by Sue Klebold, the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the two Columbine High School mass murderers.  We weren’t sure what to expect when we picked this book up, but we sure weren’t expecting this sensitively-written, insightful book the ways that even the best of parenting can unintentionally go deeply astray, if only in missing subtle warning signs. An eye-opener was Sue’s admission that if she could go back and do it over, she’d not hesitate to have intruded and read her son’s diaries.  Sue understandably doesn’t want to place blame on anyone or anything else, but clearly, a poisonous atmosphere that tolerated and even encouraged bullying was an important factor in the horrific events that took place. All author profits from the book are donated to research and to charitable organizations focusing on mental health issues.
  • No Easy Answers: The Truth Behind Death at Columbine High School, by Brooks Brown and Rob Merritt. Brooks Brown was one of Dylan Klebold’s closest friends since elementary school, and he was alternately a friend and enemy of Eric Harris, the other Columbine High School killer. Like Klebold and Harris, Brown was an alienated teen who saw the dark side of the bullying and factionalism at Columbine. Brown’s efforts to alert police prior to the massacre resulted in the local police to do everything they could to smear Brown’s reputation, the better to hide their own malfeasance. A shocking look at how administrators at Columbine, through their one-sided “justice,” encouraged Columbine’s poisonous atmosphere. A quick read and an eye-opening book about how laissez-faire policies underpin sadly simmering rage.

Public Education’s Dirty Secret

This “must-read” essay in Quillette by Mary Hudson makes explicit the disastrous effects of poor administrative and educational policy. The article begins: “Bad teaching is a common explanation given for the disastrously inadequate public education received by America’s most vulnerable populations. This is a myth. Aside from a few lemons who were notable for their rarity, the majority of teachers I worked with for nine years in New York City’s public school system were dedicated, talented professionals. Before joining the system I was mystified by the schools’ abysmal results. I too assumed there must be something wrong with the teaching. This could not have been farther from the truth.”

In this case, it is clear that those making laws have little idea of the power of negative emotional contagion, as is the case when problematic students are allowed to not only disrupt teaching, but to continuously force their own negative attitudes on students around them. Read the whole thing.

A Great “Tiny Tip” to Help You Achieve Your Goals

As you’ve probably noticed, we’re major fans of the videos of 4-Time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis. Here’s another great two-minute video by Nelson—this one will help ensure you’re on track with your goals.  (Oh yes, and Nelson’s infant son is one of the most adorable video props evuh.)

Barb’s Conversation with The Medical Mnemonist Chase DiMarco, (An InsideTheBoards Podcast)

Medical students have some of the most prodigious tasks in all of the learning world. Their day-to-day learning is like trying to drink water from a firehose. Although Chase DiMarco aims his podcast towards those in medical school, the reality is that most learners can benefit from the kinds of insights Chase’s podcast provides.  Enjoy this episode here.

How Many Public Universities Can ‘Go Big’ Online?

This Inside Higher Ed article describes the many public university systems and state flagships that are planning ambitious online endeavors. Paul LeBlanc, president of prominent online institution Southern New Hampshire, notes: “Take a look at who has been able to successfully scale online,” he says, citing his own institution (where the online operation was purposefully fenced off from the rest of a then-struggling university)…”There is no example where the integrated model has worked for getting any kind of scale. If you have to integrate, you will consume and kill the new thing.”

Think Tanks—How Do You Figure Out Who Is Credible?

This excellent, dispassionate article by Andrea Baertl Helguero in Medium gives a fine overview of how to figure out the credibility of a given think tank. [Hat tip: Enrique Planells Artigot]

How many colleges and universities have closed since 2016?

This informative article runs through the list of the many closures, acquisitions, and consolidations of higher education institutions since 2016, separated out by categories such as for profits, small liberal arts colleges, and major public colleges. The small listing of expansions at the end of the article gives hints about where higher education may be heading, although they missed many of the new MOOC-based programs noted 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

Nicholas and Alexandra–and the Drawbacks of Group Work

Posted on March 14, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Last week’s mention of Queen Victoria’s status as a carrier for the gene for hemophilia brought to mind what we believe to be one of the greatest biographies ever: Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, by Robert Massie.  Massie first became interested in the Russian imperial family because Massie’s own son was born with hemophilia. This gives Massie’s book an extraordinarily sensitive understanding of the tsarevitch’s hidden illness,  which ultimately led to the royal family’s murder. The story of Rasputin’s influence on the royals—along with the bizarre circumstances of Rasputin’s death—are some of the creepiest stories ever told. This is a book that’s nearly impossible to put down. One of Massie’s other books, Peter the Great: His Life and World, is our very favorite biography—it also won the Pulitzer Prize. If you’re looking for good, long audio books to take you through many driving hours, these are great choices. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

Group Work Is Less Creative—the Bigger the Group, the Less Creative It Is

Over the last fifty years or so, we’ve noticed an increasing trend towards glorification of group work in education. Group work is thought to be particularly valuable in increasing creativity. Now, along comes a remarkable study in Nature, “Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology,” revealing that group work appears to diminish creativity—the bigger the group, the less creative the work.

