What Barb Wishes All Employers (and Employees) Knew About Online Learning

Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

What Barb Wishes All Employers (and Employees) Knew About Online Learning

Here’s a brilliant article—a featured article on Coursera’s blog—titled “What One of Coursera’s Most Popular Instructors Wishes All Employers Knew About Online Learning.” Writer Lee Price managed to synthesize Barb’s rambling thoughts into a pithy “must read” for employers as well as employees. (Click the “heart” if you like it. 🙂 )

Books of the Week

Here’s a wonderful new book—a surprise top best-seller—called Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramon y Cajal. As the cover description mentions: “At the crossroads of art and science, Beautiful Brain presents Nobel Laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s contributions to neuroscience through his groundbreaking artistic brain imagery.” We would talk more intelligently about the book, but it’s sold out nearly everywhere—order your own copy, (just as we have), now! To tide you over, here is a lovely New York Times article about the book. (Hat tip: Jerónimo Castro, Director of COLFUTURO.) We also recommend Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul: Science and Art, by neuroscientist Javier DeFelipe.

And if you’re interested in how art improves our ability perceive and understand, we highly recommend Amy Herman’s Visual Intelligence: Sharpen Your Perception, Change Your Life.  (We prefer the hard copy over the e-reader copy, because the images are easier to see on the hard copy.)  This book will definitely improve your powers of observation—even while some of the stories are so compelling that the book’s tough to put down. And yet another excellent, but hard-to-get book on art is Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, by Margaret Livingstone.

If you’re interested in an audio book related to art, check out Leonard Shlain’s Leonardo’s Brain: Understanding da Vinci’s Creative Genius. Shlain is one of our favorite writers and thinkers, and if you listen to this fascinating book, you’ll see why.

MOOC of the Week

And speaking of art, we’ve stumbled across an intriguing new MOOC called “Art of the MOOC: Public Art and Pedagogy,” by Pedro Lasch and Nato Thompson of Duke University.  We believe that MOOCs are a phenomenal new form of art, even as they form fantastic teaching tools. So we couldn’t resist the opportunity to sign up for this MOOC, which begins on March 13th.

Interview with Dhawal Shah of Class Central

Dhawal Shah, founder of Class Central, is interviewed in this great “what’s going on behind the scenes” interview with Quincy Larson. Quincy, incidentally, is the founder of Free Code Camp, an open source community of 500,000+ people who learn to code together and build projects for nonprofits.

Inequality in Education

Here is a thought-provoking article about a pocket of inequality in American society in substantive need of improvement—that of the American university system and its treatment of adjunct professors and graduate students.

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
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