Category: Uncategorized

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Need PPE Support for Your Hospital?

In response to last week’s call for PPE equipment for hospitals, LHTLer Rafael Mayer points us toward Frontline Heroes, a charity initiative to source PPE and donate to institutions in need in the US. It’s grass-roots and not meant to exist post crisis, but it is serving an urgent need. Incidentally, you can see Rafael’s daughter, Gabrielle Mayer, a doctor who is also on the front lines battling COVID, in a stirring interview here.

Book of the Month

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life, by Ozan Varol. The book is finally out! Varol really was a rocket scientist—he served as a member of the operations team for NASA’s 2003 Mars Exploration Rover project; which sent two rovers to examine the Martian surface. But, in a tribute to his wide-ranging intellect, Varol is now tenured law professor at Lewis & Clark Law School. Think Like a Rocket Scientist is a wonderful book—a sort of vade mecum of critical thinking, whether in business, learning, or life. Varol has an unparalleled ability to weave together the brilliant thoughts of others into a coherent narrative that is greater than the sum of its parts.  A counterintuitive thinker, Varol often surprises: you’ll learn about how to act under conditions of uncertainty; how to think big, but carefully; how moving fast and breaking things doesn’t work well for rocket science or many other situations; how success can cause failure, and many other mental frameworks and strategies. Think Like a Rocket Scientist is a book to savor. 

As a special exclusive gift, Ozan is including two bonuses for ordering his book by April 21st. You’ll get (1) a pack of 10, three-minute, bite-sized videos with actionable insights from Think Like a Rocket Scientist that you can implement right away (among other things, you’ll learn the single principle Elon Musk used to revolutionize the aerospace industry and how you can use the same principle to revolutionize your life) and (2) a video training with a behind-the-scenes look at Ozan’s productivity system (you’ll learn how to defeat procrastination and get more done in less time). Just forward your receipt to rocket@ozanvarol.com and mention Cheery Friday.

Take Learning How to Learn for College Credit

Oakland University is offering ISE 1170 Learning How to Learn 100% online this summer for college credit (May 4 – June 24, 2020).  The course is based on Barb and Terry’s MOOCs Learning How to Learn and Mindshift, and their accompanying books. College students can register for ISE 1170 as an Oakland University guest student and earn 4 credits (please contact your College Academic Advisor to determine if the credits will count toward your degree). Contact Dr. Robert Van Til if you have questions about how to enroll.

iDoRecall Flashcard Program

This just in—iDoRecall, our favorite flashcard program, has just been awarded the rare “Digital Promise Research-Based Design Certification.” This means, among other things, that “Research about how people learn is core to the theoretical framework that drives product design and is evident throughout the product.” A big congratulations to a great flashcard program. (Check it out!)

Tanulj meg tanulni a Courseraval!

Yes, it’s Learning How to Learn in Hungarian. Check out the cool promo video!

Free Public Online Charter Schools

We’ve been intrigued to discover several major schooling institutions that specialize in providing online education, often free, for K-12 students. The first is called Connections Academy—it is free for those in the US, although you have to check for the specifics related to your state. An international companion school system is International Connections Academy.  Although not free for international students, this school system does offer relatively low cost, high quality education for those learning from abroad. In a similar vein, Agora Public Charter School at Home (K12 Online Schools), also offers free high quality online education for K-12 students.  

All of these institutions have years of online teaching experience. We should note that Connections Academy gets their materials and platform via Pearson, the publisher. Of all publishers worldwide, Pearson has impressed us as having the most visionary and high quality educational materials that take advantage of online advances. The quality and the economy of scale that an outstanding publisher like Pearson can provide can take learning, and online learning, to a whole new level. (This is probably one of the few times you won’t hear us grumping about textbook prices.)

Interestingly, we understand that the Governor of Pennsylvania has been trying to shut down cyber schools by mandating that students can only attend a cyber school within their own district—meaning that all the years of expertise developed by institutions like Connections Academy and Agora go to waste so as to keep schools from having to compete by potentially losing their students to other schools. This, of course, prevents parents from having choice.  

Worse yet, many online charter schools that were poised to move forward beautifully in the midst of the pandemic were forced to halt their usual teaching plans so as not to outdistance regular brick and mortar schools. This is a travesty. 

On a more positive note, no schooling system is perfect. But if you are a teacher looking to get away from spending your days disciplining students, you may wish to think about teaching at an online charter school. There are no physical fights to break up online, and unlike a face-to-face class, you can mute a miscreant with the click of a button.  In fact, many troubled students who struggle with brick and mortar schools find the online world to be much more conducive to allowing their inner lives to flourish—the bullying and nastiness that can be so harmful for some sensitive students are far more difficult to get away with online. Online charter schools provide a great, safe learning environment—far more so, in many cases, than do many brick and mortar schools.

