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Cheery (and Surprising!) Tuesday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Sorry for the unusual Tuesday instead of Friday email this week, but…

Today’s the Big Day—Launch of Barb & Terry (and Al’s) Fantastic New Book, Learning How to Learn!

Barb and Terry, and their friend Al McConville, have spent the past several years writing a book that takes the ideas of our Learning How to Learn MOOC and tells them in a fashion that kids, parents, and teachers can easily grasp. The result? Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens.

Today, at long last, is publication day!  

If you want to help a youngster from ages ten to seventeen to learn how to learn, based on practical insights from neuroscience, look no further.  The funny but deeply informative pictures alone will knock your proverbial socks off. (And yes, there are zombies…) In some ways, this seemingly simple book goes deeper into how we learn than even our MOOC Learning How to Learn. You’ll find that this is also a great book to read together as a family. And you’ll see that even if your children are in the toddler stage, you’ll get some powerful insights on learning that will help you guide your kids in their learning as they mature. You can do us a favor and leave your review

Barb Answers Questions about Learning on Facebook Live

Don’t miss this episode of Facebook Live, where Ki Sung interviews Barb about learning. Barb lives up to her reputation for clumsiness by dropping her book in the middle of the episode.

Helping You—and the Children in Your Life—Learn STEM Subjects More Effectively

Don’t forget, Barb is speaking this evening  at a free event this evening in San Jose, California, sponsored by the Silicon Valley IEEE Computer Society August 7, 2018, 6:30-8:30PM. (If you’re a tech type, you might be surprised to learn that Barb herself is an IEEE Fellow.)  If you’d like to meet Barb, learn more about learning, and/or help your children learn more effectively, especially in the STEM disciplines, come for a fun and fabulous evening! Barb will be around before and after her presentation, and will very much enjoy meeting you. If your children are mature enough to be well-behaved in a crowd, bring them, too. (There were plenty of well-behaved kids at Barb’s talk a few days ago for the UCSD Medical School!) Learn more and register here—the talk is free, but seating is limited to 200 and pre-registrants are let in first.

Barb in a Free Webinar from IEEE, Today at 11:00 AM Pacific Time

Barb will be in a free webinar sponsored by IEEE—you can sign up here to watch from anywhere in the world.  She’ll begin her talk with ideas that may be familiar to you. But you’ll see some fantastic new graphics that will take you deeper into the brain, and into learning.  Register here and ask your questions in the chat room!

Next week, we’ll be back to our usual Cheery Friday email.

Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

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

• Published Today! 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 and teachers, too!
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• 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!

Books of the Week

This week we read two contrasting books on universities, with somewhat disappointing results.

• Designing the New American University, by Michael Crow and William Dabars.  Michael Crow is one of the world’s most visionary university presidents—U.S. News and World Report has called Arizona State University, which Crow helms, the #1 university for innovation in the country. (We admit, we’re Michael Crow fans.) So this is a worthwhile book to read if only to get a handle on Crow’s admirable vision of innovation and access. Sadly, the main points of the book are buried beneath clunky prose. We think it’s time for a updated, revised, and streamlined edition.
• The University We Need: Reforming American Higher Education, by Warren Treadgold. This book has drawn attention from the Wall Street Journal, the National Review, and Inside Higher Education.  Frankly, although it was sometimes interesting to learn of Treadgold’s perspectives, which are very different from that of typical humanities professors, we struggled with his book. Treadgold’s background is in Byzantine studies, which often meant that his sweeping statements about how universities can and should operate were often completely unworkable for the STEM disciplines—we’re surprised Treadgold didn’t have at least one beta reader friend from the STEM disciplines to clue him in on this.  Suggestions such as the creation of a national National Academic Honesty Board overlook the fact that state boards designed to ferret out cheating in state schools never actually seem to do so. (See the discussion in the far better book Freakonomics for why this occurs.)  Treadgold’s cherry-picking to point out poor consequences of online learning overlooked excellent results.  And so on and so forth. We’re puzzled about the hullabaloo surrounding this book.

Barb in a Free Webinar from IEEE, August 7th

Barb will be in a free webinar sponsored by IEEE–you can sign up here to watch from anywhere in the world.  She’ll begin her talk with ideas that may be familiar to you. But you’ll see some fantastic new graphics that will take you deeper into the brain, and into learning.  Register here.

