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.

Atomic Habits

Posted on December 28, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, by James Clear. Sometimes it’s valuable to go back over your life and habits to get a sense of how productive you are—and how much more productive you could be so as to leave room for family, friends, and fun.  James’ book starts with a bang (literally—he was banged in the face with a baseball bat), and takes off from there to step through how to make tiny, doable changes that add up to big results. If you’re looking to make changes in the New Year, this book will be invaluable.  A useful book on reforming your habits, whether or not you’ve read Charles’ Duhigg’s The Power of Habit (which we also really liked). Atomic Habits is also good for audio. (Two free audiobooks may be possible through this link.)

The Top Free Online University Courses of 2018, Ranked by Popularity

The ever-informative Class Central is back with another great list—this one is a ranked listing of the most popular free online university courses of 2018.  #1 on the list? You guessed it, Learning How to Learn!

How to Memorize Stuff by Creating Simple Links

4-Time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis is back with another great memory tips video.  This one shows how to memorize a listing somewhat similar to what you might have to memorize in a class, or for gaining cultural expertise (we won’t spoil the surprise by saying what the list pertains to). Watching Nelson’s memory tips series gives you a great way to build your memory abilities gradually and naturally.  (And don’t forget to cement these memory tips even more strongly into place with Nelson’s superb book, Remember It!)

Perusall

We were recently pointed towards Perusall, developed by Harvard’s Eric Mazur, which provides a methodology for students to interact collaboratively with one another in their readings.  Here is a video explanation of the technology and approach. It looks fascinating—we have reservations only in that it seems that books must be purchased through Perusall to be workable in the Perusall system, which is definitely clunky and potentially more costly for students.  But if your course is more handout-centered, this approach could be a win. [Hat tip: Dennis Wilson.]

“Food for Fitness” Podcast

In this podcast, Scott Baptie and Barb talk about how you can learn how to learn, why our learning ability tends to decline as we grow older, and some learning hacks you can to do learn more effectively.

Barb’s Reading Habits

LHTLer Masako Atake asked Barb about how she’s able to read so many books.  Here’s her answer:

“I generally read from about 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm or so roughly four to five evenings a week.  I read pretty slowly—a legacy of reading technical books for my engineering studies. If my Kindle initially says it’ll take 4 hours to read the book, by the time I’m into it, it changes the estimate to 7 or more hours… But if you devote some (relaxing!) chunks of time on most days, the books are gradually consumed. I also read on planes, so during travel, which is pretty frequent, I can read more. I wish I read faster, though. I have so many samples that I’d love to read—I probably read 1 book for every 15 I’ve downloaded as a sample on Kindle. Occasionally I buy the hard copy if the book looks like it has lots of tables and such, or it’s not available in electronic version.  There is some randomness to what I read—for example, my webmaster just sent me an email that at the end of it, noted: “I’m currently reading Blood, Iron and Gold, by Christian Wolmar…”   Well, off I had to go to download a sample!  I’ll get ideas from books sometimes from LHTLers, or my younger daughter will make a recommendation.”

“I do read a few more books than I talk about on the Cheery Friday, maybe one additional book for every six or seven I read.  For example, I recently read the Autobiography of Gucci Mane, but I probably won’t tout it, just in that I kind of struggled with a lot of the terminology, people, and occurrences that Gucci referred to.  (I’m not an expert on the drug or rap scenes, and there seemed to be some selective remembering when Gucci got into trouble, which was pretty much throughout the book.)  Occasionally a book will start out strong and I get drawn in, but the ending is so weak that I just can’t recommend it. Or it’s a research book that has some good info, but is just too badly written to recommend.”  

“In any case, I mostly try to read books I hope to recommend. Every once in a while I’ll recommend a book that I’ve read most of the way through, but then, because of life’s exigencies, I won’t get around to actually finishing it. In general, though, what you see is what I’ve actually read all the way through….”

Thumb/Pinkie Interchange

We get a hoot out of this completely useless activity. Practice can help you get faster. [Hat tip: Cathi Allen.]

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

 

 

Can’t Hurt Me

Posted on December 21, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

This week’s astonishing book is Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds, by David Goggins. David grew up in an unbelievably tough environment with a deeply abusive father. He experienced prejudice and poverty, and suffered learning difficulties that left him graduating from high school barely able to read or do math. He became a depressed, overweight young man with an attitude.  But shockingly, he turned himself into one of the world’s greatest endurance athletes, and became the only man in history to complete training as a Navy SEAL, Army Ranger, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller.

To find a self-published book as #2 on Amazon, with a five star rating and over 400 reviews, speaks volumes about how good it is. If you’re trying to do more in your life, or change your life, you’ll find Goggin’s book to be a terrific inspiration.

Learning How to Learn—#1 of All MOOCs Worldwide!