As this New York Times article on the work notes: “Psychologists have found that people working in larger groups tend to generate fewer ideas than when they work in smaller groups, or when working alone, and become less receptive to ideas from outside. Why that would be isn’t entirely clear, but it runs counter to intuition, said Suparna Rajaram, a professor of psychology at Stony Brook University.”
“‘We find that the product of three individuals working separately is greater than if those three people collaborate as a group,’ Dr. Rajaram said. ‘When brainstorming, people produce fewer ideas when working in groups than when working alone.’”

What’s the alternative to group work? Direct instruction—but broken up with active (“diffuse mode”) breaks, which can sometimes include work with groups.  Here’s a bit of insight into how to do this in a classroom.

MOOCs—Much Like Books—Struggle with Rock Bottom Completion Rates

This Financial Times article gives a nice overview of the strategies being employed to help nudge completion rates upwards in MOOCs.  We believe part of the challenge with current MOOCs is how they’re designed and created—videos can sometimes be so boring that it’s all you can do to swivel your head, zombie-like, back towards the screen. But notice our mini-headline here. Wouldn’t you love to know the completion rates of electronically-purchased books?  Someone, somewhere, has that data, and our guess is that it would perhaps approximate MOOC-completion rates. So, we ask, tongue-in-cheek, should maybe we get rid of books? [Article hat tip: Ramiah Ramasubramanian MD, FRCA)

Online Students Multitask More (Or Do They?)

This article by whip-smart Doug Lederman in Inside Higher Ed describes study findings that show how online students seem to be more inclined to multitask than they are in face-to-face classes “presumably because instructors and peers are watching.” But note the extensive discussion of problems with the study. For one thing, the study asks students to remember their activities in online versus face-to-face classes—“remembering” can be a dicey proposition, as other researchers studying food intake have found. And as online instructor Laura Gibbs noted: “Online and face-to-face are delivery modes; they are not course designs… To say that online courses are alike because they are online is like saying that rocky road ice cream and tater tots are the same because you find them in the freezer section.” Finally, one can question the quality of “in house” university online courses, compared to MOOCs, built with economies of scale from a presumably more select pool of instructors.

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

Victoria’s Daughters

Posted on March 7, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Victoria’s Daughters, by Jerrold Packard.  Historians and writers understandably like to focus on Queen Victoria, whose lengthy reign had such an impact on Great Britain and Europe. (Long ago, we read and enjoyed Stanley Weintraub’s Victoria—many a biography has come out since.) But Packard instead focuses on Victoria’s daughters who, largely through their inheritance of the gene for hemophilia, passed like battering rams through the royal houses of Europe, among other effects, squarely taking out the Romanov dynasty and setting in motion the communist revolution. Victoria’s ill-fated grandson Kaiser Wilhelm suffered injuries during birth which appear to have affected his cognition—what would the world have been like without this key figure in the launch of WWI? Victoria and Albert’s great intentions to do good, through the vicissitudes of fate, spun off into sometimes shocking disarray. A memorable book.

Dyscalculia Interventions

Here’s an excellent overview of dyscalculia, and the lack of expertise in diagnosing the condition as compared to, for example, dyslexia. We do take a bit of a side issue with the article’s ending statement that dyscalculia is a lifelong condition—matters may sometimes be more hopeful than that. Research by Michels, O’Gorman, and Kucian, “Functional hyperconnectivity vanishes in children with developmental dyscalculia after numerical interventions,” showed that “children with developmental dyscalculia exhibited abnormally high hyperconnectivity in the frontal, parietal, temporal, and visual regions prior to the training; in other words, they were engaging too many brain regions when attempting to order numerals.” After training, those with dyscalculia become indistinguishable from the control group. The authors concluded that “number line training normalized the… prior aberrant neural activity and efficiency and generated widespread changes across the distributed brain regions involved…”  (Cognitive Foundations for Improving Mathematical Learning, Geary, Berch, Koepke,  pp. 16-17) The key to all this, of course, is early intervention when dyscalculia is suspected.

Here also is an article describing how reform math educators may be rethinking some of their approaches as a result of insights from neuroscience about helping children with learning disabilities. If so, bravo!

Do You Know a Youngster Who Loves Learning About Animals?

Check out the books by children’s author Jennifer Keats Curtis. She has books on everything from salamanders to owls to squirrels, and much more!

