Author: barboakley

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

WICKED PROBLEMS: How to Engineer a Better World by Guru Madhavan. This ingenious and important book is about the cloudiest, most difficult-to-solve of all the problems we encounter–the “wicked” problems.

The author Guru Madhavan, a systems engineer and the Norman R. Augustine Senior Scholar and Senior Director of Programs at the National Academy of Engineering, helpfully frames his book’s topic in terms of different levels of problem complexity. Some problems, Madhavan notes, are “hard problems,” bounded and boundable, like self-checkout at a grocery store, or the development of the smartphone. Next up, and far more difficult to solve, are the “soft problems” relevant to human and organizational behavior, which involve both political and psychological factors. Even the seemingly simple task of designing and building a bridge can be a soft problem—the solutions can differ broadly depending on what country and city you want to build in. The third class are “messy problems,” which are problems that entangle differences and divisions created by our value sets, belief systems, ideologies, and convictions.  Trying to grapple with a disease like Ebola, with its implications for traditional funeral values among other delicate religious sensibilities is a messy problem. 

So where does this place wicked problems? 

They emerge from the interaction of hard, soft, and messy problems. As Madhavan puts it “If they were works of art, hard problems would be photographs, offering clarity and directness. Soft problems are like blurry brushstrokes of impressionism, and messy problems are spilled and splattered abstractions. A wicked problem emerges when hard, soft, and messy problems collide. Think of them as a cubist collage where the truth is simultaneously sharp, shaky, and squiggly. All three are required for wickedness.”

And off you’ll go in Madhavan’s wonderfully engineered double-track book to learn about wicked problems–and about how the development of pilot training and flight simulators might help guide us to better engage with these problems. This book is profound and phenomenal!

An Inside Look at How Barb and her Team Create Online Courses

Ever wondered about the creation process behind great online courses like Learning How to Learn and the recent three award-winning MOOCs in the Uncommon Sense Teaching specialization?  Wonder no more!  This detailed paper: “Uncommon Sense Teaching: A 3-Course Online Specialization on the Coursera Platform to Share Advances in Effective Teaching” in the International Journal of Advanced Corporate Learning gives an overview of the creative process, construction and costs of the specialization. (If you download the pdf instead of viewing it in the browser, you should be able to play links on the videos within the pdf, which bring the ideas even further to life!) This specialization has received a rare 5.0 out of 5.0 rating, eliciting comments like “It is the best course I have taken on Coursera and many other face-to-face ones. The instructional design is wonderful. They take you by the hand at every step with appropriate techniques and excellent quality content.”

If you’d like to take the specialization, follow the links below. 

• Uncommon Sense Teaching: Teaching Online (Take first if you’d like!)

• Uncommon Sense Teaching Part 1

• Uncommon Sense Teaching: Part 2 

Everest Memory Masterclass

Our friend Nelson Dellis, 5-TIME USA Memory Champion and Guinness Record Holder, is launching his 2024 cohort for his amazing Everest Memory Masterclass. If you’ve ever wanted to transform your memory, now is the time to do it! The course will teach you how to memorize names, learn languages, remember your todo lists and calendars, and tons of other practical things! Nelson usually limits the size of his cohorts, so make sure to jump on the waitlist so you can access the class when it goes live in late April! https://www.everestmemory.com/waitlist

Barb in Ulaabaatar, Mongolia in April

Barb will be presenting “Learning how to learn,” a three-hour lecture for the delegates and teachers of National Convocation on Education in affiliation with the National University of Mongolia. This talk will include highlights about learning with generative AI, insights on teaching and learning from movie-making, and much, much more.  The venue is the Corporate Convention Center in Ulaanbaatar Wednesday 10 April 2024, from 14:00-17:00. She will also be speaking at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology on April 12, from 10:00 am -12:00 pm.

Don’t Forget the Live Webinar Event with Robert Plomin, Barb Oakley, and Olav Schewe!

If you’re interested in finding out more about genes in defining our identities and learning capabilities, join Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe as they explore this intriguing topic in a conversation with Robert Plomin – and pose your own questions directly to Dr. Plomin as well. Sign up now for this free webinar on April 3rd to save your seat and receive a link to the recording. Note that there is an attendance capacity in Zoom for this event of 1,000 participants, which means that some participants might be forwarded to watch the webinar from a streaming page.

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

 Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, by Robert Plomin.  With the rapid advancements in genomic sequencing and the ever-expanding field of behavioral genetics, we feel the age-old question of “nature vs. nurture” is one of the hottest debates around. After all, scientists can now point to the vast array of twin and adoption studies available nowadays—as well as the new opportunities created by identifying the specific genes associated with behavioral traits and cognitive abilities. Plomin’s book lays out the evidence and implications from his 45 years of groundbreaking research in behavioral genetics, making the case that inherited DNA differences are the major systematic force in shaping who we are. The current prevailing view tends to assume that only environmental factors, particularly parenting and socioeconomic status, are causal in determining behaviors and life outcomes. However, there are growing inconsistencies and problems with this view that are difficult to reconcile, including the inability to explain stark differences between siblings raised together, the finding that the effects of parenting on children’s outcomes are mostly correlational rather than causal, and the discovery of inherited DNA differences that increasingly account for variations in behavioral traits and cognitive abilities. Plomin introduces the concept of “the nature of nurture”, positing that our genes are in fact what’s driving us to perceive, select, modify and create environments that fit our genetic predispositions.