Jeff Maggioncalda, Coursera’s CEO, gave an insightful interview about the skills we need to succeed for 2019. The article’s conclusion? “AI, data science, and industry skills may have been the most in-demand this past year, but it’s impossible to know if these same skills will dominate the market in the coming five to ten years,” says Maggioncalda. It is on this basis that he encourages everyone to learn how to learn. As he says, “Learning how to learn is the key to lifelong career success in today’s dynamic workforce.” So, how does one get started? Predictably, Maggioncalda highly recommends… Learning How to Learn.  The MOOC, which was originally shot in Oakley’s basement with the help of her husband and daughter for a mere $5000, is the most popular MOOC offered by Coursera and apparently, the most popular MOOC in the world.

Microlearning

Axonify is a relatively new company that uses micro-learning (3 to 5-minute training bursts)  to help students avoid the forgetting curve. This approach has been helping companies such as Walmart, Bloomingdale’s and Merck. As Kira Virmond of University of Waterloo Magazine notes: “Rather than suffering through an afternoon of learning the latest safety procedures, regulations or marketing strategies, employees play bite-sized training games for a few minutes each day, racking up points and even winning prizes. Much of the material gets repeated so it sticks.” [Hat tip: Dennis Wilson.]

College Bloat Meets ‘The Blade’

In this Wall Street Journal article (behind a paywall, sorry!), Mitch Daniels, President of Purdue University, tells how he’s kept tuition from rising:

“Mr. Daniels, 69, is the most innovative university president in America. Like his counterparts at other schools, he believes higher education has been ‘a competitive advantage’ for the U.S.—’a nice little export industry, if you add up all the dollars that come here to purchase the education of students from other places.’ He regards the rumbling in Washington about curbing visas for foreign students to be ‘very shortsighted.’ But he also thinks American higher education has grown fat and complacent. He’s making inventive, even radical changes in the way his institution finances itself and imparts an education.

Mr. Daniels kicks off our conversation with a morality tale: ‘I’ll speak to an audience of businesspeople and say: Here’s the racket that you should have gone into. You’re selling something, a college diploma, that’s deemed a necessity. And you have total pricing power.’ Better than that: ‘When you raise your prices, you not only don’t lose customers, you may actually attract new ones.’For lack of objective measures, ‘people associate the sticker price with quality: ‘If school A costs more than B , I guess it’s a better school.’  A third-party payer, the government, funds it all, so that ‘the customer—that is, the student and the family—feels insulated against the cost. A perfect formula for complacency.’ The parallels with health care, he observes, are ‘smack on.’

Mr. Daniels takes a different approach. In 2001-03, he ran the White House budget office for President George W. Bush, who dubbed him ‘The Blade’ for his cost-cutting skills. Mr. Daniels brought his paring knife to Purdue. Examples of his efficiencies include replacing full-time dining-hall employees with student workers, scrapping the vast fleet of university-owned buses in favor of a private contractor, and saving $61 million on capital projects through what the university calls ‘innovative construction management.’

His most eye-catching achievement has been to keep costs down for students. By graduation day in 2020, tuition won’t have risen in eight years. ‘We’re able to say,’ he says, ‘that the total cost in nominal dollars of going to Purdue will be less in 2020 than it was in 2012.’

Mr. Daniels says widespread adoption of Purdue’s ‘affordability campaign’ would improve higher education. ‘Everybody is worried,’ he says, furrowing his brow. ‘What are we at? A trillion and a half of student debt, twice as much as the total credit-card debt. It’s a social and economic problem.’ He offers up a list of life’s milestones that people delay because of college debt: ‘marriage, household formation, child raising, homeownership, business-start formation—all of these things are being pressed down by college debt.’ The ‘obvious first step,’ Mr. Daniels replies, ‘is don’t charge so darn much in the first place.’”

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

When Can You Trust the Experts

Posted on December 13, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Learning How to Learn for Youth available on YouTube!

Exciting news is that the first five incredible videos of the new Coursera MOOC Learning How to Learn for Youth are now available on YouTube, here. Don’t miss them—and pass the link along to friends and family!  What greater gift than the free gift of how to learn effectively? (And have fun while doing it!)

Books of the Week

  • Our first recommended book this week is When Can You Trust the Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education, by Daniel Willingham. This is a good, much-needed book—what we particularly like is that Dan takes a step back to look at the big picture of what educators (and parents) want to get from education. You’ll learn about Enlightenment to Romantic approaches to education, how to charlatans can use their looks to help them unfairly pass tests of legitimacy (Dan’s bald pate is perhaps a signal of his trustworthiness), and much, much more. Incidentally, another great book by Willingham is his Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.
  • Our second recommended book is Behavioral Neuroscience of Learning and Memory, edited by Robert Clark and Stephen Martin. (Yes, despite the price, we bought the hard copy so we could mark it up—the color pictures are a treat.) Clark is a Professor of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at UCSD’s School of Medicine, while and Martin is a neuroscientist and Discovery Fellow at the University of Dundee.  This book provides an excellent overview of what’s known at a foundational level about memory and how we learn. There’s a fantastic discussion of the long-term memory medial temporal lobe memory system (see, for example, the diagram on page 25); we only wish that research was more advanced so that the chapter on working memory could have been similarly as informative.  (See this fascinating article on changing concepts in working memory in Nature Neuroscience.)