Noise, Learning, and Restaurants

We love learning from our friends as we travel around the world. One thing that’s taken us aback, however, is that it’s hard to learn from someone if you can’t hear them—which is often the case in restaurants. In fact, noise can make it hard to comprehend anything at all. (This paper, “The effects of classroom noise on the reading comprehension of adolescents,” gives a sense of related findings). We recently were in an excellent, but memorably painful curry house in London where the noise was so loud that the waiter could only shrug helplessly as we shouted our orders (“I’ve worked here too long,” he shouted in return, “I’m deaf.”) We also had a fine dinner in The Lamb, a small Victorian pub with a no-music policy. Much as we love music, we loved The Lamb as much for its advertisement of relative peace as for its great food!

Anyway, this is all a long lead up to this excellent, timeless article by Julia Belluz in Vox on noise in restaurants.

Not All Sleep Is Equal When It Comes to Cleaning the Brain

We’ve long known that sleep is integral to being able to learn well. But now researchers are beginning to discover that the depth of sleep has an effect on how well your brain can wash away waste and toxic proteins. As this Science Daily article reveals: “Because sleep often becomes increasingly lighter and more disrupted as we become older, the study reinforces and potentially explains the links between aging, sleep deprivation, and heightened risk for Alzheimer’s disease.” The article goes on to note: “The synchronized waves of neural activity during deep slow-wave sleep, specifically firing patterns that move from front of the brain to the back, coincide with what we know about the flow of [cerebral spinal fluid] in the glymphatic system…It appears that the chemicals involved in the firing of neurons, namely ions, drive a process of osmosis which helps pull the fluid through brain tissue.” [Hat tip: Jennifer Curtis]

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

 

 

Genius Foods

Posted on February 28, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Books of the Week

This week, we read two different books on how diet can improve your brain’s health.  

  • Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain for Life, by Max Lugavere and Paul Grewal M.D. This is a well-researched and beautifully-written book that covers some of the same ground as other books we’ve reviewed regarding sleep, the microbiome, and fat. But it puts everything together in one “life healthy” package that also includes food. Well-produced extra virgin olive oil, incidentally, is considered of standout importance. (Hey, we knew also that from reading the outstanding Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil.) Genius Foods is a “most sold” book of the week on Amazon.
  • Brain Food: The Surprising Science of Eating for Cognitive Power, by Lisa Mosconi.  Dr. Mosconi is the Director of the Women’s Brain Initiative and Associate Director of the Alzheimer’s Prevention Clinic at Weill Cornell Medical College, where she also serves as an Associate Professor of Neuroscience in Neurology and Radiology. Mosconi’s book couldn’t be more different from Genius Foods—for one thing, grains are big for Mosconi, where avoiding grains is fundamental to Genius Foods.  We got the sense that Brain Food was based on information cherry-picked to coincide with the way Mosconi was raised, rather than an impartial review of recent research literature. And sometimes her recommendations are based on rocky research ground: for example, she refers glowingly to the herb ashitaba without regard for the fact that in vivo research results have not been conducted, and royal jelly is touted notwithstanding the lack of research evidence. Mosconi’s frequent mentions of her website—a dozen repetitions of the URL throughout the book—became tiresome.

Barb’s Upcoming Talks in Azerbaijan, Spain, Italy, ASU-GSV in San Diego, and Kentucky

Barb will be in:

  • Baku, Azerbaijan speaking for Yarat, with a 1 hour keynote on March 7th, and two half day workshops for students on March 8th and 9th. Here is the Facebook page where you can sign up, and here’s an article about the upcoming event. (Incidentally,  Learning How to Learn is the only MOOC on Coursera we are aware of that has complete video subtitles in Azeri, thanks to Ali Gara and his team.)
  • Valencia, Spain, March 11th for INTED, describing “How Neuroscience is Changing What We Know about Learning: Practical Insights for Instructors.” There is a 45 minute keynote and a 1 hour and 15 minute active workshop.
  • Naples, Italy, March 13th at the University of Naples Federico II, with in-house discussions and presentations on MOOC-making.
  • ASU GSV, San Diego, California, April 10th at 11:00 am for a “fireside chat” with Jeff Maggioncalda, the CEO of Coursera.
  • Lexington Kentucky, University of Kentucky Economics Teaching Workshop, April 13.

Barb would love to meet you if you’re at any of these events—be sure to come up and say hello!

Class Central’s Best Online Courses of 2018

In case you missed it, Barb and Terry’s, and newcomer Greg Hammons’ new MOOC Learning How to Learn for Youth is in the Top 10 of Class Central’s list of all 2,300 MOOCs released in 2018—a special feat considering that it wasn’t even released until the end of November. Here also is an article about the course’s launch by Arizona State University—the #1 university in the US for technical innovation.

Teachers’ Notes to Accompany Learning How to Learn for Youth—Great Active Exercises!