Live Webinar Event with Robert Plomin, Barb Oakley, and Olav Schewe

If you’re interested in finding out more about genes in defining our identities and learning capabilities, Join Barbara Oakley and Olav Schewe as they explore this intriguing topic in a conversation with Robert Plomin – and pose your own questions directly to Dr. Plomin as well. Sign up now for this free webinar to save your seat and receive a link to the recording. Note that there is an attendance capacity in Zoom for this event of 1,000 participants, which means that some participants might be forwarded to watch the webinar from a streaming page.

Barb in Santiago, Chile speaking March 19 & 20 on behalf of Universidad San Sebastián and Aptus!

Don’t miss Barb’s talks by streaming with English and Spanish options, 

• March 20, 8:50 AM -1.30 PM GMT-3 (Santiago de Chile)
  • Primer taller: Enseña a distancia con personalidad, estilo y generando impacto
  • Segundo taller: Inteligencia artificial generativa para reforzar y acelerar el aprendizaje

Here is the link to register for the March 20 event)! (For non-Chileans, just place any number, or “Non-Chilean”  in the space labeled “RUT”) Here is the YouTube link that will be streaming in English.

• If you happen to be in Santiago on March 19, there is an in-person event that includes simultaneous translation (space is limited), 08:30 a 13:30 horas, Marchant Pereira 10, Auditorio Piso 2, Providencia. The talks include:
  • Enseñanza directa y aprendizaje activo: sistemas de aprendizaje procedimental y declarativo.
  • Una guía para el “altruista patológico” en educación: ¿cómo ayudar sin hacer daño?
  • El gran debate sobre los estilos de aprendizaje: una mirada iluminadora y contraintuitiva basada

If you plan to come in person, please register for Tuesday’s (March 19) event here.  

The brain isn’t as adaptable as some neuroscientists claim

In this eye-opening article, Tamar Makin and John Krakauer take a fresh look at the popular idea that our brains can dramatically rewire themselves after injury or sensory loss. While they don’t deny that the brain is adaptable, they argue that we’ve been overselling its ability to completely overhaul itself. By diving deep into some classic neuroscience studies, Makin and Krakauer show that the brain’s flexibility is more about fine-tuning existing pathways than completely repurposing brain regions for new tasks. They remind us that true neuroplasticity comes from good old-fashioned training and learning, not from instantly tapping into hidden brain powers. This new perspective has big implications for how we approach rehab and set expectations for recovery. It’s not about unlocking secret brain potential, but about putting in the hard work to gradually rebuild and adapt.

The Best of No-Nonsense Self Help Books

We like this compendium of great self-help books, (not least because Barb’s A Mind for Numbers is amongst them). Check it out! 

Inspiring Email from a 50-year-old newly certified safety professional

It can be so inspiring to hear of learning successes from all walks of life, at all ages.  Here’s an inspiring email we received from Nizar: 

“I am writing to share some exciting news with you and to express my deepest gratitude for the inspiration you have provided me through your work.

 Today marks a significant milestone in my professional journey as I celebrate my success in achieving the “Certified Safety Professional by BCSP” certification, widely regarded as the golden standard in Safety. This accomplishment holds special meaning for me, as it not only signifies personal achievement but also serves as a testament to the power of learning and determination.

 Your book Learning How to Learn, has been a guiding light for me throughout this endeavour. Your insights and practical methodologies have equipped me with the tools necessary to navigate the complexities of acquiring new knowledge and skills, even at the age of 50. By applying your principles diligently, I have not only surpassed professional barriers but also demonstrated to my children that age is no barrier to learning and growth. 

I am immensely grateful to you for sharing your wisdom and expertise with the world. Your work has had a profound impact on my life, and I cannot thank you enough for being such a source of inspiration.

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

The Trusted Learning Advisor: The Tools, Techniques and Skills You Need to Make L&D a Business Priority, Keith Keating. With the advent of generative AI, we feel learning and development (“L&D”) is one of the hottest areas around.  After all, L&D experts can now point employees not only toward the vast array of learning platforms available nowadays—but also toward the new opportunities created for employees to do even better at their jobs if they learn the judicious use of generative AI.  Keating’s book lays out the strategies and best practices for learning and development professionals to build trust and credibility within their organizations so they are seen as reliable, go-to advisors on matters related to training, capability building, and upskilling the workforce for the future. The current state of L&D tends to be order-taking rather than advising. However, there are growing risks and problems if L&D teams do not evolve into trusted learning advisors, including lack of integration with the business, misalignment between learning strategies and business strategies, and inability to demonstrate awareness and prioritization of business needs. Relationship building through understanding the language and culture of stakeholders provides a strong foundation for trusted advisors to make an impact.