Why Practice is a Vitally Important Aspect of Learning

Barb’s New York Times op-ed advocating practice of math, benign and solidly research-based though it was, was denigrated by some leaders of reform approaches to mathematics education who are poorly versed in the neuroscience of learning. Here’s an outstanding article by Mike Hobbiss in the npj Science of Learning community with more about the neuroscience behind why the approach Barb counseled is worthwhile. We also can’t help but also allude yet again to this powerful paper, now nearing 6,000 citations: “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.”

It can sometimes be difficult for parents to understand why some educators, unlike practitioners from other fields that have gained so much in recent decades from multidisciplinary interaction, can be so unwilling to accept insights from beyond their own siloed training.  The foreword by Neal Stephenson to David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity has the best (and funniest) discussion we’ve ever seen of the academic “circling the wagons” mentality, particularly regarding math. Wallace’s book is worth getting for Stephenson’s foreword alone.

Here is a great discussion by Daniel Willingham of the need to cleanse the field of education of bad practice based on fads and smoke-and-mirrors research. ResearchEd is leading the charge—Barb will be speaking at ResearchEd Vancouver, BC on February 9th.

Travelschool with Smartick

This interesting article by Katrina Intal on the Smartick blog asks “What if instead of going to traditional school, you took an RV and traveled to find your next learning opportunity? … The Harman-Woods are a travelschool family who pursue and encourage immersive and hands-on learning through real-life experiences.”

But how to handle a subject like math?  Lindsey Harman-Woods notes: “I heard about Smartick while listening to The BraveWriter Podcast. Julie was interviewing Barbara Oakley regarding her book How To Learn. We were struggling with math in our homeschool, as so many families do, so my ears perked up at Barbara’s recommendation of Smartick. We started the 15-day trial that week. Suddenly all three of my boys were THRILLED about math. I couldn’t believe it!!”

Smartick’s approach is great for any family looking to give their children a solid foundation in math—check it out!

What happened when someone had a chance to ask a question of the world’s most famous mathematician

This whimsically illustrated piece describes Ben Orlin’s question that he posed to Andrew Wiles—the storied mathematician who solved Fermat’s Last Theorem. [Hat tip Joe Muskatel]

Hide Your Phone When You’re Trying to Work. Seriously.

This excellent New York Times article by Tim Herrera describes how your cell phone can mess with your thinking: “A 2017 study in The Journal of the Association of Consumer Research found that the mere presence of your phone—even if it’s powered off, and even if you’re actively and successfully ignoring it —‘reduces available cognitive capacity,’ which the study’s authors call ‘brain drain.’” Read the whole thing.

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

Boyd

Posted on December 7, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Year

Our very favorite, most highly recommended book this year is Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.  This book ranks amongst our favorite biographies ever. Boyd was a genius level iconoclast (with a measured IQ of 90), and a rebel of the first order, who changed the military’s approach to war and saved countless lives while he was at it. Boyd took on idiocy where ever he found it, whether with bombastic Pentagon generals who were happy to fake important tests, or those who thought they could outgun him in the air. Boyd was so witty, engaging, and fearless in tackling new approaches, and the research behind this extraordinary biography is so artfully done, that it’s a “can’t miss” book for anyone who loves rebels and reading.  OODA away!

Hit Lit! Top Books of 2018 for Learning How to Learners!

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

 

 

Learning Tools

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

 

 

How to Memorize a Phone number Without Using a System

4-Time memory champion Nelson Dellis is back with another fantastic memory tips video—this one, (you guessed it), is on how to memorize a phone number without going through the contortions of learning a memory system.  Enjoy!  

Can we produce a MOOC like a television series?

Edna Margarita Manotas Salcedo at Colombia’s UniNorte is one of the foremost visionaries in MOOC-making today. Read her article on MOOC-making for Tec de Monterrey to get a sense of the innovative directions she is forging.

Scott Young on Effective Test-Taking

Scott needs little introduction—he’s one of the most perceptive writers about the learning process we know. If a standardized test such as the SAT, LSAT, GMAT, MCAT or any of other hundreds of more specific tests are in your future, you couldn’t do better than to read Scott’s great article on how to prepare. Graphic Novel of the Second Law of Thermodynamics—and Online Learning

We personally find the Second Law of Thermodynamics (which might be briefly summarized as “processes cause the entropy (disorder) of a system to increase”), to be of entrancing interest. (Part of the reason we couldn’t help but like Boyd!) Here’s an interesting graphic novel approach to explaining the second law, developed by a Stanford team that includes Petr Johanes, who worked on research with online learning researcher extraordinaire Larry Lagerstrom.

