Cheery Friday e-mails
Every Friday I send a “Cheery Friday” email chock full of insights about learning and changing to a million registered learners from the massive open online course (“MOOC”) Learning How to Learn. To receive these emails, just register for the course here (it’s free, and registration takes only a few seconds). “See” you on Friday!
Memory Superpowers!
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 Nelson Dellis. It’s probably clear from our many past postings that we’re HUGE Nelson Dellis fans. That’s because four-time US memory champ Nelson isn’t just a memory expert—he’s also o …
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Online Teaching with Zoom
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Online Teaching with Zoom: A Guide for Teaching and Learning with Videoconference Platforms, by Aaron Johnson. We had previously read and liked Aaron’s first book on online teaching, Excellent Online Teaching. Aaron’s new book provides a solid overview of how to use Zoom for …
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Zvi Galil of Georgia Tech
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! The Most Important Movement in Higher Education Today We feel that former Dean of Computing Zvi Galil of Georgia Tech, along with Georgia Tech’s innovative faculty, have produced the most significant leap forward in higher education of recent decades with their Online Master of Science in Com …
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Urban Myths about Learning and Education
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Urban Myths about Learning and Education, by Pedro De Bruyckere, Paul A. Kirschner, and Casper D. Hulshof. This book, originally published in 2015 (and followed by a 2019 sequel), is as topical as ever. Killing commonly repeated educational myths is, it seems, its own cottage …
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The Bilingual Brain
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Bilingual Brain, by Albert Costa. We’re suckers for books on bilingualism, and this recent book, by multilingual Albert Costa, (who is in real life a leading researcher on bilingualism), really delivers the goods on what we know from neuroscience. Unlike many authors wh …
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The Craving Mind
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Help Michael Live Here is a rare request directly from me (Barb) regarding a life-or-death situation. My niece Meg’s husband Michael is facing a rare, life-threatening neuro-biological disease. Michael and Meg are a young couple whose life has been completely upended. And Michael is the love …
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The Breakdown of Higher Education
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done, by John M. Ellis. This provocative book provides a sobering analysis of what is unfolding on college campuses today—a phenomenon similar to that which Barb experienced in her past wo …
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The Idea of the Brain
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Idea of the Brain: The Past and Future of Neuroscience, by Matthew Cobb. This broad-ranging book starts near the dawn of written history, where we learn that even back in ancient Rome, active learning was a “thing.” “To demonstrate his discoveries Galen used ‘lecture-com …
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Born a Crime
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Year We watched Trevor Noah’s thoughtful video take on George Floyd, the Minneapolis Protests, Ahmaud Arbery, and Amy Cooper, and were inspired to read Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Wow! This riveting book describes how, due to miscege …
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The Chiffon Trenches
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Books of the Week The Chiffon Trenches, by André Leon Talley. Barb’s own sense of fashion tends toward frumpy. So she was fascinated to read André’s descriptions of life at the highest levels of fashion—he was friends or colleagues with practically every major figure in high fashion over the …
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