If you are looking to understand the L&D industry, whether as a quick overview or to do a deeper dive, you couldn’t do better than to read The Trusted Learning Advisor.

Added Value!

Posture Town, by Shweta Kapur, a book for children illustrated by Catherine Suvorova. This is such a unique, quirky subject and book with beautiful rhyming and illustrations! Author Shweta Kapur is a physical therapist and researcher who is passionate about promoting healthy behaviors in a fun and engaging way. As a clinician, talking with hundreds of her patients about posture, she realized that the habit of slouching can begin early on–and we can help kids avoid this by early coaching.  How we here at LHTL wish we’d had this book when we were little.  If you’re a parent or coach for youngsters, you will greatly appreciate this delightful book!

Our very own Terry Sejnowski wins one of the most important prizes in all of neuroscience 

The world’s largest brain research prize is Danish and is awarded and founded by the Lundbeck Foundation. Each year, 10 million Danish krone (approx. 1.3 million Euros) are given to brain researchers who have had a ground-breaking impact on brain research. This year, Terrence Sejnowski is accorded this extraordinary recognition.  Read more about it here! 

Sprouts and chunking

Jonas Koblin, a former student of our Learning How to Learn MOOC, was inspired by our course to start Sprouts—a YouTube channel that makes videos lessons for teachers to use in class and now reaches over 2M students a month in over 10 languages Take a look at this wonderful video that explains chunking in an elegant, desceptively simple way.   

To learn more about Jonas’s work, visit sproutsschools.com.

SF brings back 8th-grade algebra, admits the failure of reform math approaches

As Silicon Valley journalist Joanne Jacobs reports: “For years, San Francisco Unified claimed ‘equity math’ was improving minority students’ success rates. [But] As critics had predicted, forcing students to wait till ninth grade to take algebra has reduced the number of students taking higher-level math courses in high school. Now, the district admits that algebra for none was a flop.”

Once again, we see that superficially appealing approaches to helping others—“pathological altruism”—can surprisingly often backfire. Thank goodness for the behind-the-scenes researchers willing to do necessary debunking.

The most up-to-date article we’ve seen on Khanmigo and AI tutoring

This Washington Post op-ed by Josh Tyrangiel, “An ‘education legend’ has created an AI that will change your mind about AI,” provides superb insight into the future of AI tutoring. Key grafs:

[Sal Khan’s team] team drilled down on GPT’s math issues and discovered that it was decent at computation but easily bullied. If a user told GPT that 5 + 7 = 90, it would shrug and agree. This was largely because OpenAI’s original idea of a helpful assistant was one that’s always subservient — which makes a lot of sense when you have cutting-edge tech, and you don’t want to freak out your users. But in an educational context, second-guessing humans is kind of the point.

By infusing GPT with its own database of lesson plans, essays and sample problems, Khan Academy improved accuracy and reduced hallucinations. The full archive of Khan Academy math problems is now baked into GPT — “Our service to the broader AI community,” says Khan. But that still left a ton of work to do around interactivity. Khan and a small team provided hundreds of hours of feedback, gently retraining GPT to be less of a know-it-all that spits out answers, and more of a patient and knowledgeable companion. Like, say, Sal Khan.

The result is Khanmigo, a safe and accurate tutor, built atop ChatGPT, that works at the skill level of its users — and never coughs up answers. Khanmigo is the best model we have for how to develop and implement AI for the public good.

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers

For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, by Fei-Fei Li.  In her memoir The Worlds I See, AI pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li offers rare insight into the human story behind modern artificial intelligence advances. Detailing her journey from her childhood in China to leading Stanford’s famed AI Lab, Dr. Li reveals the curiosity, exploration, and discovery underlying her seminal contributions.

Central was her risky gambit developing ImageNet—a categorical catalogue of what is now over 14 million images—to push computer vision research. This massive dataset allowed for a competition to assess how good a given algorithm was at analyzing what category an image might belong to. The contest proved a turning point as Geoff Hinton’s convolutional neural network approach shattered records, launching the deep learning revolution now embodied by systems like ChatGPT.

Beyond the analytical breakthroughs, Dr. Li compellingly addresses the human biases and ethical considerations tha influence what AI models learn. Dr. Li helped establish AI Safety and AI for Social Good as research priorities.

Threaded with Dr. Li’s discussions of her research and visionary leadership is her personal tale escaping stifling environments in communist China. Through clear storytelling and hard-won wisdom, The Worlds I See inspires future innovators while unveiling AI’s societal importance and human foundations. For comprehending modern AI or the values driving great science, Dr. Li’s memoir fascinates and enlightens. This is already going to go on the list as one of our favorite books of the year!