And if you are in the Bay Area…

Helping You—and the Children in Your Life—Learn STEM Subjects More Effectively

Barb is speaking at a free event in San Jose, California, sponsored by the Silicon Valley IEEE Computer Society August 7, 2018, 6:30-8:30PM. (If you’re a tech type, you might be surprised to learn that Barb herself is an IEEE Fellow.)  If you’d like to meet Barb and help your children learn more effectively, especially in the STEM disciplines, come for a fun and fabulous evening! Barb will be around before and after her presentation, and will very much enjoy meeting you. (If your children are mature enough to be well-behaved in a crowd, bring them, too!) Learn more and register here—the talk is free, but seating is limited to 200 and pre-registrants are let in first.

Trigger Warnings Might Actually Be Harmful for College Students

Here is an excellent discussion by social psychologist Craig Harper in Medium of recent findings related to the harmful effects of trigger warnings.  Key grafs are:

“After controlling for various factors… the researchers found that those participants who received trigger warnings were significantly more likely (compared to those in the control condition) to suggest that they and others would be more vulnerable to emotional distress after experiencing trauma.

“…[T]hose who believed that words can cause harm demonstrated a significantly higher level of immediate anxiety to markedly distressing passages (compared to those not holding this belief) in the trigger warning condition, but not in the control.

“This finding could have significant implications in the context of ongoing cultural debates about the power of language in reinforcing perceived oppression. That is, if we are telling students that words are akin to violence and can cause harm, and then giving them trigger warnings to compound that message, we risk increasing immediate anxiety responses rather than decreasing them.”

10 Must-Watch TED Talks for Lifelong Learners
Learning How to Learner Marelisa Fábrega wrote a very popular blog post on “10 Must-Watch TED Talks for Lifelong Learners.” Marelisa didn’t include Barb’s TED talk on learning on the list, because she’d already referred to our MOOC Learning How to Learn in another post. Enjoy Marelisa’s work!

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!
• Coming in 4 days! 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!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

###Note! Barb’s talk at the UC San Diego moved to a larger auditorium.###  

Barb’s lecture on on Learning How to Learn at 9:00 am on August 4th at UC San Diego has been moved to a larger auditorium nearby.  It will now be at the main auditorium on the entrance level floor of the Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute, room #1W-210, 9452 Medical Center Dr, La Jolla, CA 92037. As we previously mentioned, her lecture will include many new animations and insights related to her and Terry’s upcoming book, Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens, which is shipping early (August 6th). Even if you’re an adult, you’ll gain new insights, going beyond even what you’ve learned in the MOOC!

Are You a Slow Learner?  Join Our Discussion Forum and Discuss!

Praveen is a 24-year-old student from Sri Lanka who is currently learning software engineering at university. He writes with an interesting challenge.   

“I followed your Learning how to learn MOOC and also read Mind for Numbers. I have found it very helpful in becoming at learning.

“The thing is, I am a slow learner. I have to repeat/rehearse something many more times than my peers to understand it. In high school teachers complained that I was inattentive in class and don’t work. However, in final exams I ended up getting good marks. The reason I struggled to learn in school is not because of being inattentive but I couldn’t learn at the same pace they were teaching. Imagine concept A was taught and then concept B is taught. To understand concept B you need the knowledge of concept A. But I have forgotten half of concept A after learning it. This is the reason I fell behind in class. At home, I would study concept A multiple times an do questions until I was confident in it. Then only I would move to concept B.

“I have noticed this while learning anything, including sports or learning to drive. I have to repeat it more than everyone present in class. For example, when I tried learning martial arts the teacher would repeat a technique. Then students had to join up in pairs and practice it. I had to practice it more times than other students. The teacher would get frustrated and accuse me of not paying attention and even demonstrate it again to me. But it’s not because I don’t pay attention. I am paying maximum amount of attention. But I just have to repeat it that many times to be able to remember it. But most teachers don’t understand. Apart from this, I am unable to remember driving directions. I remember being this way from my childhood. Psychologists I went to suggested I might be having some learning disability but they couldn’t diagnose any specific named condition.