Online cyber schools have also figured out how to teach younger children. An important element is that K-6 children generally need to have a “responsible adult” to help the children on the side. You may think “well then, that’s only for wealthier families with a stay-at-home parent.” But that’s not true at all. Many young online students, for example, from inner city Philadelphia, have an older sibling, grandparent, aunt, or uncle as their responsible adult. In fact, most parents, rich or poor, are deeply invested in their children’s education and are willing to go the extra mile to help them succeed. Families also have mentors paid for by the schools.

If you want to promote your child’s sense of mastery of their own learning journey, even while they receive a quality education, check out the online charter schools. 

Reaching Homeless Students

We believe one of the biggest learning challenges of this pandemic is how school districts can effectively reach out and teach their students who are homeless.  Does anyone from LHTL have experience in helping homeless students get online and share the advantages of online learning?  If so, please share your ideas in the discussion forum here.  (If the link doesn’t work, just go directly to the top of the general discussion forum of the course—update your session if necessary.)

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

• Interested in having Barb give a webinar on learning or moving into the online learning world? Reach out here.
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers! And the followup book, Mindshift.
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Special note: Barb’s daughter Rosie is a physician on the front lines of battling COVID-19. She asks: “Please donate any PPE (gowns, masks of any kind, or eye protection) that you might have to your local hospitals—it would mean a lot to us.”

Remote Learning Guidance from State Education Agencies During the COVID-19 Pandemic

We would like to point school administrators toward this masterful preprint, compiled by Harvard’s Justin Reich and his colleagues, about what the 50 different states are doing to try to best address the unprecedented demands of educating while social distancing. Interestingly, synchronous approaches to teaching (eg Zoom and Google Classroom), are discouraged,  “since coordinating the meeting times of students, parents/caregivers, and teachers (who are often addressing the needs of their own children) makes this approach very difficult and perhaps unsustainable.” Vermont explicitly warns against more than 2 hours of synchronous instruction per day. Asynchronous is much better in reaching out to teach, and best practices for agencies often seem to involve providing the personal touch by communicating via videos–which implies this approach might be worthwhile for teachers as well.  Some innovative outreach, for example, in the state of Arkansas, is being done by a partnership between schools and public broadcasting stations like PBS to provide scheduled programming on television for students.  

Coursera Offering Free Certificates!

For a limited time, Coursera is offering free certificates for 85 courses. Here is the full list, with instructions to access. (This list includes our Mindshift)!

Book of the Week

The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church, by Malachi Martin. At a time when some (thankfully, as noted above, not all!) public schools are refusing to teach in the name of “equity,” (as we mentioned last week), this book is as topical today as when it was first published in 1988.  Martin was originally ordained as a Jesuit priest—he became Professor of Palaeography at the Vatican’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. From 1958 he served as secretary to Cardinal Bea during preparations for the Second Vatican Council, so his knowledge of the Jesuits and the inside history of this important group was unparalleled. (Disillusioned by reforms, he asked to be released from certain of his Jesuit vows in 1964.) Martin makes a convincing case for how the Jesuits used cult-like revamping of the meaning of Roman Catholic vocabulary, such as equating evil with capitalism, that allowed the group to essentially become a Marxist splinter group in direct opposition to Pope John Paul II’s attempts to overcome the evils of communism, particularly in South America. (See here for Barb’s experiences with communism.) As Martin notes: “Cleverly used, the new ‘theological’ lexicon not only justifies but mandates the use of any means—including armed violence, torture, violation of human rights, deceptions, and deep alliances with professedly atheistic and antireligious forces such as the USSR and Castro’s Cuba—in order to achieve the ‘evolution’ of Marxism and its promise of material success.” 

See also Perfect Peril: Christian Science and Mind Control for another example of how cults redefine important words so that when you think you are discussing the same ideas, you actually aren’t—making cult deprogramming all the more difficult. Martin’s views must be taken as a snapshot of the context of the time and his own beliefs, but his careful attempts to be objective contain much worth pondering.

Being Stubborn, Rigid May Lower Your Alzheimer’s Risk

Well, this study is a new one for us!  Key graf: “A truly fascinating new piece of research finds that being just a little stubborn and argumentative may just protect against dementia and Alzheimer’s… Before you go and pick a fight with the next person who looks at you funny, that lack of agreeability would be most effective if accompanied by a healthy dose or curiosity and an aversion to conformity. According to researchers at the University of Geneva, people with that personality combination showed better preservation of brain areas that usually deteriorate and lose volume during the aging process and lead up to an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.” 

Now we know why there are so many curmudgeonly old people around! 

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

• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers! And the followup book, Mindshift.
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

We thought last week was big with 26,000 new Learning How to Learners.  But this week is even bigger—40,852 new fellow students!  Welcome to our vibrant learning community, approaching 3 million total registered students on all platforms. If you are trying to grapple with career change or upskilling, as many are nowadays, check out our sequel course to Learning How to Learn—Mindshift. 