Barb in Lima, Peru February 13-15!

Join Barb (here’s a message from her!) and a spectacular lineup of speakers at the Congreso Internacional de Educadores 2024 in Lima, Peru on February 13-15. This enormous conference will allow you to discover the latest trends and innovative methodologies to enhance your teaching work. 

You’ll have a unique opportunity to connect with colleagues, experts and educational leaders. Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for professional and personal growth–register here!

Pioneering Work in Understanding Working Memory 

This fascinating article from MIT News describes the pioneering work of MIT’s Professor Earl Miller and related research groups.  This work is giving us vitally important, far deeper understanding of working memory than we’ve ever had before.  As the article observes: 

“The human brain contains billions of neurons, each of which has its own electrical firing patterns. Together, groups of neurons with similar patterns generate oscillations of electrical activity, or brain waves, which can have different frequencies. Miller’s lab has previously shown that high-frequency gamma rhythms are associated with encoding and retrieving sensory information, while low-frequency beta rhythms act as a control mechanism that determines which information is read out from working memory.”

“His lab has also found that in certain parts of the prefrontal cortex, different brain layers show distinctive patterns of oscillation: faster oscillation at the surface and slower oscillation in the deep layers. One study, led by Bastos when he was a postdoc in Miller’s lab, showed that as animals performed working memory tasks, lower-frequency rhythms generated in deeper layers regulated the higher-frequency gamma rhythms generated in the superficial layers.

“The findings support a model that Miller’s lab has previously put forth, which proposes that the brain’s spatial organization helps it to incorporate new information, which carried by high-frequency oscillations, into existing memories and brain processes, which are maintained by low-frequency oscillations. As information passes from layer to layer, input can be incorporated as needed to help the brain perform particular tasks such as baking a new cookie recipe or remembering a phone number…

“‘The consequence of a laminar separation of these frequencies …may be to allow superficial layers to represent external sensory information with faster frequencies, and for deep layers to represent internal cognitive states with slower frequencies… The high-level implication is that the cortex has multiple mechanisms involving both anatomy and oscillations to separate ‘external’ from ‘internal’ information.’”

This YouTube presentation by Earl Miller is well worth your while if you are interested in working memory!

Barbara Oakley on Critical Thinking and Learning

Richard “Ric” Lindberg and Barb have a wide-ranging podcast conversation (check out the comprehensive list of books in the list of references mentioned during the podcast). This is one of the most interesting podcast conversations Barb has had in many years–you’ll enjoy it, too.  

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month (to be released February 6th!)

The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment, by Eric Siegel. Whether you are an AI expert or know nothing about AI, this book will teach you, through compelling examples of success and failure, what machine learning projects are and how to implement them.  Siegel is a master story-teller, who starts us out by describing how the delivery company UPS implemented machine learning to streamline its business practices.  This may seem like a no-brainer, but at the time, economizing with the help of machine learning was pretty much the last thing on the mind of most UPS business executives.  Indeed, it’s easy to go off track with machine learning projects, which aren’t like simple plug-and-play computer products, but instead can involve entire swathes of a company’s different divisions. Through the corresponding sections of his book, Seigel guides us through what he terms “BizML Practice”:

1. Value: Establish the deployment goal
2. Target: Establish the prediction goal.
3. Performance: Establish the evaluation metrics.
4. Fuel: Prepare the data.
5. Algorithm: Train the model.
6. Launch: Deploy the model.

Seigel’s broad experience in every aspect of the field helps bring the practices he describes to life.  We LOVED this book and cannot recommend it more highly!

Make class prep easy with 8 flexible prompts for retrieval practice

We’re frequently asked for tips on how to encourage and use retrieval practice in classes.  This marvelous article by Pooja Agarwal provides simple, practical ideas that you can put right to work in your teaching.  And of course, don’t miss the book Powerful Teaching, which gives even more resources.  Enjoy!  

How Transformers Helped AI Vastly Expand Its Grasp of Language and Meaning

Many different approaches have been tried over the years to allow a computer to rapidly parse the relationships of all the words of a sentence, paragraph, book, or in fact, any consecutive string of information. Computers’ ability to hold and analyze large chunks of information at once is akin to the abilities of a human’s “working memory”—that is, how much information we can grasp and hold in mind at once. (Please forgive us for attributing humanlike qualities here, but giving human traits to AI makes it easier to grasp how ChatGPT and comparable advanced natural language models work.)

In previous decades, we humans have experienced the upshot of computers’ limited computer working memory when it came to language translation. At first, computers could only hold only a single word in mind when translating into a foreign language.  This resulted in strange translations like “The test is a piece of cake,” (meaning “the test is easy”), being literally translated into Spanish as “El examen es un pedazo de pastel.” (Really? Should we eat the test, then?)  