Insightful Email about Learning and the Pomodoro

Here’s an inspiring note from LHTLer Sivan Traub: “About a year ago, I came across your book A Mind for Numbers, which I practically read in one sitting… It is precisely because I have come across the topic of ‘learning’ so often and throughout my life that I am extremely appreciative and interested in what you do. One thing that your course ‘Learning how to Learn’ has helped me with is making violin practice, and basically every learning task I engage in easier and less effortful. Pomodoros have a regular place in my practicing scheme, and I am much more aware now of the importance of relieving the area of the brain doing the focused work, so stretching and push-ups have become my favorite Pomodoro-interval (the effects of which I am seeing in my increased arm strength).”

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

 

 

New MOOC–Learning How to Learn for Youth!

Posted on November 30, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Coursera’s first MOOC for Youths, Parents, and Teachers!

We have a huuuuge announcement!  Today is the launch of Coursera’s first MOOC created for younger people, as well as the young at heart—Learning How to Learn for Youth. This is a sister of our original Learning How to Learn MOOC, and contains a fresh take on some of the ideas of Learning How to Learn, along with intriguing new material.  Barb and Terry are joined by their friend and amazing talent, motivational speaker and conference emcee Greg Hammons.

If you are a parent, teacher, or coach of young people, and want to give your kids a supercharged start to success in school, sports, music, art and life in general, take this course. Research has shown that incentives do work, so feel free to give your kids a reward for taking it!

Great Banjo and Guitar

A friend of Barb and her husband Phil, Mr. Vincent Sadovsky, recently passed away.  He was an incredible guitar and banjo player, as well as composer and arranger. Over his career he published for Mel Bay – New Twists for the 5-String Banjo: A Guide to the Use of Keith Tuners, and was a voting member of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences as well as a grand national champion banjoist.  If you love folk guitar or bluegrass banjo, Barb recommends stopping by for a look at www.vincentsadovsky.com.   

Books of the Week

  • e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning, (4th edition) by Ruth Colvin Clark and Richard E. Mayer. It’s easy to think that this is a book only for creating online materials.  Nothing could be further from the truth—this is a very deep and useful book for any serious educator. Early on, the book describes how to find and evaluate good research. It’s hard to find books on teaching that build their guidance from knowledge of how the brain works, but Clark and Mayer’s book does just that, and beautifully.  Sure, some of the guidance seems straightforward, but when put all together, this book provides a great set of principles that will help instructors from any discipline better understand, and reach, their students.  Hardcover (not e-book) copy is recommended.
  • The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning, 2nd edition, edited by Richard E. Mayer. If you want to go even deeper into the principles of how human beings learn effectively, you can’t do better than this marvelous 900 page, nearly five-pound behemoth of a book. It goes heavily into the research that helps guide our understanding of how human beings learn. The basic premise is that humans learn better when they can both see and hear what they’re learning–Mayer and his contributors give great insight into why this is true. Hardcover (not e-book) copy is recommended.

Barb in Rochester, Michigan

Barb’s giving a talk for the wonderful Rotary in her hometown of Rochester, Michigan on December 4th at 12:15 pm. Barb and Phil’s daughter Rosie traveled to Chile for her senior year in high school under the auspices of Rotary, which is ultimately how Rosie’s husband came to be from Chile. If you’d like to see Rotary in action connecting local people together, and see Barb while you’re at it, come to the talk!  More information here.

The Reproducibility Crisis in Psychology

Here’s an intense article in The Atlantic about a major problem that most researchers are aware of, but would often like to ignore, or pretend is just not that big a deal. The problem is, fully half of all studies in psychology cannot be reproduced.  Other researchers just can’t get the same results, even when they work carefully with the original researchers and do large-scale studies. And it’s not just because people are, for example, different from one part of the world to another.

The Replication Crisis in Education  

One of the important implications of the research in psychology relates to research in education. Here’s a four-year-old article complaining about the lack of replication in educational research. In other words, the field of education doesn’t seem to be nearly as well-grounded as psychology, despite the apparent problems of psychology, because education doesn’t appear to be creating solid mechanisms for replicating their findings. We need a large-scale study of educational research, similar to that of the field of psychology, that gives a sense of the validity of educational research.  

Incidentally, the terms “reproducible” and “replicable” are often used interchangeably, but technically, replicable means independent people collected new data and got the same result, while reproducible means that independent people analyzed the same original data and got the same result.

Growth Mindset and Effect Size

Along these lines, Carol Dweck deserves credit for putting forth a “gold-standard” study of growth mindset. She and her colleagues pre-registered their plans beforehand so intentions couldn’t be altered once the data came in, and the study was massive, involving over 12,000 students in 65 public schools.  Their findings showed a .03 improvement in GPA, which Dweck argues here is significant. The effect size, however, is only a 0.08 overall (a good explanation of effect sizes is in chapter 3 of this book). A meta-analysis by a different author group found the effect of growth mindset interventions to be too small to be practically meaningful. Meta-analysis co-author Brooke McNamara responds to Dweck’s criticism of the meta-analysis here. (We also have to give credit to McNamara, an assistant professor, and her chutzpah in being willing to look critically at the work of a world-renowned Stanford researcher.) This related discussion in Wired also helps put growth mindset interventions into context.  