You asked for it, and now you’ve got it!  In the additional resources for each video in our MOOC Learning How to Learn for Youth, you will now find detailed teachers’ notes, which include summaries, deeper insights, and plenty of active exercises for you to do with your students in class. Enjoy!

The Devil’s in the Details—How Much Direct Instruction Is Too Much?

Our discussion above of the value of active exercises and group work might seem to violate the tenets of the important paper we’ve often cited: “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.”  The devil, it seems, is in the details. Too little guidance can indeed pose a challenge to students. But on the other hand, unrelenting direct instruction is also harmful—there seems to be a limit to how much students can generally absorb before they need to take a micro-break and do a test run themselves with the materials. (These microbreaks are often where students discover they didn’t understand as much as they thought.) As cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist David Geary 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. Speaking, for example is primary, while writing is secondary. See the abstract of Geary’s original paper on this concept here.)

Our readings have further led us to Chapter 9 of the book Evolutionary Perspectives on Child Development and Education, edited by David C. Geary and Daniel B. Berch.  If you go to the Google books version, you can get a few excerpts of the chapter, including, perhaps most importantly, the magnificent graph on page 240. This graph develops a 3-dimensional way of visualizing the degree of direct instruction that might be optimal, given other important factors such as whether the subject-matter is, for example, more socially-oriented, or is evolutionarily novel (eg math or reading).  It will be exciting to see the research unfold with the many educational researchers!

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

Coddling of the American Mind

Posted on February 21, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Books of the Week

This week we read two related books on movements that are emerging from college campuses and affecting society as a whole—and not necessarily in a positive way.

  • The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, by Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning. It can be dizzying to understand the new “victimhood” culture that is arising in opposition to the more traditional US culture of dignity.  “Victimhood culture,” as Campbell and Manning define it “is marked by a low tolerance for slight. It produces a correspondingly low tolerance for all sorts of discomfort and difficulty, even if these are not considered offenses as such. Victimhood culture is also distinguished by a tendency to ask third parties for support in conflicts, and to do so in ways that advertise or exaggerate one’s victimization.”  This excellent book puts a helpful framework on a seemingly helpful movement that, given our past work with the Soviets, we know can lead to problematic outcomes for individuals as well as society. (We can’t help but also recommend Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror: A Reassessment and The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhi-Sui, Mao’s personal doctor.) Campbell and Manning’s wrap up gives as good an overview of sociology as we’ve seen—between their fearless assessment of societal trends and their mastery of their field, those two authors carry the ground-breaking tradition of the great early sociologist Ibn Khaldun. (Read about Ibn Khaldun’s breakthroughs and adventures in Peter Turchin’s not-to-be-missed War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires. Okay, so Turchin does go on a bit about the Cossacks…)
  • The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Where Campbell and Manning’s Rise of Victimhood Culture views the microaggression, safe space, and trigger warning trends from a larger perspective, as sociologists, Lukianoff and Haidt’s book also goes into more depth at a personal level about how these kinds of trends can be harmful. But this is actually an uplifting book overall, with plenty of insights from cognitive behavioral therapy to help you get, and keep, your own life in order.

A Wonderful New Video from 4-Time US Memory Champ Nelson Dellis on Making Life Memorable

This is one of Nelson’s very best videos, growing from one of his always-intriguing adventures, on how to make life itself memorable. Don’t miss it. (And read, if you haven’t already, Nelson’s useful book Remember It!) If you want to get away from the “coddling” mindset, follow Nelson’s advice!

Reproducibility  in Science

Here is a very informative video on replicability in science by Dr. Shai Silberberg, a Program Director at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH). As Shai notes: “These days it appears that every other week in either the lay or scientific literature highlighting problems with the ability to reproduce scientific findings. Sadly, many of these publications either implicitly or explicitly imply wrongdoing on the part of scientists, unjustly tainting the scientific community. So to help put things in perspective, let’s describe what it means when results are reproducible, and then identify factors that might lead to low reproducibility.” Following the points in this video could do much to begin tackling the reproducibility challenge.

Sleight of Hand in Reporting on Educational Funding

The types of problems Shai Silberberg alludes to in his video—many of which might be attributed to pathologies of altruism—can also be found in government-issued reports. For example, the relatively recent report on funding inequity on education tackles an important topic, but it is perhaps most notable for its sleight-of-hand in reporting data.  As Commissioner Gail Heriot observes in her dissent, the report claims that the highest poverty districts receive far less than the lowest poverty districts, and districts with the largest numbers of students of color receive much less than districts with fewer students of color.   But, Heriot continues “But the figures—which came from an advocacy group, not from the Commission’s own research—are for state and local expenditures only. Even assuming arguendo that they are otherwise accurate… they do not take into account billions of dollars worth of federal funding, most of which is targeted at low-income, high-need students… When all sources of funding are taken into account…on average, more dollars are spent on these school districts.”