In contrast to computers, human can hold up to an average of four “chunks” of information in mind at once. Those chunks can be quite large if they’re connected to information stored in long-term memory.  (Retrieval pratice helps here!) This means it’s straightforward to hold the sentence “The test is easy” in mind if you are an English speaker—you’ve got a lot of knowledge of English semantics, grammatical structures, and writing stored so you can retrieve the information without even thinking about it.  But just try holding the same sentence in mind if you haven’t learned Russian: “Экзамен лёгкий.” Or you don’t know Chinese: “考试很简单.”

To expand what a computer can process in one go, scientists tested different methods over the years, like recurrent neural networks and gated recurrent units (types of neural networks). Computer translations improved markedly when computers began to be able to hold entire sentences, and then paragraphs “in mind.”  But matters become more and more difficult the larger the strings of words become—it takes a lot of computational horsepower to remember everything that was written, for example, in the first half of a book.  

Large Language Models exploded into the public eye when Google engineers found a way to make for near-infinitely large computer working memories that can allow computers to hold entire books, and more, in their working memory equivalents.  These new Large Language Models use what are called transformers.

“Attention is all you need,” the paper that introduced the concept of transformers, has been cited over 100,000 times since it came out in 2017.  But despite its importance, this paper can be hard to parse.  This 15-minute video by the AI Hacker explains the operation of the transformer in as simple and clear a set of terms as we’ve seen anywhere. If you’re trying to understand ChatGPT, and you have a little bit of a tech background, you’ll enjoy!

A terrific direct eye-contact webcam

And speaking of attention, David Joyner, our co-instructor for our marvelous (even if we do say so ourselves!) course on “Teaching Online,” recommends the “IContactCamera.”  This allows your viewers to focus and pay better attention to you.  David writes: “The stick that holds the camera out is way more stable, the camera quality itself is a good bit better than the CenterCam (not quite to the level of the Brio, but only really notable in difference when comparing them side-by-side), and I like how easy it is to flip it out of my way when I’m not in a meeting or using a teleprompter.”  

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, by Tom Loveless. Now that we’re largely back on track after the epidemic-related school shutdowns, it’s a good time to also get back on track in what’s going on more generally with education.  In his insightful book Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, Tom Loveless provides a compelling analysis of the complex forces that shape education policy and reform in the United States. He explores the history of standards-based education reform, with a particular focus on the rollout and implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). 

What’s particularly enjoyable about this book is that Loveless writes so clearly. (Not like a typical academic!) Loveless also doesn’t take obvious sides in the progressive versus traditional debates—ultimately, that battle is extraneous to whether programs like Common Core work, and are worth the enormous cost and pedagogical upheaval. Loveless himself has led major studies in this area.  Ultimately, it seems part of the challenge with Common Core is that it was developed largely behind closed doors, with virtually no input or feedback from boots-on-the-ground teachers. This seems an obvious misstep—yet perhaps surprisingly, part of the reason for the failure of earlier standards was their very openness and transparency. 

Between the State and the Schoolhouse is an illuminating guide to the complex machinery behind education reform movements. Anyone interested in going beyond surface-level debates to truly understand the forces shaping America’s schools would do well to read this important and engagingly written work.

How to Quickly Memorize Poems

Here’s a wonderful video by memory maven Nelson Dellis (5 time US Memory Champion) on how to memorize poems, or indeed, any text.  Even if you’ve learned a lot of memory techniques already, you’ll benefit from this masterful overview of memorization.  The video is so eminently watchable that we watched it twice!

A conversation on the Future Learning Design Podcast about Uncommon Sense Teaching

Join this podcast episode as popular education podcast Tim Logan and Barb enjoy a deep discussion about teaching and learning.  Tim approaches the topic from unusual angles, so this is worth a listen (despite Barb’s froggy voice from a cold!) 

Top YouTube Teacher Adds His Two Cents on Uncommon Sense

Physicist Giles McMullen-Klein learned to code while studying physics. He now spends most of his time using python to analyse data. As a side hobby, he is one of the world’s most charismatic and popular teachers of python.  On this YouTube channel, he posts python tutorials and provides tips about working with data.  He also shares about learning resources. Along those lines, here is the best video review we have seen of Uncommon Sense Teaching, comparing it to another of our favorite books on learning—Make It Stick.  Well worth watching! [Hat tip: Adam Trybus]

How AI Chatbots Like ChatGPT or Bard Work – Visual Explainer

Here’s an extraordinary set of animations that visually describe what’s going on with Large Language Models.  If you are trying to understand LLMs, but don’t get the math or the complex flowcharts, you might be surprised at how much you can learn from these simple visuals.  And if you already do have a sense of LLMs, you will marvel at how simple and elegant this explanation is.  Kudos to Seán Clarke, Dan Milmo and Garry Blight of the Guardian!