School Finances and Teacher Professional Development

In light of all of these findings, where growth mindset interventions have a best case effect size of 0.34 amongst students coming from poverty, (0.08 overall), while interventions like teaching with mnemonics have a far larger effect size of 0.76, we can’t help but wonder why far more discussion and professional development for teachers isn’t being devoted to, for example, topics like direct instruction, scaffolding, creating video review of lessons, rehearsal and memorization, and mnemonics, which, as John Hattie’s research has shown, can have a far larger impact on students. Some researchers feel that mindset is still vitally important—that its effect size is small for understandable reasons.  But even so, it’s reasonable to ask why is “growth mindset” appears omnipresent in teacher development training,  and not factors that have far greater effect sizes. As the above Wired article argues, are monies being faddishly spent by school districts on materials that have little impact and that could be better used elsewhere?

Fads in Education As Opposed to Solid Information about How the Brain Learns

In fact, might future research relate to detecting educational fads? To get a sense of what might be becoming a fad, researchers could go through typical number of hours of professional development being given to teachers, or monies spent on a specific intervention, and relate that to the actual effect size of that intervention.

In a related vein, researcher Richard Mayer’s fantastic work on multimedia learning describes the bottleneck of working memory, and how to ensure material is learned despite that bottleneck. Virtually all modern learning is multimedia learning—that is, it takes advantage of both pictures and text.  So why are these foundational ideas on not often taught in teacher professional development? We believe it’s time to move past trendy, easy-to-digest materials and on to material that’s been proven by research to have a hefty impact.

Interview with Barbara Oakley in El Mundo: “To say that you do not care about mathematics is elitist”

Here is a recent interview with journalist Berta de Vega in El Mundo, one of the greatest papers of the Spanish-speaking world.  Berta points out that educational guru Ken Robinson has noted that dance can be more important than mathematics. Barb’s response? “If you do not care at all about having to put food on the table for your family, then I can understand that dance is just as important to you as mathematics.”

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

 

Learning How to Learn for youths

Posted on November 23, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

A great review of our kids’ book Learning How to Learn

Here are part 1, part 2, and part 3 of a review of Barb and Terry’s kids’ (and parents’ and teachers’) book Learning How to Learn in the blog the Examining Life, by  Erin Valdez. Erin has a wonderful way of connecting the book, and the ideas to many other great books on education. (If you’re looking for holiday gifts for kids or educators in your family, this will give you ideas!)

The Arcanum Magical Academy of Artistic Mastery

We’ve heard some great things about the Arcanum’s ability to teach and inspire in relation to photography and art. We have to admit—the website alone is enough to draw us in! It seems the perfect alchemical mixture of magic and learning, where you learn with a small cohort under the guidance of a master. It is virtual, but also deeply personalized, so the structure is adapted to you. [Hat tip: Arnim Rodeck.]

Barb in Michigan, Georgia, and North Carolina

Barb will be speaking about learning in Port Huron, Michigan at the SC4 Fine Arts building on Erie at 6:00 pm, November 26th. The next day (Nov 27), she’ll be at Georgia Tech, speaking about making great online videos at 11:30 am – 1:00 pm. And the following day (Nov 28) she’ll be at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, keynoting and doing workshops on learning. Lots to learn—lots to share!

Helpful Insights about Using Analogies to Help with Learning

Here’s are some interesting thoughts from LHTLer Olaniyi Olawoye from Abuja, Nigeria about using analogies to help with making better presentations.

“I am currently taking the Learning how to learn course on Coursera and I thought to give you a feedback on how I used one of the lessons therein this week.

Today I had the opportunity of making a presentation about my department (and what we do) to the entire staff of my office. As I thought about it and prepared for the presentation, one thing came to mind – analogy! I remembered that you said that analogies are some of the best ways to learn. So I looked for some of the best analogies I could use to describe my department’s work and did my presentation.

Now guess what? A number of my colleagues have provided some fantastic feedback on the presentation. Some said it helped them understand better, others simply made jokes out of it and other presenters after me made reference to the analogies. It is simply amazing how much difference it made.

I have learned a lot more concepts than you can think but this is the one I have successfully applied and I look forward to applying others too.”

Professor Richard Hamming, Intro to The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn

LHTLer Piyush Deshmukh notes: “Recently I came across a series of lectures from Prof Richard Hamming which seemed to be relevant in today’s world where there is a tremendous amount of growth in knowledge and hence a difficulty in developing our own paths and styles of working.” Watching Hamming’s prescient lecture from 1995 does indeed provide great insight into our own desires and the world of today. (It’s interesting to see those problems in AI Hamming alluded to have been overcome.)