Book of the Week

Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), by Stephen R. C. Hicks.  We read this marvelous book some years back, when it was in its first edition, and are delighted to now see the book is now out with a new, expanded version that is, as we type this, now available on Kindle for free. (The expanded essays include “Free Speech and Postmodernism” and “From Modern to Postmodern Art: Why Art Became Ugly.”  Hicks has a wonderfully readable style that makes complex philosophical ideas more comprehensible to us mere mortal, non-philosopher types.  

True story: Barb was talking to a fellow colloquium attendee who seemed keenly aware of philosophy. She mentioned she only really felt she understood and enjoyed one book about philosophy, but for once she couldn’t remember the title or author. She dutifully reported back after a break to visit her hotel room that the book was Explaining Postmodernism, by Stephen Hicks.  “Oh,” said Barb’s conversant. “That’s nice to hear, because I’m Stephen Hicks.”

Think K-12 Is Going Online? Think Again

One very-well situated professor of education tells us that many K-12 schools, at least in the US, have not stepped up to the shift to online—instead, they’re just bidding the rest of this school year goodbye, hoping that matters can go back to business-as-usual in the fall. (Sometimes public schools are using the excuse that because all students can’t be taught, no students should be taught—which, of course, simply further benefits the elites who are sending their children to on-the-ball private schools.)  What’s particularly disappointing is that the middle and high schools that have the technology—meaning the students each have been given devices—are ignoring the need to create engaging materials. Throwing a few documents online and turning students loose on them is not creating engaging materials. And creating engaging materials doesn’t mean just getting the students to interact with one another.  Creating engaging materials means creating engaging materials, especially videos, which is what students love and learn well from.  As this article observes: “COVID-19 will bring about an education reevaluation, if not revolution.” 

Preparing for a Fall Without In-Person Classes

This perhaps eerily prescient article in Inside Higher Ed speaks of universities that are wisely preparing for the possibility of a virtual Fall semester.  In our opinion, all universities and K-12 schools should be doing the same. This is a time to step back and look more meaningfully at how to create good online coursework, rather than simply throw together remote instruction.  

Online Learning—Webinar and Beta Review Opportunity

Incidentally, Barb is working on a book to be published by Penguin-Random House on effective teaching based on practical insights from neuroscience. If you are an experienced professor or teacher and have the time to beta review and constructively critique the chapter on online learning, please email her.  And if your institution would like to invite her to give a webinar on creating truly engaging online materials based on solid research findings, feel free to also reach out.

The EdSurge Podcast Is Inviting You to Share Your Stories 

If you’re teaching a class online for the first time, suddenly taking your courses digital or helping lead an institution through this crisis, EdSurge hopes you’ll share a short one- or two-minute anecdote or observation about how that is going. What has been a moment of surprise or unexpected challenge? Just open the voice memo app on a smartphone, record a short message and email it to jeff@edsurge.com. Please do keep it short. EdSurge will compile some of them for a future episode of their excellent weekly podcast.

MOOC of the Month: Sex from Molecules to Elephants

In a time where it’s difficult to do any travel, you can travel vicariously while learning about sexual reproduction by taking “Sex from Molecules to Elephants.” This MOOC follows the best of good MOOC-making techniques: The instructors tried to avoid talking heads as much as possible—they based the instruction on nature videos that they shot all over the world, including Africa, Yellowstone, Iceland and Israel. Watch the promotional video of this extremely-popular-in-its-home-university course here. “Sex from Molecules to Elephants” is intended as an enrichment course suitable for everybody, with no previous knowledge required. Enjoy!

Remembering the Important Things You Learn

This wonderful video by Will Schoder provides a great reminder and set of new perspectives on key ideas about learning we learned in Learning How to Learn. Will then goes beyond to show how these approaches can help you live a more meaningful and productive life.

Cognitive ability is a whole-brain phenomenon

As described in this recent article, research is revealing that cognitive ability involves much of the brain. As the researchers themselves note: “Firstly, we have demonstrated that the relationship between brain structure and intelligence not only involves grey matter, but also white matter — the brain’s wiring system… Secondly, it’s not just one part of this wiring system that is important for intelligence, but rather the wiring system as a whole…”

Building Your Memory

Four-Time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis has created a new, updated video on how to calculate any day of the week in history. It’s a fun skill to learn (and not too difficult). And don’t forget Nelson’s great book, Remember It! The Names of People You Meet, All of Your Passwords, Where You Left Your Keys, and Everything Else You Tend to Forget and his upcoming Memory Superpowers! for kids.

Teachers Urge Government To Reopen Schools Before Students Learn To Think For Themselves

Yes, that’s the headline of an article from one of our favorite satire sites, the Babylon Bee. (And of course, we also enjoy the Onion.)

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

• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers! And the followup book, Mindshift.
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

A new record of brand new Learning How to Learners this week—26,000 learners have joined since last week.  Welcome to our vibrant community, approaching 3 million total registered students on all platforms. If you are wrangling children or teens at home, don’t forget our companion course, Learning How to Learn for Youth! (Actually, even long-time LHTLers will learn new information there!) And speaking of schooling at home, hear this mother’s fervent, funny prayer.