Going Deeper into How Large Language Models Work

This video, by computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, is the best we’ve seen as far as a relatively general-audience introduction to Large Language Models (LLMs), the key processing approach behind systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard. Andrej is back at OpenAI now, but he has served as the Director of AI at Tesla, where he led the computer vision team of Tesla Autopilot. The talk discusses what what LLMs are, where they are headed, and some of the security-related challenges we’ll be facing in this new computing era. [Hat tip, David Handel of iDoRecall, Barb’s favorite flashcard system, which just keeps getting better as it integrates new approaches that are possible now due to LLMs.]

That’s all for now. Have a happy week—and Happy New Year!—in Learning How to Learn!

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers

For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, by Shane Parrish.  Like half the planet, it seems, we are fans of Shane Parrish’s podcast The Knowledge Project. In Clear Thinking, Shane distills the best of what he’s learned over the years, both from his high-pressure work for certain unnamed agencies and from his wide-ranging conversations with hyper-talented individuals. What we really love about this book are its personal stories of success and failure.  By laying out some of his poor past decision-making, Shane invites us to engage honestly with our own personality quirks and foibles. (It’s actually quite encouraging to realize that even world-class thought leaders can be all-too-human in their thinking!) Drawing from diverse fields, including philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, Shane provides us with an accessible yet sophisticated set of mental models and insights that can be readily applied to real-world situations.

Everything rings true with our own experiences.  For example, Shane describes the value of getting accurate information, instead of as relayed through layers of management. As an enlisted woman, Barb would witness generals who might think they were being guided, for example, through a typical training classroom. In actuality, the generals were being taken to a special classroom of hand-picked students—all other classrooms in a quarter mile having been cleared to avoid any “accidental” side visits. These high-ranking officers weren’t witnessing reality—they were witnessing only what they were being allowed to see.  This type of thing happens in the military, in education, in the corporate world—in fact, wherever layers of administration, as Shane describes, allow for murkiness and even subterfuge to emerge, so the bosses on high see only what’s intended instead of the existing real world.

Clear Thinking represents an empowering resource for anyone seeking to hone their judgment, cultivate self-awareness, and chart a purposeful path forward in work and life. Highly recommended!

Barb wins the McGraw Prize (sling-shotting back to New York from Santiago, Chile)

And it is indeed a Cheery Friday Greeting today as we announce that our very own Barb has won the McGraw Prize—colloquially known as the “Nobel Prize for Education.”  Barb is the first winner of a newly created category of the Prize—the Life Long Learning Award—in recognition of our society’s changing need to help learners of all ages grow in and out of the classroom. Barb joins fellow award winners Debra Duardo, Superintendent, Los Angeles County Office of Education, for her work in preK-12 education, and David Wilson, President, Morgan State University, for his work in higher education.  The Prize will be awarded on November 8th in New York City, at the Morgan Library and Museum.  It’ll be a direct flight for Barb returning from the fantastic ResearchEd on November 21st in Santiago, Chile to New York (okay—she can’t resist a stop over on Easter Island! 🙂 )

Northwest Mathematics Conference

Barb will be headlining at the 62nd Annual Northwest Mathematics Conference on October 12-14th, 2023 with some ground breaking presentations:  

• Effective Teaching & Learning: Dramatic New Insights from Neuroscience, Thursday, October 12, 1:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
• Friday Breakfast Keynote: Interleaving: The Path toward Reconciliation in the Math and Reading Wars, Friday, October 13, 8:00 a.m. – 9:30 a.m.
• The Pathological Altruist’s Guide to Education: How to Help Without Hurting, Friday, October 13, 11:00 a.m. – 11:50 a.m.

If you’re in the Portland area, register now and Barb will see you next week!

Dr. Monica Aggarwal

Barb was fortunate enough to talk about learning recently on Dr. Monica Aggarwal’s podcast.  Dr. Aggarwal is a cardiologist who uses common sense medical coupled with diet and lifestyle approaches to help improve your health and boost your energy. (We loved her book Body on Fire: How Inflammation Triggers Chronic Illness and the Tools We Have to Fight It). 

Hat Tip to Matthew Tower from ETCH (“Ed Tech Career Home”)

If you are interested in general edtech issues, we highly recommend signing up for Matthew Tower’s ETCH Substack. As Matthew notes: “I follow the news in EdTech throughout the week and write this newsletter on Sunday afternoons. The goal of each newsletter is to give the reader an information-dense 5 minutes of reading on the edtech to start your week. It is informed by my decade of experience in the edtech world, but I try to find publicly available information to back up what I say.” 

Harvard Canceled its Best Black Professor. Why?

In this thoughtful, eery 25-minute documentary, director Rob Montz explores Harvard superstar Roland Fryer’s search for truth. This search appears to have sown the seeds of his destruction.