“These experiences lead to low self-esteem and depression. Over time I found ways to learn better. For example, now I rarely try to memorize things. I make very organized notes with diagrams and sketches in Microsoft Onenote. So, I can easily search for topics whenever I have forgotten. If I need to memorize things for exams in school I use Anki spaced repetition. And in programming, I can learn everything I want at my own pace online. Actually, I’m starting my first internship at a software development company next week. I also work with a therapist to manage depression. I have found mindfulness practice to be especially helpful. I deal with inability to remember directions by storing addresses of places I want to visit as Google contacts and using Google maps to navigate.

“Thanks to help from [Learning How to Learn and other learning materials] I am slowly developing habits and techniques to be better. One thing I would absolutely love to do is contact and hear stories from learners who share similar problems to mine. It would help me develop confidence seeing them facing challenges and succeeding. Unfortunately, I was unable to find such people. Do you know of any communities? Support groups? Or even research being conducted about how people with similar learning difficulties learn? Most people with conditions such as ADHD I met have difficulty being attentive. But this is not something I share. My problem is that of poor memory consolidation.”

If you would like to join Praveen in discussing this condition, and perhaps developing a support group, please go to the discussion forum here.

Looking for a Platform for an Online Course You’re Constructing?

We’ve been introduced to Thinkific, “a software platform that enables entrepreneurs to create, market, sell, and deliver their own online courses.” We often meet people who are looking for a good platform to build their courses on. If you’re in this situation, Thinkific may be worth checking out. (There’s also a Facebook group that has webinars like that Anthony Metivier’s recent one bout authentically generating an audience for one’s courses with YouTubing and Podcasting )

Arthur Worsley on Memorizing a Monologue (or Anything Else Word-Perfect) and on Books

Our friend Arthur Worsley has just finished a 4,500 word guide on how to memorize a monologue (or anything else word-perfect) that runs through everything from rote repetition, to flashcards and spaced repetition to mnemonics and memory palaces.

Arthur is a master of compendiums.  He has also pulled together a list of all 452 book recommendations from Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans, including 5 religious texts, 98 fiction titles and 349 non-fiction titles. He is also on version 3.0 of his ultimate learning how to learn reading list, and memory improvement reading list. As he notes, “there’s some amazing reads to be found!”

• Book recommendations from Tools of the Titans
• Ultimate Learning How to Learn Reading List
• Best Books on Memory Improvement: 30 Books To Blow Your Mind

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!
• Coming in just a few days! 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!

Books of the week

This week, we compared two books that discuss raising US-born children in non-US educational systems.  

• Little Soldiers: An American Boy, a Chinese School, and the Global Race to Achieve, by Lenore Chu. It’s very easy to fall into a pattern of thinking that making your child happy is—and should be—the theme of all education.  Chu’s remarkable book explores an educational system that is in many ways the exact opposite of that espoused by Westerners. As it turns out, when “happiness” is not necessarily a factor, sometimes kids, and parents, seem to end up happier.  It’s fascinating to read about the obviously negative (from a Western perspective) effects of the Chinese education system on Chu’s son, but how Chu’s open-minded understanding allows her to persevere and see the benefits of this very different system. We also deeply appreciated Chu’s visits to the Chinese countryside, to obtain a fuller account of what is going on “on the ground” in the Chinese educational system. This is one of the best and most thoughtful books we’ve read on education in a long time—highly recommended.
• Achtung Baby: An American Mom on the German Art of Raising Self-Reliant Children, by Sara Zaske. Zaske’s book keeps a positive focus on the many positives (from a US perspective) of the German schooling system. This means there’s less willingness to peer under the rug at the mixed positives and negatives than Lenore Chu’s Little Soldiers. At the same time, Zaske’s book is a terrific one to read in tandem with Little Soldiers, because it shows how a system that is different in many significant ways from the Chinese system can have its own benefits.  

We found Zaske’s discussion of the problems with “attachment style parenting” to be particularly interesting.  As Zaske points out, efforts to be a close parent who maintains a strong bond with a toddler may have the inadvertent effect of creating a type of dependency—not to mention making for many sleepless nights.  Fascinating insights into the differences between US and German parenting cultures, including the German focus on fostering independence, increasing appreciation for the open air, and taking necessary risks.