Book of the Week

Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health, by Mark Hyman, M.D.  For the heroes on the front lines of the pandemic, as well as those of us at home, good nutrition is more important now than ever.  Hyman’s book has an unusual take on diet—he describes why fats and oils are so important, and how the US government went astray decades ago in its low fat recommendations. Although Hyman’s approach is similar to some low carb and keto diets, his explanations help us understand why consuming fats is actually a healthy idea.  See also Dr. Hyman’s article “How to Protect Yourself from COVID-19: Supporting Your Immune System When You May Need It Most.” 

Scott Young’s Six Week Learning Course

Barb’s friend Scott Young, author of the wonderful book Ultralearning, is opening a new session of his six-week learning course. He’s offering a free lesson series this coming week on how to start your own ultralearning project. This is a wonderful time to start an exciting learning challenge, and Scott’s course will give you fantastic guidance. Check it out!  

Class Central—Your Source for the Best in Online Learning

At a time when almost everybody is looking to discover new ideas and inspiration online, Class Central is seeing enormous boosts in traffic.  Here are some of their most popular articles:

• Here are 450 Ivy League courses you can take online right now for free
• Ivy League Courses
• Free Online Courses You Can Take from Universities Worldwide
• Free MOOCs that Teach about COVID-19

Encourage Youngsters to Take MOOCs

Maureen Winningham, Director of Learning & Development at PCG, notes: “My daughter already took a Stanford class on Nutrition and Health on Coursera and is now into Mountains 101 from U of Alberta.  I told her that while others are goofing off or playing video games when she applies to college, she can submit a stack of MOOC certificates to show colleges.”

The MOOCathon Challenge

Rassul-Ishame Kalfane, a PhD Candidate at Université de Montpellier, has started a MOOCathon challenge to help people grow and develop while they are social distancing. Feel free to join in—just hit the translate button at the bottom of the webpage if you don’t speak French.  (Rassul-Ishame, like Barb, is a fan of the iDR flashcard system.)

10 Ways to Help Your Students Cope with the Transition to Virtual Learning

This nice article by Tsedal Neeley in Harvard Business Publishing Education provides insights on shepherding your students into their new online relationships with you. [Hat tip: Jose Fernando Gallego Nicholls.]

Maintain Social Interactions While Learning Online

Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success is back with another valuable post about how MOOCs can help you to stay mentally strong and alert by keeping your social interactions in high gear—even in a time of social distancing!

Homemade Coronavirus Masks

Here is a recipe from a neurosurgeon (a brilliant medical school friend of Barb’s daughter Rosie) for improvising protective equipment if you can’t get anything better.

Zoom

Zoom has emerged as people’s prime choice now for video conferencing. We love its simplicity. But use the safety features to avoid “Zoombombing.”

Job Opportunity at the National Academies

There’s a job opening at the National Academies for an Associate Program Officer. Please apply if you’ve got the appropriate background and interest—the National Academies is one of the world’s most fascinating places to work. 

Cool Promotional Videos for MOOCs

Barb had the fortunate opportunity to speak with Vincent Renken,  Program Director BioTech Delft at Delft University of Technology. Delft is making some innovative MOOCs—take a look at these cool promotional videos related to the exciting basics of transport phenomena! (Haven’t you sometimes wished you could fly?)

If You’re Going to Write About Science of Reading, Get Your Science Right

This excellent article by Daniel Willingham takes to task the confusing mishmash of a policy statement on reading by the National Education Policy Center. Key graf: “ The NEPC didn’t say ‘science doesn’t matter.’ That would sound like climate change denial. But note too they didn’t say ‘they’ve got the science wrong. HERE’S the way the science of reading really works.’ Instead they said ‘hey, this is all pretty murky and complicated…no one really knows what’s right, it’s all controversial, but those folks are pretending that they’ve got the science of reading figured out.’ The authors of this report try to render science irrelevant by claiming it’s premature to apply it. This argument is undercut by their repeated demonstrations that they misunderstand science, the application of science, and the extant literature

on reading… [These problems] are a result of wrong-headed (in the NEPC’s view) paths toward educational goals, or wrong-headed educational goals. They are not a direct result of reading science. Whoever wrote this report did not know enough science to see the difference.”

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

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

This week, we’re going to shift to a topic many people are now having to address as social distancing comes into play—how to cook and eat healthily.  Let’s start out with a gizmo you might find useful in your cooking at home, and then move on to helpful ideas for handling home, work, and learning online.

Gizmo of the Year

Normally, we don’t like kitchen gizmos. They clutter up the counter and, after not being used for a while, end up relegated to the garage.  But we love, love, love the Instant Pot. It’s a pressure cooker that doesn’t need you to be standing around fiddling with the temperature on the stove—you can instead just set it and forget it, cooking a tender beef stew in half an hour; making beans (our favorite are lima beans with Vegeta, sweet paprika, stewed tomatoes, and if desired, meat that you can brown with an onion and garlic right in the Instant Pot before pressure cooking). You can also make artichokes, brussel sprouts, or other vegetables in far less time and in a more nutritious way. Now that eating out is mostly not an option, this gizmo is fantastically helpful. You can either get a cookbook or just Google whatever you want to cook—you’ll see all sorts of recipes online, and of course, very helpful YouTube recipes.  If you don’t already have this very popular kitchen device, we think you’ll really like it.