In other words, to get the results they wanted to report, it seems the authors of the report used data from an advocacy group which is suspect by reason of its provenance, and further massaged their message to leave off one of the most significant school funding sources.  

Heriot goes on to note: “If school districts that serve large numbers of students below the poverty line arguably need more money than other schools, why am I so interested in establishing that, if anything, more actual dollars, on average, are spent on school districts with high proportions of poor or minority students? Because if the total expenditures of actual dollars were really as the Commission alleged, it would suggest a much more inequitable situation than actually exists. It fuels racial and class resentment based on a misunderstanding. The real problems (as usual) are more complex and nuanced.” Heriot’s dissent is worth reading in its entirety. An important issue as well with these types of reporting biases is that they result in loss of respect for government-commissioned reports.

Help on the Way with Replication in Education Studies

Larry Hedges, chair of the department of statistics at Northwestern University, has won the Yidan Prize for “outstanding accomplishments” in education (Anant Agarwal, founder of EdX, also won $4m). As the article notes, “Hedges shoots high and is optimistic about the possibilities for education science. He believes that research can uncover ways to bring about real improvements in teaching, learning and how educational systems are organised – but worries that there is still too much emphasis on finding a ‘magic bullet’ while too many potentially valuable improvements are overlooked because their effects are small.” Hedges is using half the money he received from the Yidan Prize to tackle the issue of replicability in educational research.  Let us hope that government funding sources follow suit.

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 Bottleneck Rules

Posted on February 15, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

This week, we read the simple The Bottleneck Rules: How To Get More Done at Work, Without Working Harder, by Clarke Ching. This is a short, quick read that gives plenty of examples of bottlenecks (we’ll never look at lines in a coffee shop—or elsewhere—in the same way). Bottleneck Rules gets to some of the key ideas of the theory of constraints much more quickly than the famous The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement; at the same time, Clarke’s breezy style makes the book altogether fun. [Hat tip: José António Basto]

Do Stimulants Really Make the Brain Work Better?

Stimulants are something students sometimes look towards to help them with their focus. (We’re fans of caffeine, but that’s as far as we go.)  This article in Psychology Today by Seth J. Gillihan Ph.D., interviewing well-known neuroscientist Martha Farah, explores whether stimulants like methylphenidate (Ritalin) and mixed amphetamine salts (Adderall) really work to help you in your learning. When Martha and her colleagues “set out to explore the effects of stimulants on college students’ performance, they wondered not if the drugs would enhance cognitive ability but rather how big the effect would be, and whether certain mental abilities would be affected more than others. What they found was something quite different.”

Barb’s Cheery Welcome to “Tao of Learning” Learners—A Special Chinese Version of Learning How to Learn!
The Chinese version of “Tao of Learning (TOL)” was created by two “landing” instructors in Greater China—Kenzen Chen and Moo Ming Poo—along with Barb and Terry. TOL is tri-annually offered on XuetangX, CNMOOC, NetEase, and ewant, the major Greater Chinese MOOC platforms. College students may earn general education credits by completing TOL online (institutional rules apply). To welcome Chinese learners in the spring of 2019, Barb took an exciting video moment to say hi to all TOLers—check out her cheery greetings (and Kenzen’s, too)! (Note how the Taiwanese production crew—her favorite team member “Mushroom” in particular—got Barb all dolled up Chinese make-up style!)

Do You Want to Discover What Actually Works in Education?

Then you’ll want to check out the What Works Clearinghouse, which reviews existing research on different programs, products, practices, and policies in education. The goal of the Clearinghouse is to provide educators with the information they need to make evidence-based decisions. The Clearinghouse focuses on the results from high-quality research to answer the question “What works in education?”

All too often, teachers have programs or practices foisted upon them that have little or no backup research that supports their use—this clearinghouse gives tools to explore when you might be having a funny feeling about whether some new innovation in education is based on a solid research foundation or a fad.  Well worth exploring.

Nearly All Teens in the US Are Short on Sleep

Parents could have already told you what this important study found.

A Collection of Free, In-Depth Book Summaries From Arthur Worsley over at FASTER TO MASTER

We’ve been following Arthur’s growing list of book summaries over at FASTER TO MASTER ever since his first excellent synthesis of our very own A Mind For Numbers. We love that they’re all free to read. And also that he’s just released a free 10-step cheat sheet of the exact process he uses to write them! Expert Tip: In the “Learn Faster” section of the site you’ll find Google’s top-ranked reading list of books on “Learning How to Learn” (with plenty of summaries). Read more 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

 

The Brave Learner

Posted on February 7, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

We received a pre-publication of Julie Bogart’s magnificent The Brave Learner: Finding Everyday Magic in Homeschool, Learning, and Life.  Barb’s cover blurb says it all: “A masterpiece. This is the deepest, most meaningful book on parenting I have ever read. If you want to raise your child to be a happy learner, whether via homeschooling or conventional schooling, read this book.” If you are a parent or parent-to-be, get this book! Nice for audio, too. (We’re had dinner with Julie—her voice is great!)