Barb in an open-to-everyone free lecture at the University of California, San Diego

Barb will be giving a lecture on Learning How to Learn at 9:00 am on August 4th at the Goldberg Auditorium, Moore’s Cancer Center, UC San Diego Health Science Campus, 3855 Health Sciences Drive, La Jolla, CA, 92037. Her lecture will include many new animations and insights related to her and Terry’s upcoming book, Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Even if you’re an adult, you’ll gain new insights, going beyond even what you’ve learned in the MOOC. If you’re near San Diego, come—Barb would love to meet you. (If your children are mature enough to be well-behaved in a crowd, bring them, too!)

Study finds that teens glued to phones may risk a ‘modest’ rise in ADHD symptoms

This interesting article describes research findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggesting that “excessive phone use could be linked to to a ‘modest’ but significant rise in symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).” The results were based on “nearly 2,600 Los Angeles teens who answered survey questions over a two-year period—making it one of the largest and longest studies on the topic to date.”

Barb’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on women in STEM

Barb’s well-received op-ed in the Wall Street Journal has stirred people’s opinions from all ends of the spectrum.  If you don’t have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, here is a version of the article with some of the key grafs, and that also gives you the ability to comment.The Complete Guide to Building Your focus

This article by one of our favorite writers on learning, Scott Young, lays out virtually everything you need to know about maintaining your focus.  The article is a not-to-be-missed classic if your work requires any kind of focus.

Helping Kids with Math

We’ve heard good things about a program called Beast Academy, for aspiring “Math Beasts” in grades 2-5.  There’s a series of books, and also a new interactive learning experience under development that has an adaptive review system that provides extra practice as needed.  If you’re looking for additional practice materials for your child, or if you’re homeschooling, you may wish to check this system out.

Keeping Online Courses Fresh: Valuable, but Costly

This well-researched article by Mark Lieberman in Inside Higher Ed (featuring insights from our friend Mary Niemiec, associate vice president for distance education at the University of Nebraska), describes the sometimes unanticipated costs of keeping online coursework up-to-date, as well as the how investment and quality of the learning experience intertwine.

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!
• NEW! 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!

Cheery Friday the 13th to our Learning How to Learners!  (Since we’re contrarians, we think it’s a lucky day.)

Book of the Week

This week’s read was The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery, by Barbara K. Lipska (the neuroscientist of the title) and writer Elaine McArdle. This is a wondrously eye-opening account of what it feels like to go mad, or to be like one of those mean, nasty, self-centered, semi-crazy types who you sometimes run into if you work in customer service. This upbeat, pretty durn happy-ending book is one of the most beautifully-written that we’ve read all year. Good insight into the brain even as we readers receive great insight into the frailty and wonder of human consciousness.

Helping You—and the Children in Your Life—Learn STEM Subjects More Effectively

Barb is speaking at a free event in San Jose, California, sponsored by the Silicon Valley IEEE Computer Society August 7, 2018, 6:30-8:30 PM. If you’d like to meet Barb and help your children learn more effectively, especially in the STEM disciplines, come for a fun and fabulous evening!  Barb will be around before and after her presentation, and will very much enjoy meeting you. (If your children are mature enough to be well-behaved in a crowd, bring them, too!) Learn more and register here—the talk is free, but seating is limited to 200 and pre-registrants are let in first.

Barb in Atlanta Today!

And don’t forget, Barb is speaking today (at 4:00 pm) at the SEA Homeschoolers Conference at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta.

Our Failing Schools. Enough Is Enough

We are enormous fans of educator Geoffrey Canada. Here is his inspiring TED Talk call to action. As Canada notes “America cannot wait another fifty years to get this right. We have run out of time. I don’t know about a fiscal cliff, but there’s an educational cliff that we are walking over right this very second.” Those are as true a words now as when they were first spoken in 2013. Also check out Canada’s autobiography, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence, including the story of the founding of the Harlem Children’s Zone.

How to leverage prior knowledge to enhance learning

Here’s a nice explanation in layman’s terms of researcher Marlieke Tina Renee van Kesteren and her colleague’s research findings about how memories can be harnessed to enhance learning. Key graf: “Both students and teachers often think that once something is learned it is set in stone in the brain and they don’t have to pay attention to it anymore. However, it actually makes sense to retrieve previously learned information often (a process known as retrieval practice).”