Pandemics Should Not Halt Our Education System

This fine article by old friend of LHTL and “super-MOOCer” Ronny de Winter describes the efforts Coursera and edX are making to help make quality online content available for learners for free. Key graf: “Do you have limited access and skills to prepare qualitative online content? Can the IT infrastructure of your school not cope with the massive demand for online access? Before preparing ad hoc material in an amateurism way, that will be difficult to engage students, investigate first the excellent opportunities that already exist. https://www.classcentral.com/ helps you to find quickly the relevant courses that will save you headaches.” Remember—you do not have to reinvent the wheel in your instruction—there are already some great online materials out there that you can use to upgrade your move online!

Coursera for Campus

It’s worth specifically pointing to this article by Coursera CEO Jeff Maggioncalda about making it a LOT easier for instructors to incorporate pre-existing online materials into their classes. “Starting today, we’ll provide every impacted university in the world with free access to our course catalog through Coursera for Campus. Universities can sign up to provide their enrolled students with access to more than 3,800 courses and 400 Specializations from Coursera’s top university and industry partners. These institutions will have access until July 31, 2020, after which we plan to provide month-to-month extensions depending on prevailing risk assessments. Students who enroll on or before July 31 will continue to have access until Sept. 30, 2020.”

Many Companies Are Using This Time to Help Their Employees Upskill by Learning How to Learn

Barb will be giving webinars for IKEA and Hunter Industries, among others, in the coming weeks.  These visionary companies know that now is an important time to provide upbeat, future-oriented insights that boost both productivity and morale. And nothing boosts morale more than knowing that a company values and supports learning. Reach out here to schedule an inspiring and practically useful live webinar for your company on how to learn effectively. 

Parents—Don’t Lose This Opportunity to Keep Your Kids Up on Their Math!

Smartick, our favorite math program for kids, has come up with a solidarity campaign for parents who really don’t know what to do with the kids at home. They have expanded their free period to 15 days to cover for those weeks with the kids at home—see the video here. 

School Canceled Because of Coronavirus? A Homeschooler Offers Some Tips

Ever thought about homeschooling? This informative article—along with the enforced isolation of the pandemic, might cause you to take this approach seriously: “COVID-19 is in the news with new cases reported every day. The list of schools, colleges, and other institutions suspending their efforts is also adding up. But there’s one education sector that may get away with minimal disruption: homeschoolers. Families that take responsibility for their kids’ education have a distinct edge in terms of flexibility and adaptability when it comes to unexpected events like … well … a worldwide pandemic that has people on edge.”

Fluent Forever dropping their 30-day subscriptions to $0

Gabriel Wyner is the author of one of our favorite books on language learning, Fluent Forever. (The Audible version is read by Gabriel himself.) Last year, he released an app that automates the method in his book, and this past Wednesday, he decided to drop his 30-day subscription price to $0 while people are stuck at home due to the pandemic. If you are looking for productive ways to spend your time, there are few things better for your mind than picking up a new language! The $0 coupon code is STUCKATHOME, and he’s put instructions on redeeming it over here. 

Visual Classrooms

Visual Classrooms, a research-based collaboration and discussion platform which was initially an NSF-funded project at the Center for Engineering Education and Outreach at Tufts University, (meaning it is solidly research-based), is offering their platform free through July 1, 2020 due to the pandemic. Visual Classrooms provides a good way to make online discussions more interactive and visual.  It integrates with all Learning Management Systems and is also useful for classes using Zoom as a way to get students interacting and documenting their learning in the background. Check out their introductory video.

Zoom: A Tutorial

This great tutorial by George Kao also describes how to use Zoom’s breakout discussions feature, which can allow you to emulate the group activity you do in a conventional face-to-face classroom.

How To Teach Online: Providing Continuity for Students

Here is what looks to be a useful, free course on online teaching from FutureLearn—it starts on Monday. 

Handling Online Labs

This article gives useful insights into how to bring lab courses online (one of the toughest things to do online).

Simple Tips for Better Online Meetings—COVID-19 Edition

This article provides a nice overview from MIT on how to do online meetings better in this new, perforce online era.

How to Use Set Up and Use Google Meetings

Here’s a nice set of short videos by Oakland University’s Andrew Dimmer that quickly walk you through using Google Meetings with your 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

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine . . . for Now, by Stanislas Dehaene. This is the best book around, hands down, on how the brain learns. Part of the brilliance of Dehaene’s book is that he breaks everything down into easy-to-understand insights that allow you to grasp the big picture without getting bogged down in the minutia of complex neural interactions.  