A Nature study reveals that stupid people are loud, proud, and oblivious
This article pithily encapsulates recent findings from Nature, the world’s foremost research journal. Researchers concluded that some of the most outspoken individuals suffer from an “illusion of knowledge.” “Though it was clear that their extreme opinions were cultivated from almost zero information, the subjects firmly believed that they knew the most. This disparity extends far outside the scientific realm, the study says.”

Of course, we already knew this. 😉

Genius Advertising Copywriter? Or Natural Neuroscientist?

LHTLer Kamlesh Parmar wrote to say “I am so happy to tell you that my son and I have benefited tremendously from your course Learning How to Learn on Coursera. I found this rare (1994) and insightful video of copywriting genius Eugene Schwartz. Surprisingly, he tells the similar techniques using a timer, the diffuse mode, and so forth.”

We agree—what a fascinating video this is about the entire creative process!  Incidentally, Schwartz’s magic lives on in the advertising cognoscenti—his now long out-of-print book Breakthrough Advertising, for example, sells for $299 used.

How To Boost Your Creativity The Einstein Way—With Combinatory Play

This nice article by Amy Rigby on Trello gives an overview of ideas related to how to be more creative through combinatory play. (We love the illustrative snippet from Office Space, a classic comedy that hits home because it’s so close to truth.) [Hat tip Joe Muskatel.]

Universities Face Increased Pressure from Job Programs That Generate Results, Not Just Debt

Imagine a school that trains software engineers in exchange for a portion of their income for a couple of years.  This process is taking place now in Lambda School, a Y Combinator company that trains students in software engineering in exchange for a slice of their income for a few years that recently raised $30 million from investors in a Series B round. Universities get their pay even when their students can’t get jobs—an incentive to push anything, even fluff.  Lambda School gets paid only when students have jobs.  Is this the wave of the future? Read more here.

Potential Cure for PTSD

Here’s an interesting article about work-in-progress using electric therapy to potentially make a significant improvement in those suffering from PTSD, depression, and anxiety. “The theory that underpins MeRT posits that many… problems share a common origin: a person’s brain has lost the beat of its natural information-processing rhythm, what Won calls the ‘dominant frequency.’  Your dominant frequency is how many times per second your brain pulses alpha waves. “We’re all somewhere between 8 and 13 hertz. What that means is that we encode information 8 to 13 times per second. You’re born with a signature. There are pros and cons to all of those. If you’re a slower thinker, you might be more creative. If you’re faster, you might be a better athlete…” This one’s worth reading the whole thing.

45 MOOC-Based Master’s Degrees Worldwide

Some 45 university masters programs are following in the footsteps laid by Georgia Tech with their pioneering Online Master of Science in Computer Science.  Thinking of getting a high quality, low-cost masters degree online via MOOCs? Read the line up of available programs 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

The 100-Year Life

Posted on January 31, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity, by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott. We had never really thought about the consequences of lifespans in today’s world, where people have a good chance of living to 100.  Living so long means many societal changes. For one thing, it’s just not as possible as it once was to retire at 65 and live comfortably over the next 35 years without having planned wisely. In fact, retiring at 65 may not be the best option at all.  This book gives an insightful overview of how to effectively plan your own life, and reinvent yourself as necessary to live long and prosper. Good for audio. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

Stuck? Go to a Conference!

Are you feeling bored in your job—stuck in a rut, and not sure how to get out of it? Is your circle of friends smaller than you’d like, limited to only the people in your city or town? Are you looking for motivation to make change?  Here’s our suggestion—go to a conference in whatever you are interested in. Is it photography? Writing? Entrepreneurship? Rock hunting (or rock music!)? Language learning? Learning math if you are an older adult? Whatever it is, you can find a conference on it!  Yes, you’ll have to pay for registration, travel, and a place to stay. But you can find ways to do things on the cheap, and you’ll almost certainly find that taking matters into your own hands and seeing and meeting inspirational people will make an enormous difference in breaking you out of your rut. Go for it!  

Reviews of Learning How to Learn for Youth!

Here’s a great (well, almost great 🙂 ) review of our newest MOOC, Learning How to Learn for Youth by the ever-curious and indefatigable Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success.  Also, don’t miss this wonderful review in the Times Educational Supplement of our book Learning How to Learn by polymath Daisy Christodoulou.