Common Core—A Correction

Several readers wrote to correct a story we linked to last week regarding a Florida school dropping Common Core was actually never a Common Core school. As one reader notes “Speaking as a high school teacher, I believe Common Core standards (they are standards, not a “method of teaching,” as described by the article) have advantages and drawbacks… True, factors contributing to students’ test-taking success are often difficult to pin down; however, much strong research [see here, for example]. indicates that higher test scores are directly correlated to higher socioeconomic status. Naples, the location of Mason Classical Academy, is among the 10 wealthiest cities in Florida.”

That’s what we get for naively thinking that education is a “Faux-News-Free” zone.

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!

• NEW! 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

This week we read The Magic of Impromptu Speaking: Create a Speech that Will Be Remembered for Years in Under 30 Seconds, by Andrii Sedniev.  Andrii is someone to be reckoned with—as the book description  notes: “At the age of 19, Andrii obtained his CCIE (Certified Cisco Internetwork Expert) certification, the most respected certification in the IT world, and became the youngest person in Europe to hold it. At the age of 23, he joined an MBA program at one of the top 10 MBA schools in the USA as the youngest student in the program, and at the age of 25 he joined Cisco Systems’ Head Office as a Product Manager responsible for managing a router which brought in $1 billion in revenue every year.”  Impressed by Andrii’s resume, we picked up Andrii’s book, and we’re glad we did. Along with useful insights, Andrii provides wonderful stories about speaking, including his own growth from shy youth to outgoing public speaker. A useful primer to help you gain more comfort in speaking publicly, and an easy, nice read.

A Popular App to Help You Learn to Play the Guitar, Piano, Bass, and Ukelele

We’ve heard some great things about the multiplatform app “Yousician,” which helps you learn to play a musical more quickly by giving you instant feedback. If you’re looking to release your inner musician, this may be the approach for you.

What’s the Difference Between STEM and STEAM?

This worthwhile article from npj Science of Learning does a good job of explaining how an appreciation of arts and the humanities can allow for more creative work in STEM. We love the pictures showing Leonardo Da Vinci’s work—if you’re at all interested in STEAM, you can’t miss Walter Isaacson’s magnificent biography Leonardo da Vinci.

Common Core—An Interesting Experiment

There is an ongoing controversy going on with the US Common Core—here’s an interesting article about a Florida school that dropped Common Core, and consequently went to #1.  “Thanks to the classical approach of phonics, an impressive 90 percent of the third-grade students at Mason Classical Academy were proficient in English Language Arts, compared to just 58 percent in the county overall, most of whom rely on Common Core.”  It would be valuable to replicate this effort with different classes and teachers and to put it forward through research channels.

Our own opinion is that many of today’s teachers are brilliant, and the more we can give them the leeway to teach using their own creative skills, the better off students, on average, will be.

MOOC of the Week

We’re 2/3rds through the University of California, San Diego’s Introduction to Algae.  We think algae are pretty cool critters, and this MOOC is helping us understand why algae are so important in the earthly scheme of things.  The two key instructors, “Ike” Levine and Stephen Mayfield, are both excellent—personable, likeable, and in Ike’s case in particular, with good explanatory skills, as with exemplary guest lecturer Bianca Brahamsha.

We must admit that the video editing and presentation style could have been greatly improved—we’re always annoyed, for example, when complex textbook- and academic-journal style pictures are thrown up on a screen all at once—with the imagery often so small that it’s impossible to make out what’s going on. (Check out Andrew Ng’s beautifully taught Machine Learning course for great examples of how to gradually build complex material on the screen.) It’s also annoying when one instructor repeats what another guest instructor has already taught—meaning no one reviewed the MOOC in gestalt to ensure all the instructors worked well together. The feedback on the quizzes, unfortunately,  is mostly non-existent.

But if you wink past the sporadic drips and drabs of fairly advanced biochemistry, (well, it’s nothing to worry about if you’re a biochemist), this is a fascinating MOOC that covers what algae are, how they’ve evolved, and how they’ve transformed our planet. It’s a  little like watching an interesting documentary in the form of 1950s style horror film—the subject matter is fascinating, but you can’t help but wonder what cheesy thing you can laugh at that will happen next in the production. See if you can spot the guest lecturer who seems so bored with his own lecture that he looks about to fall asleep, double bonus points if you point out the bobbing guest lecturer.