Dehaene also describes why discovery learning is so problematic in comparison with explicit teaching: “[Discovery learning] is attractive. Unfortunately, multiple studies, spread over several decades, demonstrate that its pedagogical value is close to zero—and this finding has been replicated so often that one researcher entitled his review paper ‘Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule against Pure Discovery Learning?’ When children are left to themselves, they have great difficulty discovering the abstract rules that govern a domain, and they learn much less, if anything at all. Should we be surprised by this? How could we imagine that children would rediscover, in a few hours and without any external guidance, what humanity took centuries to discern? At any rate, the failures are resounding in all areas: 

• In reading: Mere exposure to written words usually leads to nothing unless children are explicitly told about the presence of letters and their correspondence with speech sounds. Few children manage to correlate written and spoken language by themselves…. The task would be out of reach if teachers did not carefully guide children through an ordered set of well-chosen examples, simple words, and isolated letters. 
• In mathematics: It is said that at the age of seven, the brilliant mathematician Carl Gauss (1777–1855) discovered, all by himself, how to quickly add the numbers from one to one hundred (think about it—I give the solution in the notes…). What worked for Gauss, however, may not apply to other children. Research is clear on this point: learning works best when math teachers first go through an example, in some detail, before letting their students tackle similar problems on their own. Even if children are bright enough to discover the solution by themselves, they later end up performing worse than other children who were first shown how to solve a problem before being left to their own means. 
• In computer science: In his book Mindstorms (1980), computer scientist Seymour Papert explains why he invented the Logo computer language (famous for its computerized turtle that draws patterns on the screen). Papert’s idea was to let children explore computers on their own, without instruction, by getting hands-on experience. Yet the experiment was a failure: after a few months, the children could write only small, simple programs. The abstract concepts of computer science eluded them, and on a problem-solving test, they did no better than untrained children: the little computer literacy they had learned had not spread to other areas. Research shows that explicit teaching, with alternating

If you’re into the neuroscience of learning, you will unquestionably want to read this book. (The last half, in particular, is extraordinarily enlightening.)

The Best Analysis We’ve Seen So Far on the Coronavirus

Virtually every aspect of education has been affected by COVID-19. This article gives a superb overview of what you need to know to help your community or company to act wisely in the face of the exponential spread of the coronavirus. [Hat tip: Dr. David Handel, founder of our favorite flashcard app, IDoRecall.] 

How to Remember Not to Touch Your Face

This wonderful video by four-time memory champion Nelson Dellis gives you a quick tip to help you to not only not touch your face and to be sure to wash your hands—but it also gives you a way to detect fellow Nelson Dellis fans. 🙂

Putting the ‘special’ into ALL education

This podcast, featuring Tim Connell, an educator specialising in Special Education, discusses various trends and insights related to Special Education. Key graf: “Special education too tends to be less at the mercy of the kind of pendulum swings of whatever is trendy currently with an education, special educators tend to hold that line of just good practice because they know that works and invariably those pendulum swings in mainstream education tend to come back to that anyway.”

The Unparalleled Daisy Christodoulou to Give a Workshop on Simplifying Assessment in Schools

We had the good fortune while in London last year to attend one of Daisy’s workshops on comparative judgment of essay writing to speed and improve assessments in schools.  Frankly, we were blown away by the unique simplicity and effectiveness of this approach. If you’re interested in learning more, you can attend Daisy’s workshop May 5th in New York City.  Register here.

Garuba Ojo Fredericks (Fred) from Nigeria has completed over 400 MOOCs in a wide range of subjects

Are you looking for inspiration in the MOOC-making world?  Look no further than Fred, who is a world-class MOOC-taker.  It’s a fantastic story, well-told (as always) by Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success.

How to Turn Yourself Into a Superlearner

This article in the Guardian does a terrific job of covering the nitty gritty behind good learning. Key (encouraging!) graf: “Most of us have more than enough brainpower to master a new discipline, if we apply it correctly – and the latest neuroscience offers many strategies to do just that.” [Hat tip: Lead Mentor Steven Cooke.]

Drilling Down into Problems with Common Core

This article gives an in-depth description of why one K-12 teacher, who has two decades experience in a technology-related career, finds Common Core math to be deeply problematic.

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

• Interested in having Barb give a live webinar or virtual workshop on learning or online learning? Reach out here.
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents. 

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Explicit & Direct Instruction: An Evidence-Informed Guide for Teachers, Edited by Tom Boxer, Series Editor Tom Bennett. This wonderful short book lays out everything you need to know about Direct Instruction, a precise way of teaching that research has shown to be one of the very best approaches to use in a classroom. (Doug Lemov’s admirable Teach Like a Champion uses many techniques of Direct Instruction.) What we found to be most useful in this book was the discussion of how to select the best set of example problems when trying to give students an intuitive foundation for what they are learning.  Real people, after all, must often learn from very limited data-sets, unlike many of the approaches used in artificial intelligence. We also appreciated learning the history of why Direct Instruction has been too long been ignored, and is only now coming into its deserved prominence. Enjoy!

