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.

Top books selected by Learning How to Learners from 2016 Dec 30, 2016

Posted on January 5, 2017 by - Uncategorized

Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

2016 Book of the Year

Elon Musk, by award winning feature writer Ashlee Vance, is our recommendation for Learning How to Learn’s book of the year. We love biographies, and this one is superb—we learn of Elon Musk’s difficult childhood, and the good and bad of the razor thin path he’s walked to success in reinventing entire industries. This is a book of great inspiration about not only humanity’s future, but your own future. Read it and be inspired about what hidden talents lie within!

Top 10 “Cheery Friday” Recommended Books for 2016

We’ve been asked which books we’ve recommended this year have been the most popular. Here’s a list:

  1. Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential (look’s like Barb’s book, due out in April, is going to be a hit!)
  2. The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
  3. Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise
  4. Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
  5. Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It
  6. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
  7. Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain
  8. Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change your Life
  9. I Forgot Something (But I Can’t Remember What it Was)
  10. How To Win Friends and Influence People

Also, if pencils counted as a book, these cool pencils would also be in the top ten: Palomino Blackwing.

Kevin’s “Cheery Friday” Website

The app by our Learning How to Learn course designer, Kevin Mendez, for “Cheery Friday” books has been very popular indeed, with a lot of requests for an additional Android app. To tide everyone over, Kevin has added a list of all our Learning How to Learn recommended books on his “Cheery Friday” website. If you have any comments or suggestions (or “attaboys!”) for Kevin, please email him directly at cheeryfriday@gmail.com. Download now—highly recommended!

A Fascinating Article: “One Skeptical Scientist’s Mindfulness Journey”

Our friend Scott Barry Kaufman, (author of Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind), has written one of the most insightful articles we’ve ever read about meditation and its tradeoffs. Scott is a skeptical kind of guy, and he approaches his real world exploration of meditation and mindfulness with a nuanced understanding of tradeoffs, as well as deep background knowledge of the underlying neuroscience. Scott refers to an important new paper on creativity and what we in Learning How to Learn loosely call “the diffuse mode”: “Mind-wandering as spontaneous thought: a dynamic framework.” As great writers do, Scott’s popular article gives us a framework to understand and appreciate the important science going on in this area—and also to understand how we can put this knowledge to use in improving our own lives.

The Strange Persistence of First Languages

One of our favorite writers, cognitive scientist Julie Sedivy, has written a beautiful article in Nautilus on the value and meaning of first languages, even if they might seem to have slipped away in the presence of other, more dominant, languages. If you like learning about languages as well as learning languages, this article is not to be missed.

That’s all for this year. Best wishes for 2017 from Learning How to Learn!

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

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