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Marie Curie: A Life by Susan Quinn.  Marie Curie is one of the greatest scientists of the last several centuries.  Yet people often know little of the life of this extraordinary woman who helped unravel the mysteries of radiation—to her own, and her daughter’s, ultimate peril and demise. Maria was born in Poland as the fifth and the youngest child of teachers Bronisława, (née Boguska), and Władysław Skłodowski. Władysław was the director of a secondary for boys, where he taught mathematics and physics. Władysław also taught Maria mental math—a trick she used to her advantage through her career. (Would that we commonly taught these skills in elementary school nowadays.)  Meanwhile, researcher Pierre Curie in Paris was beginning to think he would have a career wedded only to science, since he could never find a woman as interested in science as he.  But when Marie moved to Paris, Pierre was bowled over.  Their mutual passions produced a Nobel Prize and two daughters.  Pierre might, however, be thought of as an exemplar of the dangers of excessive focus. It seems he was killed while inattentively attempting to cross a busy street.  Marie, devastated, still forged ahead in her research, winning a Nobel Prize yet again for her solo efforts.  This fascinating book tells the story of this exceptional woman, with a phenomenal memory and even more extraordinary ability to piece together the mysteries of radiation.   

Learning & the Brain Conference, Boston, November 17-19, 2023

Learning & the Brain is one of our very favorite conferences, packed full of great information with terrific speakers.  You’ll see Richard Davidson, perhaps the best-known meditation researcher;  the always informative polymath Paul Kirschner; Annie Murphy Paul, whose books we’ve admired for years; and Robert Waldinger, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and director of the longest, most comprehensive scientific study of happiness and wellbeing ever conducted. Barb’s own presentations will help reconcile the math and reading wars using insights from neuroscience (Nov 17, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM ET); as well as the keynote on building memories and effective learners, Nov 18: 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM.  Register here to take advantage of the early registration until September 29th!

Smartick Data

One of the coolest developments we’ve seen online are the fantastic data visualization capabilities offered by Smartick Data.  Wow!  You can find, for example, graphs and articles revealing how the number of students with disabilities have trended markedly upwards.  “In the 2000-01 school year, when data collection for autism began, around 93,000 students were reported. This figure has grown nearly ten-fold to 882,000 students by the 2021-22 school year. Similarly, the category of ‘other health impairments’ has seen an exponential increase from 141,000 students in 1976-77 to over a million students in 2021-22.”  You can also break this data out by state.

Here is just the tiniest sampling of the many charts and articles you can easily access through Smartick Data:

• Visualizing The Current State of Teacher Shortages in U.S.
• Numeracy and Literacy Scorecards
• EdTech Titans: The Global Unicorns Shaping the Future of Education
• International Mathematical Olympiad 2023: Unveiling the Champions
• Visualizing the Duration of School Summer Vacations Around the World
• Crunching the Numbers: How Much Funding Do Public Schools Get?

We’ve bookmarked Smartick Data, and return to it again and again to find fun, interesting charts and articles. You can also subscribe, as we have, to their educational newsletter. Smartick is all about teaching kids math, but it’s also so much more. Enjoy! 

“Finland Government has Admitted the Failure of Finland Education”

Indefagatable investigative Japanese educational reporter Manabu Watanabe is back to reporting in English after an all-too-long hiatus. The Bildung Review is Finland’s recent report involving the shocking decline of learning standards in the country since the early 2000s.  Manabu observes: “As we all know, very few people abroad talked about the excellence of Finnish education between 1960s and 1990s. It was only after it had reached to the top in the PISA ranking in the mid-2000s that Finland was hailed as ‘Education Superpower.’ Since then, Finnish teaching has been an exciting topic and celebrated enthusiastically in many foreign media such as TV programs, books, newspapers, blogs etc. Education debates in the world have been revolving around Finland for almost two decades. However, according to the Bildung Review, while proficiency in reading and mathematics strengthened between 1960s and 1990s, rapid decline in learning outcomes began in early 2000s. So if you accept this view of the Finland government, you cannot help but come to the conclusion that the Finnish teaching mythologized after the mid-2000s is useless or even harmful, because it has caused the sharp drop in the learning outcomes. 

In this way, it poses a very painful question especially to those who have been making a fuss about Finland education on the bandwagon.”

Barbara Oakley, cómo aprendemos

Enjoy Barb’s conversation about learning and entrepreneurship at Libertopolis in Guatemala City with Maria Dolores Arias and Jorge Jacobs. 

Modern Firefighter

Learn more about the intense discipline of firefighting–and how learning applies, with Rob Kandle and Barb in this podcast episode of Modern Firefighter.

Sithu Khant’s Journey in Machine Learning

If you are trying to get a foothold in the world of machine learning, read this interesting blog post by Sithu Khant about his learning journey over the past year.

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

The Battle Over the Butterflies of the Soul: Camillo Golgi, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and the Birth of Neuroscience, by Wallace B. Mendelssohn, MD. 