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!

• NEW! 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!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

There’s something about a map that brings extraordinary meaning to what, where, and even who you are in life.  (The long and the short of it is, we’re among the map-obsessed minority known as “mapheads.”) So we couldn’t resist reading On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks, by New York Times bestselling author Simon Garfield. Simon takes readers through an insightful history of how maps and map-making unfolded over the millenia. If your sense of place isn’t complete without a map, and you’re a bit of a history buff, you will enjoy this book. (An earlier book we also enjoyed several years ago was Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, by Ken Jennings.)

School Is Expensive. Is It Worth It?

This intriguing Weekend Interview with Bryan Caplan by James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal has a terrific description of Caplan’s signaling theory of education. “Suppose you have a bachelor’s in philosophy from Mr. Caplan’s doctoral alma mater, and you’re applying for a job somewhere other than a college philosophy department. What does the sheepskin signal? His answer is threefold: intelligence, work ethic and conformity. “Finishing a philosophy degree from Princeton—most people are not smart enough to do that,” he says. At the same time, ‘you could be very smart and still fail philosophy at Princeton, because you don’t put in the time and effort to go and pass your classes.’”

How to Do a Successful Online Learning Binge

Normally, we’re not advocates of binge learning—after all, cramming doesn’t build as good a neural structure.  But there’s some times when life intervenes and your only real option is to binge on the materials at hand. Here’s another excellent article from Pat Bowden with her recommendations for completing a MOOC when speed is your only option.

The most famous psychology study of all time was a sham
We’re always interested in psychology, and the Stanford Prison Experiment has long had our interest just because of its popularity, despite the obvious and deep-rooted flaws of the experiment.  This first-rate article by Ben Bloom, “The Lifespan of a Lie,” relates how experts have all the way along been suspicious of Zimbardo and his findings—and how Zimbardo has completely misrepresented key aspects of the experiment.  

As Bloom notes: “The appeal of the Stanford prison experiment seems to go deeper than its scientific validity, perhaps because it tells us a story about ourselves that we desperately want to believe: that we, as individuals, cannot really be held accountable for the sometimes reprehensible things we do. As troubling as it might seem to accept Zimbardo’s fallen vision of human nature, it is also profoundly liberating. It means we’re off the hook. Our actions are determined by circumstance. Our fallibility is situational. Just as the Gospel promised to absolve us of our sins if we would only believe, the SPE offered a form of redemption tailor-made for a scientific era, and we embraced it.”

If you’re a psychology enthusiast, Bloom’s article  is a must read.

29 of  the Best Flipped Classroom Apps for Highschool Teachers

There are currently over 80,000 educational apps available to teachers. So it can sometimes be tough to figure out the best.  This listing of best apps is particularly useful because it has a lot of apps that can help students create videos—something that can really boost learning on all sorts of topics, because students love to do it.

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!
• NEW! 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
• New articles related to learning, updated daily: The Learning Methods Daily

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

This week’s read was How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan. We’ve had this book suggested to us by a number of Learning How to Learners, so we wanted to see why all the interest.  First off, Pollan is a great science writer—he’s able to pull the reader into the world of psychedelics and what science is discovering about them, whether or not psychedelics are “your thing.” Pollan makes a great case for why the recent movement to begin studying psychedelics again is beneficial—even as he also gives an even-handed description of the “wow factor” and the dangers of these unusual drugs. A thought-provoking and interesting read.

How Blockbuster MOOCs Could Shape the Future of Teaching

Here’s a fascinating article from Jeff Young at EdSurge on monster MOOCs and their impact on academia.  Barb argues in the article that the many so-called “second-tier” universities are top-tier when it comes to great teachers.

The article has some pointers to great MOOCs, noting (we’ve supplied links to lead you to the courses): “One of the newest blockbuster MOOCs is The Science of Well-Being, offered by a Yale University professor. The University of California at Berkeley has drawn record numbers of students with a similar course on The Science of Happiness. And the University of Queensland made the top 10 on edX with a course on The Science of Everyday Thinking. All of them offer advice for how to find fulfillment or think more clearly (and all promise to apply science to an everyday concern).”