A review of Barb’s “Khanversation” with Sal Khan at Khan Academy

Here’s Pat Bowden’s insightful review of Barb’s fireside chat with Sal Khan for the blog Online Learning Success. And while we’re on the topic of the chat, we might ask, have you ever had a “brain fart” while public speaking?  Barb had a pretty spectacular one during her conversation with Sal. The conversation then devolved to a competition to see who has the worse working memory…  What all this means is, if your working memory isn’t so good, there’s hope for you!

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

Khan Academy

Posted on November 15, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Event of the year

Barb is visiting Khan Academy today to have a “fireside chat” with Sal Khan—she’s so excited! Tune in on Facebook Live, or YouTube at 12:30 pm US Pacific time.

Book of the Month

We’re often asked by people who want to try to get back into math (or just into math, if they haven’t been successful at it before). We unfailingly recommend Khan Academy, not only for math, but for pretty much anything. Salman Khan is one of the world’s greatest teachers, and his upbeat, fun, but always spot on videos are one of the best ways around to get yourself started.  (Of course, there’s plenty of practice opportunities available, too!) You may not be aware that Sal has written a fantastic book about his experiences in starting Khan Academy and his vision for education: The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined. This “big picture” book helps you see where education could–and should—be heading. What’s great about this book is that it isn’t a theoretical tome—it’s a practically useful guide to the future by someone who has already done so much to help us get there.  

We can’t help but ask. Which do you prefer—Sal Khan’s videos with no instructor face shown? Or our LHTL videos that show the instructors?  Feel free to comment in the discussion forum here.

Help Your Child to Learn

The cover article in PTA Magazine this fall is by our very own Barb and Terry—it provides excellent advice on helping your child to learn. If you have a kidlet, you may want to check it out!

A Great Class Central Article on the Competition for MOOC Degrees

Manoel Cortes Mendez has just written another great article on MOOCs for Class Central. Here’s a sense of how the article starts:

“A few months ago, Coursera announced its first Ivy League MOOC-based degree. And a few weeks ago, edX announced seven new MOOC-based degrees, including a master’s degree in computer science from UT Austin, whose residential program is among the best in the US.
And with each announcement, the competition in the online degree market intensifies, compelling universities and course providers to find new ways to make their online degrees attractive to students.
In this article, I explore some of the characteristics that could sway me toward one online degree over another. Some of these characteristics are already part of certain online degrees, while others are uncharted territory.”

Keep reading here!

Do You Have Problems with Outlook?

Barb has struggled for years with trying to keep her Outlook integrated across her various devices.  (She knows, she knows…) Finally, she hired a professional—Lisa of “Call That Girl.”  All problems have vanished at last! If you’re having troubles with Outlook, we can’t recommend Lisa more highly.

Generation Z Is Choosing Trade School over College

Learning involves all types of learning.  As this article suggests, it looks like Gen Z is refusing to incur educational debt and instead opting for vocational learning—not necessarily such a bad trade-off.

Learning a Sport Online

Barb is a preternatural klutz, always in awe of not only sports greats, but also everyday heroes who can make catching a baseball or kicking a soccer ball look easy. Can online learning help?  Here comes the indefatigable Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success with a great article on how online (and in-family!) learning can help you learn a sport no matter what your age.  Enjoy!

Caution with APOE4 results!

Last week, we alluded to a study finding an affiliation between APOE4 and intelligence.  Well, one of our ever-on-the-ball LHTL readers, Jeremy Schwartzentruber, a postdoctoral fellow in human genetics, noted: “…you delved into human genetics, which is my research area, and so I wanted to caution you about passing on links to tenuous studies such as the Alzheimer’s / intelligence report for the APOE4 allele. You may be aware of the general issues surrounding scientific studies with small sample sizes. What you have passed on is almost surely a false association between the APOE4 allele and intelligence. Studies with only around 50 people are ripe for incorrect conclusions like this. I’ll point you to a study with more than 250,000 people which finds no association whatsoever with intelligence at the APOE4 alleles.”  

The issue of small sample size studies is indeed a major issue behind the lack of replicability of many published scientific studies, so we appreciate the correction!

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

Seven Myths About Education

Posted on November 9, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

As you can tell, we’ve been heavy into education books recently (don’t worry—we’ll be back soon to other topics!). Our most recent book, Seven Myths About Education, by Daisy Christodoulou, is one of the best on education that we’ve ever read. Daisy’s broad experience in teaching, coupled with her critical thinking skills, provide counter-intuitive insight into how we can be fooled into thinking some ways of teaching are better, when they’re actually worse. Her observations involve seven widely held beliefs that are harming students:

  • Facts prevent understanding  
  • Teacher-led instruction is passive   
  • The 21st century fundamentally changes everything   
  • You can always just look it up   
  • We should teach transferable skills   
  • Projects and activities are the best way to learn   
  • Teaching knowledge is indoctrination.

Although this book was written for UK audiences, its findings are perfectly translatable to what is going on in the US. This powerful book is a “must read” for any parent, or K-12 teacher, professor, or administrator.

