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!
The Glass Castle/Barb in Doha
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week We make it a practice to ask people about their all-time favorite book. Along these lines, we’ve had a number of recommendations for The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls. So we finally broke down—it turns out to be a fast, riveting read. (The Glass Castle, incidenta …
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What Every BODY is saying
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Our email may be a bit early for you today because we’re on a different time zone, just about to head out on a 14-hour flight from Doha, Qatar, (a hotbed of educational innovation), to Chicago. Next up, Barb’s off to Valencia, Spain, to speak next week at the International Symposium of Appli …
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A compendium of educational books
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Books of the Week: An Assortment on Education On to this week’s recommendations, which all relate to education. We’ve had a number of books suggested to us recently, and we decided to review them all at once, so as to be able to contrast and compare them with one another. Dumbing Us Down: The …
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Where Did Language Come From?
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, has been floating at the top of the Amazon best-sellers listing for several weeks, so we had to see what all the hullabaloo was about. Peterson’s book is an intriguing mixture of deeply researched psychology, phi …
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Confessions of a Public Speaker
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week This week’s book recommendation is Scott Berkun’s Confessions of a Public Speaker. We’ve read a fair number of books about various aspects of public speaking, and Scott’s book ranks among the best. He goes into the nitty-gritty of travel, preparation, and what it feels like …
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Hit Refresh
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week We happened to pick up Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone, by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. To be honest, we weren’t expecting much (we read a lot of books that never make the cut for our Cheery Friday newsletter). We …
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Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week This week, we opted for some light reading with Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, by Mason Currey. This is basically a compendium of workaholic work habits of a number of famous writers and artists. Since we’re sort of workaholics ourselves, it was an intriguing glimpse into …
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The problem with experts
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month (Yes, a second one) We’re embarrassed to admit that, despite all of the hullabaloo over the past decade, we had never previously gotten around to reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable—a no-holds-barred vivisection of so-called experts. Taleb doesn’t shy …
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When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month We’ve long been major fans of Dan Pink. His latest book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing lives up to Dan’s fantastic writing record. Right from the start, we were riveted to read of a ship sunk on a sunny afternoon within sight of shore—with over a thousand liv …
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Barb in San Francisco
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week We received an awesome Christmas gift—How to Traumatize Your Children: 7 Proven Methods to Help You Screw Up Your Kids Deliberately and with Skill. By making fun, (in hilarious fashion) of common parental foibles, it also helps us keep in mind what good parenting really entai …
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