Research Culture: Framework for Advancing Rigorous Research

Check out this new research paper (Barb is amongst the co-authors), on the pressing need to increase the rigor of research in the life and biomedical sciences. There is even more need for educating about the need for rigor in educational research.

Change Can Be Made to Align with Teaching with Scientific Findings

This outstanding article from the New York Times shows how research findings related to phonics have finally made headway in changing and improving how reading is taught to students. And here are followup thoughts on the article from the ever-reliable Dan Willingham. This provides hope for much-needed improvement in the area of math education—as noted below.

Want to Be a Real Social Justice Warrior?  Criticize Reform Math Educators and Curricula

Even with our hard-bitten, curmudgeonly eye towards trends in modern education, we’ve been taken aback to learn of the latest attempts, in our opinion (we pointedly add),  to impede educational advances through the use of lawsuits and intimations of legal action. Those who think that proper science eventually wins often don’t consider how clever use of legal action and the threat of legal action can block the proper back and forth that allows scientific processes to unfold.

A parent, Blain Dillard, who has been sued by a discovery math curriculum vendor MVP, (can you even imagine a curriculum vendor suing a parent for critical comments?) has written a blog post “Surviving a SLAPP Lawsuit: Advice for Education Activists.” Key grafs: “I started this blog with that article because there was simply too much in my head I wanted to communicate and I didn’t think Facebook was conducive for laying out my case in what I thought was a well-presented argument outlining my reasoning.  Little did I know then that my words would eventually be cited in a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) against me, courtesy of Utah-based Mathematics Vision Project (MVP), the math curriculum vendor which provides resources and professional development to my school district (Wake County Public School System, NC), one of the top 15 largest districts in the USA.”

“Without talking directly about my particular lawsuit, I would like to share some advice with the many fellow parents and educators who are using social media or the public square (ie. school board meetings) to fight for the educational futures of students everywhere.  

“In the event you are being effective in your critique, you too may become a target of a SLAPP lawsuit. According to Wikipedia, these are ‘lawsuits that are intended to censor, intimidate, and silence critics by burdening them with the cost of a legal defense until they abandon their criticism or opposition…’ 

“In the area in which I am an activist – education – the opposition runs in vicious circles and has dollars backing them.  They are often driven by ideology, and may find it more effective to file a SLAPP lawsuit to silence criticism from an individual, versus engaging in debate using publicly available data and peer-reviewed research.”  

Lend a Hand to Parent Who Is Standing Up for Your Rights

→If you’d like to contribute to courageous Blain’s GoFundMe debt payoff, go here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/mvp-lawsuit-debt-payoff. (We donated.) If you’re a parent, remember that Blain is standing up not only for your children’s rights to a good education, but for your rights as a parent to speak out.

Quick Fixes and True Believers

Along those lines, another concerned parent adds “The challenge is people want a quick fix and it’s often embraced at the cost of teaching. There is no magic bullet. Teaching math requires diligence and a solid plan to lay down basic skills that are often thought of as boring topics by adults, but not children! I listen to followers of Jo Boaler and some of the other gurus and I am flabbergasted at the zeal and ‘closed ear’ syndrome—it seems they will die believing what is said is gospel truth.” 

Incidentally, philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote a book about this type of fanaticism, True Believer, [available free on Kindle] based on his observations of national fanaticism during World War II. And of course, followers are often perfect examples of pathological altruists.

In the Front Lines of Scientific Truth

Professor Robert Craigen at the University of Manitoba provides another example of why math education often does not shift as it should in response to solid scientific criticism. He occasionally tweets critical comments related to the poor scientific underpinnings of a surprisingly large percentage of “research” in education, which of course means that he also tweets about Jo Boaler’s work.  Rather than address the scientific issue, Boaler’s response is to tweet back that she has made her lawyer aware of his statements. We can’t help but gasp—What? This is the response of a legitimate researcher? 

Craigen continues: “It is an error to back down when you are certain what you’ve said or done stands up to legal tests and you feel strongly enough about them.  The whole point of threats is to use your fear of litigation as a means to coerce behavior you wouldn’t otherwise do, and once you start backing down you’ve really lost the battle.  SLAPP is indeed a problem and I wish there were solid anti-SLAPP legislation here in Canada, but threats of the same nature begin long before you’re actually hauled before a court — the very suggestion that it might happen may be enough for bad actors to get satisfaction from those who aren’t ready to battle it out.  It’s a form of bullying. (Though, of course, it is you who are accused of being the bully. That’s all part of the game.)

Don’t Miss researchED Philadelphia 2020

If you are interested in meeting fellow educators and parents who are concerned about good teaching in accordance with what cognitive psychology and neuroscience is actually telling us, plan to attend researchED in Philadelphia on October 24th, 2020!