Custom interval Pomodoro-like timer
Programmer Alex Shirokov was inspired by LHTL to create a custom interval ring timer.  You can create and save any number of timers with any number of intervals—allowing you to customize your use of the Pomodoro technique. It looks like a circle and has visually clear representation of intervals and counting. You can add, remove and adjust intervals intuitively by finger. It’s not free, but comes at reasonable price.

How One Company Created an Apprenticeship Program to Help Diversify Tech

Here is a wonderful article in the Harvard Business Review by Ryan Carson, CEO of and Founder of Treehouse, an online school that’s trained 850,000 software engineers and helps companies like Airbnb, Nike, HubSpot, Mailchimp hire top tech talent and create diverse teams. When it comes to building diversity at his company, Ryan’s approaches are well worth emulating.

Gene linked to dyslexia associated with lower concussion risk

We often tend to think that genes associated with learning challenges, such as the genes associated with dyslexia, are in some sense “bad.”  But that’s not necessarily the case. Here for example, is an article about recent research showing that the more diffuse neural wiring of those with dyslexia may actually reduce the damage produced by concussions. In other areas, it’s known that the APOE4 gene variant can predispose one to Alzheimer’s in old age.  But, as noted in the New Scientist, “young people with the variant tend to be smarter, more educated and have better memories than their peers.” You win some, you lose some!

Career Help from the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation for Education for Emirati and Arab Youth

The Al Ghurair Foundation for Education has launched the Al Ghurair Young Thinkers Program – a college and career readiness platform to support Emirati and Arab youth. The entire platform is offered in English and Arabic. We can vouch for the fact that the Al Ghurair Foundation is doing some excellent work in preparing future leaders – check it out if you’re Emirati or Arab in the 15-25 year old age range!

A Helpful Guide to Reading Better

We’re fans of the Farnam Street blog. Here’s a wonderful article on how to improve your reading, whether it’s selecting quality material, or retaining it.  We love the article’s starting quote by Charlie Munger: “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero.”

Spanish Version of Make It Stick

Last week we mentioned Make It Stick—one of our favorite books on learning.  We heard from Óscar Barberá, the Spanish translator, who let us know that a Spanish version is available: Apréndetelo: La ciencia del aprendizaje exitoso.  

Barb in English—El País

If you’ll remember, several weeks ago we featured an interview of Barb in Madrid with El País. Here is the original English version of the conversation. (The translated Spanish longer and shorter versions are also available.) As we mentioned, the audience, and Barb, had a blast!

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

Make It Stick

Posted on November 2, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

We recently had the opportunity to have breakfast with Peter Brown, the first author of the redoubtable Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, which we believe to be one of the very best books on learning currently in existence. So we took the opportunity to reread the book before our meeting.  Yes, Make It Stick holds up and is even better than we remembered—it’s a wonderful romp through the various techniques that are valuable in making your learning really stick.  What has impressed us is not only the scientific rigor of the work (thanks, Henry Roediger III and Mark McDaniel!) but also Peter’s in-depth explanations and wide-ranging examples—this is not a fluff job of a book. Peter’s a heckuva guy—stay tuned for a joining of forces in LHTL’s future projects.

Edsurge is doing an article on the kids book Learning How to Learn—they need teachers’ help!

The educational magazine Edsurge is doing an article on our Learning How to Learn book for youngsters.  They would love to hear from any teachers who are using the book in their classrooms.  If you are using the Learning How to Learn book for kids, please contact tina@edsurge.com with some insights about how you’re using it (and feel free to copy Barb at oakley@oakland.edu.)

Using eye-tracking data to see how studying logic improves the ability to reason

Psychology researcher Silvia Bunge and her colleague Belén Guerra-Carrillo at UC Berkeley, have recently published an eye-poppingly original article in the npj Science of Learning:  “Eye gaze patterns reveal how reasoning skills improve with experience.”  Here’s a nice summary by Silvia in response to npj’s questions. “We found previously that studying for the LSAT – an exam that heavily taxes reasoning skills – strengthens the brain network that supports reasoning and reduces brain activity in a part of the brain that is active when participants carry out a cognitively demanding task. However, this work didn’t tell us in which way reasoning improved…[Using eye-tracking data, w]e found that the biggest change associated with Logic Games practice was increased efficiency in encoding the relevant relations (e.g., a balance scale showing that a green ball is heavier than a yellow one). We could not have drawn this conclusion from the behavioral data alone.”

This finding is important because it shows that specific types of learning are distinct in their ability to improve critical thinking skills—and we now have a sense of why.

190 universities just launched 600 free online courses. Here’s the full list.

Dhawal Shah of Class Central is on it in providing great information about free MOOCs.  Don’t miss his extensive list of courses—there’s bound to be something that’s perfect for your goals and interests.