One of the more intriguing rivalries in the history of science is that between the Italian Camillo Golgi and the Spaniard Santiago Ramón y Cajal—both of whom received the Nobel Prize for their interlinked discoveries.  Golgi’s staining methods gave Cajal the start of a methodology he refined to help him get a more comprehensive view of neurons.   Both scientists initially published in back-water journals, so it’s no surprise that each at first remained unaware of the other’s work.   This meant that Cajal published studies claiming he had discovered findings that Golgi had already published. The brash young Cajal also wrote Golgi aggressively to challenge his theories—particularly, Golgi’s hypothesis that only a single, large interwebbed “reticulum” of cells was fused to form the brain’s neural networks. History would show Cajal to be largely correct. This short book by Dr. Mendelson describes the development of staining techniques in photography and neuroscience and examines the rivalry between the two scientists. Why was Golgi so stubborn—and wrong—in the face of overwhelming data? This book by psychiatrist Wallace Mendelson comes as close to what we can know today to the answer. 

TED talk by Sal Khan on the extraordinary opportunities presented by ChatGPT

Learning How to Learner and neuroscientist Leif Gibb writes to point out Sal Khan’s fantastic TED Talk. Leif notes: “I found it inspiring and was fascinated to learn about how Khan Academy is giving its tutoring AI the ability to ‘think’ quietly, chatting with itself to perform multiple steps of reasoning.”  And Leif is also correct in observing: “I have no doubt that the principles of Learning How to Learn can also be incorporated into their AI tutor.” Perhaps in a learning mode, Khanmigo might be able to point out key ideas that a student might find worth practicing retrieval with. Or suggest a few jumping jacks for a break when it’s clear a student is pushing the wall with frustration.  Or home in with interleaving exercises when a student clearly needs a bit of extra practice.  We like Leif’s idea! 

Barb in Panama!

Barb will be in Panama speaking at a number of different events from September 15-18.  The three-hour workshop on Learning How to Learn on September 15th is perfect for professionals who want to keep up with the latest in the deluge of change.  The three-hour workshop on teaching on September 16th—Uncommon Sense Teaching: Effective Teaching & Learning, Insights from Neuroscience—will give you a plethora of insights to help improve your ability to effectively communicate key ideas. And if you are interested in changing careers (for example, going into something more technically-oriented), Learning How to Change, September 18th, is ideal for you.  Sign up today, as seating is limited.

Study finds that the human brain reactivates mental representations of past events during new experiences

This super-cool article describes how neuroscience related to movie-making once again reveals fascinating information about how the brain puts together its understanding.  Researcher Avital Hahamy observes: “We developed a new fMRI method to look for replay of past information in the transitions between movie/story scenes. We basically asked—would our brains replay past information that is needed for interpreting a scene we had just perceived?” 

And yes, it does! “We found that the same brain regions that replay spatial information in the rodent brain also replay narrative events in the human brain,” Hahamy said. “In other words, replay, previously thought to mainly support spatial navigation, could also underlie the human ability to make sense of narratives. Moreover, while research in rodents proposed that replay is used to store past events into memory, mostly when rodents rest or sleep, we suggest it can also be used to make sense of the present, on the fly, while events are unfolding.”

All this is eventually going to help teachers all better understand what’s meant by “higher conceptual understanding” in Bloom’s taxonomy.

Clues about how the brain figures out what’s worth remembering

This article by Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta shows how researchers are investigating what sparks interest in remembering things.  As we’ve seen before in advertising expert Robert Cialdini’s books Influence and Presuasion, hooking people with anything that catches their interest opens a window that allows you to feed them other information you want to learn.  This approach apparently works for both students and snails.

Insightful discussion with visionaries in math education

Don’t miss this terrific discussion between math professors Anna Stokke and Brian Conrad, of the University of Winnipeg and Stanford, respectively.  Anna and Brian are the real deal–genuine mathematicians who are deeply concerned about the direction of mathematics education in North America.  The pair discuss modern-day applications of math, and Brian gives advice “for parents who wonder what type of math their kids should learn to be ready for a four-year college degree in STEM or other quantitative fields.  Listeners will receive an update on what happened with the California Math Framework since the two episodes featuring Jelani Nelson (Episodes 11 & 12).  As well, Brian Conrad shares examples of the many false or misleading citations he found permeating a 1000-page draft copy of the CMF. The discussion of those findings illustrates how citation misrepresentation can lead to misunderstandings about math and data science among the general public. This episode is a must-listen for parents, teachers, policy makers and anyone with an interest in math or education.”

The Science of Learning

Check out this Substack newsletter by solidly evidence-based educators Dr. Nidhi Sachdeva, an evidence-informed learning designer and consultant; and Dr. Jim Hewitt, a professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning at the University of Toronto. Their goal is to keep you updated on the latest breakthroughs in learning sciences while providing a platform where teachers, teacher candidates, graduate students, and researchers can come together to exchange ideas, share experiences, and deepen their understanding of the science behind effective teaching and learning.  

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

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

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!

• Mindshift—the book and MOOC

• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC

• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers

For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!