Barb’s 3 talks in London today and tomorrow

Barb is excited because she will be meeting and speaking with Daisy Christodoulou (author of the fantastic Seven Myths About Education) in London late this afternoon as she speaks at St. Matthias School. Barb will also be speaking on learning at 1:00 pm today (Feb 1) London time at the London House Large Common Room at Goodenough College. (Incidentally, today, Feb 1, is Barb and her Hero hubby Philip’s 35th wedding anniversary!) Barb will speak on a quite different topic—pathological altruism and altruism bias—12:00 pm tomorrow (Feb 2) at the William Goodenough House Large Common Room at Goodenough College.

MOOCS Stats and Trends for 2018

Here’s an important article from Class Central that provides a clarifying overview of the world of MOOCs in 2018.  If you read one article this year about what’s going on in the world of MOOCs, this should be the article.

Language Learning

Are you someone who can’t seem to learn a language or doesn’t know where to start? Then Barb highly recommends “Learning How to Learn a Language,” an online course designed by Dr. Shane Dixon and Dr. Justin Shewell from Language Warriors. The course uncovers the secrets of the most successful language learners, and what those learners do to build “language ecosystems,” environments that power up language learning.  These two professors are fun-loving course designers, and Barb had a great time with them at Arizona State University last March at the Coursera conference—in fact, you’ll even see her as a guest presenter in their course! Both Shane and Justin are LTHLers themselves, and Barb just loved how they cleverly connect language learning principles with the principles we discuss in Learning How to Learn. These guys are some of the most creative online course designers out there, and you are sure to have a great time while receiving powerful and practical tools.

For a short time only, members of the LHTL community can receive a significant discount (more than 60%!) to take the course and join this massive language learning community—with over 40 different languages spoken!  To receive the offer, just click here. This offer ends on February 6th.  

Learning and Linking with Flashcards
Physician David Handel recently launched iDoRecall.com, a web application that allows you to create targeted flashcards with direct links to your learning materials. As you read your materials, you create digital flashcards which are scheduled for practice by a spaced-repetition algorithm. If you’ve forgotten an answer, there is a link on the back of each flash card that leads to the exact spot in your learning materials where the flashcard was created, so that you can quickly reread the source content refresh your memory and return to their practice session. The flash card approach allowed David to graduate number one in his medical school class. You can try iDoRecall.com for free for the first 30 days.

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

Secret Life of Fat

Posted on January 24, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

This week’s fascinating book is The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You, by Sylvia Tara PhD. What we love about this book is not only that it brings fat to life as the fascinating substance it is, but Tara is also a great story-teller, able to wrap us into the lives of various genetic syndromes that manifest as humans becoming too fat or too thin. We picked this book up, oddly enough, because of the title’s resonance with the book The Hidden Life of Trees, a favorite book of ours. Whatever, we’re glad we found it!

Barb in Segovia, Spain, Jan 28, London on Feb 1, and Vancouver, BC on Feb 9

If you happen to be in Segovia, Spain on January 28th, Barb will be speaking for IE University there—please just email the event coordinator to request to reserve a spot.  You can still purchase tickets for her talk at ResearchEd in Vancouver, BC, on February 9th. ResearchEd is a fantastic event for solid, research-based insights into real K-12 education—you won’t want to miss it in any case. Barb’s speech at St. Matthias School in London is now waiting list only, but give it a shot if you’re in London. Barb would love to meet you at any of these events!

Barb’s talk for the Fundación Rafael del Pino in Madrid
Fundación Rafael del Pino is one of Spain’s greatest philanthropic organizations—Spain, and the world, is lucky to have them.  See Barb’s talk two nights ago on Learning How to Learn for the Foundation here.

Smartick—A Great Program for Helping Children to Learn Math

When Barb was in Madrid, she was fortunate to be able to visit Smartick’s headquarters.  Barb is a big fan of Smartick–she sees it as one of the most well-designed programs available to help kids gain the solid foundation of math practice that they often miss in today’s often hit-or-miss education approaches.) Here are some short videos that were taken during her visit:

Our Friend Nelson Dellis, 4-Time US Memory Champion, in the Wall Street Journal—Plus, a New Video!

Here is a fascinating peek into Nelson Dellis’s memory methods. Key graf:  

“For a computer, ‘a piece of information is just a piece of information,’ Mr. Dellis observes. Only a person can give it meaning: ‘It can bond to another piece of information. That creates another thought or idea.’ Multiply that by years’ worth of experiences, and you end up with ‘a web of associations’ that are ‘specific to you’—an inner life. It is by harnessing that creative process that Mr. Dellis boosts his ability to process data.”

Don’t forget Nelson’s great book, Remember It! Nelson also has a new video on how to create a more complex number system to memorize more numbers. As with all of Nelson’s videos, enjoy!

People Who Read Live Longer and Have More Health Benefits

This nice article in the “Self Development Secrets” blog provides a very readable overview of the health benefits of reading.  One of many key grafs: “…reading is better at reducing stress levels than listening to music or drinking a cup of tea. The theory behind this is that reading absorbs the mind in a different world that allows people to escape their anxiety. Reading a newspaper might not have the same effect though because many stories can add further stress.”