Better ways to know whether students have mastered what they are learning

Here is a terrific presentation by Candace Thille of Stanford University: “The Science of Learning, Data, and Transformation in Higher Education.” This talk unpacks why you don’t want your students to just “understand” a concept. [Hat tip: Matthew Parson] It’s useful to watch Candace’s presentation in conjunction Professor Juan Quemada’s presentation “The AMMIL Methodology.” (The English version of the video is further down on the page.) AMMIL stands for “Active Meaningful Micro Inductive Learning”—it’s a methodology for creating good educational modules based on micro-objectives that are very similar to the unpacked “understanding” that Candace alludes to. In other words, Juan provides an easy-to-understand method for implementing Candace’s important ideas within a MOOC. He then goes on to give a more concrete feel for how the recordings were physically implemented, without expensive post-production, in the studio of Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Barb was fortunate enough to meet Juan in Madrid—his programming MOOCs are amongst the most popular on MiríadaX, Latin America’s Largest MOOC Platform.

Longer videos are becoming more popular

Interestingly, we recently discussed video length with a producer from Crash Course (a series we really admire), and discovered that many video producers on YouTube are moving towards longer videos—20 or 30 minutes in length, because that’s what people are watching and enjoying. These findings go along with that of Larry Lagerstrom and his colleague’s research findings related to “The Myth of the Six-Minute Rule: Student Engagement with Online Videos.”

Online comic on how to boost memory

Here’s a very cute interactive comic, perfect for kids, that explains how to improve memory with spaced practice. As one researcher has commented “It’s a bit fast and loose with the details (she seems to care more about teaching the procedures than explaining mechanisms of learning and memory), but still kind of fun and useful.”

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 Deep Learning Revolution!

Posted on October 25, 2018 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Year

The Deep Learning Revolution, by Terrence Sejnowski.  Barb had the chance to read this superlative book pre-press, and she has a beautiful hard copy beside her as she writes this. If you are interested in how we got to driverless cars, automated translations, eerily human-like conversations with automatons, and uncannily adept opponents in chess and Go, you can’t miss this fantastic book by our very own Terry Sejnowski. Terry’s many decades of experience at the pinnacle of discovery in neural processing and artificial intelligence give him an irreplaceably broad perspective. Learn how the obstruction of a few key players delayed the advent of artificial intelligence by decades  and the future direction of deep learning networks in everything from gaming. The deep learning revolution has brought us driverless cars, the greatly improved Google Translate, fluent conversations with Siri and Alexa, and enormous profits from automated trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Deep learning networks can play poker better than professional poker players and defeat a world champion at Go. In this book, Terry Sejnowski explains how deep learning went from being an arcane academic field to a disruptive technology in the information economy. Barb’s not being biased (well, only a tiny, inescapable bit!) when she calls this book the book of the year—read and enjoy!

Are Engineers Educated? Or are they merely trained?

This article in the IEEE Spectrum by Robert W. Lucky explores what being well-educated might really mean.  As Lucky notes: “Let me just give you my take. A graduate of a good university noted for, say, philosophy or English literature, would be considered to be ‘well educated.’ A graduate of a similar university noted for engineering would be considered bright and intelligent. I’ll settle for that.”

Correlation is not causation, but heck yeah for video games!

A recent study, “funded by the British Academy and published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviour, found that 13-14 year old girls classed as ‘heavy gamers’—those playing over nine hours a week—were three times more likely to pursue a PSTEM degree compared to girls who were non-gamers.”

Barb in Spanish—El País

You can read and watch Barb’s interview in Madrid with El País here. Here also are longer and shorter YouTube versions of the video. As you can tell, the audience and Barb were having a blast!

The “Throw the Pen” Memory Method

Here is another practically useful—and super funny—short video by memory champion Nelson Dellis about how to remember ideas you might get in the middle of the night, or when you’re preoccupied with something else that you can’t really take a break from.  This is one of many useful ideas from Nelson’s great book Remember It!

A nice email about A Mind for Numbers

Here’s a nice email we received about how a learner has been able to restructure their thinking to become successful:

“Last semester I failed a differential equations class, and it was my biggest wake-up call. I have always been deluding myself into thinking I know something when I actually didn’t. That class was proof of my delusion. Your book, A Mind for Numbers, was unlike anything else I’ve read. Instead of reaffirmations, it was book filled with tips to restructure the way I process information. I would like to thank you on constantly pointing out the errors in the way a person learns so that they can use other tools to actually grasp information. [A]ctually working out the solution or thinking of just something to get started has helped me a lot better than staring at the solutions. Thank you for sharing your tips which helped me grow my learning abilities. It’s sad to say that it took me 8 years for me to get this frustrated for me to actually make the change in order to learn better. I’ve always had the knowledge in me, you just pieced together the information in a more logical point of view so the reader has no choice, but to be confronted with facts and helpful tips. Thank you once again.”

Debunking the Myers-Briggs type indicator

Here’s a good article from Reason Magazine about the fallacies of the Myers-Briggs indicator.  Surprisingly, some of the most-cited literature about the validity of learning styles is actually predicated on the Myers-Briggs, meaning that literature is actually built on a house of cards.

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