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

• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Great ideas for parents, too!
• Follow LHTL on Facebook | Join the private LHTL Hall of Fame group | Follow LHTL on Twitter

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Memory Superpowers! An Adventurous Guide to Remembering What You Don’t Want to Forget, by 4-time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis. This is a wonderful book for youths from about 10-years-old to 14—it’s the kind of rollicking good adventure that your youngster can read aloud to you, so you are learning together as a family about tricks and secrets to remembering everything from the world capitals to the elements of the periodic table to speeches and soliloquies.  Barb’s blurb on the book is: “If there’s ONE BOOK to give your child (or you!) to help with learning, this is the one.” This is a pre-order—get your order in line early for what we suspect will be a sell-out!

Looking for a Fantastic Online School—Look No Further than Stanford OHS! 

Barb had the privilege of presenting a webinar last week for Stanford Online High School, a fully accredited independent school for academically talented students located within Stanford University. It’s a six-year school, serving students in grades 7-12. One of the many great things about this school is that students are placed in course levels by their individual ability, not by grade level alone, and their schedules are individualized. As far as education goes, it’s virtually (ha ha!) impossible to get any better than this wonderful online approach, used by great students from all over the world. If you’ve a youngster who breaks the mold, check out Stanford Online High School.

Redeveloping a Global MOOC to be More Locally Relevant

Barb has worked with many different countries to help bring the ideas of Learning How to Learn to learners internationally with “mother tongue” speakers, using versions of the course that grow from local culture and language.  (See, for example, this Russian version of Learning How to Learn for Youth from Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, and this Spanish version of Learning How to Learn from IE University in Spain.)  Here is a full-fledged paper on the topic, “Redeveloping a Global MOOC to be More Locally Relevant,” by Professor Kenzen Chen of National Chiao Tung University and Barb. If you want a good research project for your university, as well as a great enterprise for learners in your country, you will get fruitful ideas about MOOC redevelopment from Kenzen and Barb’s paper. Incidentally, Kenzen and Barb’s joint efforts in redeveloping Learning How to Learn for Chinese audiences won Taiwan’s “Best MOOC of the Year” award. Also see the paper “Leveraging Multilingual Learning Communities in a Global Environment,” by Orlando Trejo, the Spanish Lead of LHTL, on strategies to foster the participation of Spanish speaking learners, based on the feedback from learners at Spanish LHLT. 

A Plot of Land for a University in Malaga, Spain—Any Takers? 

In a bit of off-beat news for the week, there is a free plot of land available for a university to be constructed in Malaga, Spain.  Malaga has the best-connected airport to UK in the world, a very interesting mix of population along the coast and a great location next to Africa, where new middle classes are now emerging.  It also has a great cultural scene thanks to Museums like the Picasso Museum, (Malaga is the birthplace of the genius). On top of all of that, Malaga has amongst the world’s nicest climates. If you know of an institution with an interest in this, please have them contact Barb’s friend Berta Gonzalez.

Thoughtful Insights about Listening to Audible Books and Mirror Writing

LHTLer Adam Weissman writes to point out: “I love your Learning to Learn books and the course on Coursera. I’m a career changer thanks to you, my wife, and two kids (4 and 1 — I’m 37). I don’t think I’d have had the courage if not for your books (and Sejnowski’s Deep Learning Revolution) to embark on this new journey as a software engineer.

“Though I had been an aspiring novelist/screenwriter (Dostoevsky is my favorite) before the software journey, my day job is still Dog Walker.  I make the most out of my day by listening to several books a week while walking. I’ve heard that Uber drivers, Truckers, and anyone else that does manual labor in isolation does the same thing as me.  Audible in some ways is our only link to preserving an intellectual life. I had even done your Coursera course while walking dogs on my iPhone. When I’m home with the family, it’s impossible to read physical books — especially since the software course accounts for much of that time as well.

“The reason I’m writing today is I recently finished the Walter Isaacson book on Da Vinci. [We reviewed this fine book here.] I try many unconventional approaches to learning, and it occurred to me that there may have been a deeper reason for Da Vinci’s mirror writing.

“My question for you: would mirror writing cause the formation of more neural connections, since you have to mentally decode it. Da Vinci studied optics and understood that images would be flipped as with a camera obscura. He must’ve wondered about how invisible input (information and ideas) would be imprinted. Could mirror writing have been an attempt to get a “double dose” of the input? Or, to eliminate an imaginary step of the brain “right siding up” the information?

“As I do my own brief experiment with mirror writing, I find that looking at it forces me to recall the information in a way that seems to make it stickier since it forces me to decode it. Also, it forces me to be more conscious about what I’m writing.”

There’s evidence from research that thinking in new patterns, as Adam suggests, can be helpful with understanding in fresh ways.  If you have any comments on Adam’s thoughtful email, please go to the discussion forum here. (Just go to the top post in the main discussion forum if the link doesn’t work.)  And, we’d like to add, we suspect that Adam is a hidden jewel waiting to be discovered as a writer!

Misattribution

Our apologies for the misattribution of the wonderful article, “We Teach Our Kids To Be Doormats And Then Wonder Why There Is A ‘Bullying Epidemic’,” which was in the Daily Wire, not Wired. 

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

• Interested in having Barb speak? Reach out here.
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.