Book Giveaway

Most successful people consider learning to be one of the most crucial skills to have as an entrepreneur. After interviewing more than 200 business founders and investors, CEO Library has put together a list of books about learning how to learn, based on the founder and investor recommendations. It’s a collection of the best books that teach you how to learn more efficiently. The giveaway ends on June 28 at 1:00 pm EDT (Eastern Time) and the prizes are: One mega-prize – all the books in the Learning How to Learn collection (see all the books here). That’s 10 great books for the big winner! And one book of your choice for 6 other winners. Go here to enter the giveaway. (We can’t help but note that very own A Mind for Numbers is high on the list!)

An Adaptive Math Program

We’ve been hearing good things about an adaptive math program called Knowre that “identifies and fills student learning gaps to help them reach their full potential.”  It builds strongly on gamified learning, and seems ideal for both schools and homeschooling. You might check Knowre out, and if you have any comments or already know anything about the program, please post on this discussion forum.

Exercise in the World of MOOCs

The redoubtable Pat Bowden of Online Learning Success has a nice posting on some of the different MOOCs related to exercise, as well as related thoughts on how to get exercise. And she has a nice mention of Terry’s discussion of the extraordinary value of exercise in Learning How to Learn!

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!

• NEW! 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!

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Books of the Week

• We’ve just discovered that Barb’s book Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential is on sale for $1.99 on Kindle.  If you’ve been meaning to read it, this is a great price (and very temporary), so get it now!
• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, by John Carreyrou. This was such a riveting book that we finished it all in one evening. There’s something so alluring about Silicon Valley would-be geniuses who claim world-changing technology.  The upshot of our salacious Silicon salivation is this cautionary tale featuring world-class frauds and utterly ruthless, no-bounds-of-human-decency litigators. John Carreyrou and the Wall Street Journal deserve kudos for this edge-of-the-seat investigative reporting. See also Nick Gillespie’s interview with John Carreyrou.  Also a great book for audio.
• Macular Degeneration: A guide to help someone you love, by Paul Wallis. It’s easy to get all excited about a great new biography, or entertaining, insightful books on subjects like octopuses or trees. But who would have ever thought that a book on macular degeneration could be both entertaining and enlightening? Entertaining, that is, even if you know no one with macular degeneration, and even if (perhaps especially if) you’ve never known anything before about macular degeneration?  Yes, Macular Degeneration: A guide to help someone you love is a delightful, informative, and upbeat book about a condition that most know little about.  Chapters 1 through 9 in particular give a nice overview of the topic. Paul Wallis is a good writer, whose use of analogies and examples makes the whole book sing—this book is the culmination of his career’s work. Dr. Wallis’s book is well worth reading if you’re generally interested in unusual subjects, if you’d like to learn a little about a subject that might save your own eyesight someday, and if you enjoy taking a literary walk with a good writer who has valuable insights on life. (And yes, it has an audio version.)

2018 World Cup—Amaze Your Friends by Telling Them All the World Cup Winners!

4-Time US Memory Champion Nelson Dellis is back with another great memory tip video—this one gives great tips for remembering all the world cup winners, evuh!  If you’re a soccer fan, you will love this video. And even if you’re not a soccer fan, you’ll find much to learn in this great video, which gives a sense of how you can make memorizing fun!

Barb the Opening Keynote for Homeschoolers July 13 in Atlanta: Special Discount for LHTLers

If you’re at all interested in homeschooling—or in meeting Barb—please come to the SEA Homeschoolers Conference at the Marriott Marquis in downtown Atlanta for Barb’s keynote on the afternoon of July 13. SEA is now offering one-day convention tickets for families who can’t attend the whole weekend. There are special rates for the hotel rooms for those traveling from out of town.

The convention is family-friendly, secular-oriented, and inclusive. It will feature a wide variety of workshops and talks for parents, as well as a full weekend of activities for kids and teens. There will be a vendor hall showcasing the best in secular homeschool materials, opportunities to network, and more. Open to homeschoolers,  anyone interested in homeschooling, or anyone who would just like to come out on Friday for the keynote on learning! Tickets are on sale now—the coupon code for 20% off is “BarbAtSEA.”