Note-taking—is Writing by Hand Really Better?

Virtually anything we read nowadays about note-taking emphasizes the value and importance of writing notes out by hand. But is that really true?  This fascinating research paper by Jansen et al, “An integrative review of the cognitive costs and benefits of note-taking,” points out that research on medical school students has found that typing on a laptop seems to work just as well as writing notes out longhand. The real trick in note-taking relates to understanding your working memory capacity. Strangely enough, those with low working memory capacity may do better by fully focusing on the lecture while it’s being given, and borrowing someone else’s notes for review purposes (those who review notes the same day the lecture is given fare best in their studies).  This echoes a long-ago finding by Kiewra and DuBois along the lines that using others’ notes, while focusing intently yourself on the lecture, can allow you to do almost as well as taking the notes yourself.

But… it’s never simple. This article, “Only Three Fingers Write, but the Whole Brain Works,” concludes that “a clear recommendation might be to combine traditional handwritten notes with visualizations (e.g., drawings, shapes, arrows, symbols) to facilitate and optimize learning. Sensory-motor information for the control of (pen) movement is picked up via the senses, and because of the involvement of the senses they leave a wider mark on establishing pathways in the brain, resulting in neural activity that governs all higher levels of cognitive processing and learning.” It would have been nice to know what the authors would have made of the contrary findings of Jansen’s nearly simultaneously published paper.  (Here’s an interesting-looking book on good note-taking.)

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

Isabella: The Warrior Queen

Posted on January 18, 2019 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

One of our tricks for finding good books, especially biographies, is to look through the books at historical tourist sites that we happen to visit.  In this way, we happened to come across (at the Royal Alcázar of Seville), the extraordinary book Isabella: The Warrior Queen, by Kirstin Downey. What a book! This great biography of Isabella of Castile, “the controversial Queen of Spain who sponsored Christopher Columbus’s journey to the New World, established the Spanish Inquisition, and became one of the most influential female rulers in history” goes into the psyche of this extraordinary woman—an increasingly black-and-white thinker whose efforts to do good sometimes rebounded for ill through many centuries. (Shades of pathological altruism.) Great biographies often take side tangents into other fascinating areas: Downey doesn’t disappoint with her descriptions of how Columbus blew one of the greatest discoveries of modern European history, the back and forth of the Ottoman and the European empires, Isabella’s focus on her children’s education, the origins of syphilis, and much more.  Amongst the best biographies we’ve ever read—we had trouble putting this book down. It’s also nice for audio.

Olive Oil Touring

Speaking of Spain, while near Sevilla, Barb happened to visit an absolutely marvelous olive oil producer, Basilippo, with tours in either English or Spanish—or both languages, if your group is split! (Barb was with her daughter’s Spanish-speaking-only Chilean in-laws.)  If you’re looking for something cool to do on holiday, you couldn’t do better than to plan an educational tour about olive oil production at Basilippo—cool tastings, too!  High-quality olive oil is a proven anti-inflammatory—and it’s just darn healthy. A good place to learn more about olive oil is at the Olive Oil Times.  And of course, one of our favorite books about olive oil is Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. Now we’re waiting for someone to make a MOOC on olive oil production and tasting!

Have You Signed Up for the Learning How to Learn MOOC Without Completing It?

LHTLer Jae P wrote to say thank you for the Learning How to Learn course, noting: “I signed up for the course years ago and never got around to finishing it. On a whim I decided to go back and start the course over from scratch … and in doing so I was able to learn so much about myself and what makes us as humans able to retain knowledge. I found the section about procrastination incredibly helpful and gave me the viewpoint that I needed to tackle procrastination in an effective way.”

Can MOOCs Predict the Future of Online Education?

This article in Harvard Magazine provides context for a recent article in Science by Justin Reich and José Ruipérez-Valiente. In the Harvard article, Bharat Anand, who recently assumed oversight of HarvardX, notes: “The paper does a nice job in summarizing some of what we have already learnt from the past few years of ‘the MOOC experiment’: merely supplying more content online, or better-quality content, or free content will not create transformational outcomes.” But the paper’s analysis of historical MOOC data “does a better job of interpreting what these data have meant for the early stages, and evolution, of MOOC platforms in particular,” Anand says, “than it does in extrapolating from them to draw implications about the future of online learning in general.”

9 Simple Strategies for Reading More

Here’s the strategies that Ali Binazir, MD, MPhil uses to plow through 130+ books a year.  Key graf: “Once you make this shift, from reading only when all the other important stuff is done, to reading being the important stuff, from giving it the dregs of your time to making it your prime-time activity, everything changes. And really, short of your relationships and life-sustaining activities, what’s more important than 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