We should note that the recommended course book, A Mind for Numbers, is very popular with homeschoolers, and Barb and Terry’s upcoming book Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens, is ideal for homeschoolers as well as regular students—and their parents.

A Survey on Lifelong Learning in the Workplace

Barb’s friends at the Digital Learning Consortium are collecting (completely anonymous) information about lifelong learning in the workplace.  If you’d like to help them out in making an impact on the future of digital learning in the workplace, please take the survey.  We took the survey ourselves, just because we find it fascinating to learn what questions are of interest in lifelong learning.

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

New articles related to learning, updated daily: The Learning Methods Daily

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

We were very lucky to receive a pre-publication copy of 4-time US memory champion Nelson Dellis’s 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.  Nelson’s book will be coming out in September—it’s the best book on how to develop your memory we’ve ever read, so we highly recommend pre-ordering your copy.  What’s terrific about Nelson’s book is that doesn’t just give the usual information about how to remember lists or sequences of numbers. Dellis provides all sorts of side bits of important everyday tips—like how to remember something important that occurs to you when you wake up in the middle of the night, how to remember where you’re parked, and how not to forget objects, like a purse (forgetting her purse is the bane of Barb’s existence). We plan to reread the book as soon as we receive our final hard copy. We can’t recommend this book more strongly!

Looking to Hire a Good Education Program Leader?

Barb’s good friend Erin Valdez has strong experience as a non-profit program manager and she is looking for a job—in Texas or telecommuting with some travel is great. Erin believes in the power of students and teachers create innovative pathways to success.  She is eager to help non-profits and others by leveraging her experience as a philanthropic portfolio strategist, policy advisor, school leader, and vision-aligned partnership builder.  You can find out more about her via email, erin.davis.valdez@outlook.com.  She is also eager to connect with her fellow “fans of Barb” via LinkedIn.

Can You Help with Video Captions?

Many professors are facing a challenge nowadays in that all online videos used for classes nowadays need to have high-quality video captions to be compliant with US university accessibility standards (99% or above accuracy in relaying the speaker’s exact words with correct spelling, punctuation, and grammar). YouTube’s automatic captioning feature is nice, but it isn’t good enough—see Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal’s Caption Fail Videos, for example.

Barb is currently facing a bit of a challenge in that she has roughly 50 hours of videos in two mathematically-oriented classes that need high-quality captions.  She finds it generally takes her about 5 hours to fix 1 hour of YouTube video captions. Loaded here on YouTube, for example, is her Introductory Statistics and Probability class (she’s fixed the captions on the first video, so that one’s locked—only 31 videos to go!) And here is her “How Things Work” class, based on Lou Bloomfield’s great textbook by that name.  

If you’re interested in Barb’s courses and would like to contribute to the captions, feel free to go to any video in the courses, click on the gear symbol/add subtitles/add subtitles/English/edit. When done, submit the contribution, and let others keep working, (unless you’ve finished the whole video, in which case you can submit it for review).

If you might have advice for Barb and the many other professors in the same situation, who have many sometimes complex and mathematically-oriented videos that need 99% or better accuracy in the captions, please post in the discussion forum here.  

Blackout Poetry

If you’d like to see some intriguing examples of an increasingly popular phenomenon called “blackout poetry,” you might try checking Professor Joseph Garnjobst’s daily posts on his Twitter account: @jgarnjobst. Joe’s “blackouts” grow from Dan Neil’s auto column in the Wall Street Journal.

Barb on the “On Grit” Podcast

Join Rigel Patterson and Barb for a fascinating podcast about learning, grit, and the challenges people face when changing careers. Barb shares stories about people who buckled down and pursued what for them seemed like long shots, if their pasts were any indication of what they could be good at.

Seymour Papert—A Towering Figure in Education

Many people remain unaware of the importance of Seymour Papert in a wide variety of areas in education. A South African who vehemently opposed apartheid (he organized classes for local black servants), Papert was a rigorous and creative thinker who ultimately earned two doctorates in mathematics. He went from constructivism to constructionism in his approach to education, and helped kick-start the Maker Movement.  Read Papert’s obituary in Nature to get a better sense of Papert’s impact, and watch this “turtle” video.  [Hat tip: Lorena Barba.]

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!

• NEW! 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!