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 Worlds I See
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, by Fei-Fei Li. In her memoir The Worlds I See, AI pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li offers rare insight into the human story behind modern artificial intelligence advances. Detailing her journey from her childh …
More >
The AI Playbook
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month (to be released February 6th!) The AI Playbook: Mastering the Rare Art of Machine Learning Deployment, by Eric Siegel. Whether you are an AI expert or know nothing about AI, this book will teach you, through compelling examples of success and failure, what machine learning p …
More >
Between the State and the Schoolhouse
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core, by Tom Loveless. Now that we’re largely back on track after the epidemic-related school shutdowns, it’s a good time to also get back on track in what’s going on more generally with education. I …
More >Kieran Egan
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book (review) of the week: Kieran Egan’s “The Educated Mind” This book review (which won the ACX book review contest) introduced me to the ideas of someone I had never heard about before — Kieran Egan, the (recently deceased) Canadian educational philosopher. The review lays out Egan’s visio …
More >
Clear Thinking
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results, by Shane Parrish. Like half the planet, it seems, we are fans of Shane Parrish’s podcast The Knowledge Project. In Clear Thinking, Shane distills the best of what he’s learned over the years, both from his …
More >
Marie Curie: A Life
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Marie Curie: A Life by Susan Quinn. Marie Curie is one of the greatest scientists of the last several centuries. Yet people often know little of the life of this extraordinary woman who helped unravel the mysteries of radiation—to her own, and her daughter’s, ultimate peril …
More >
The Battle over the Butterflies of the Soul
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Battle Over the Butterflies of the Soul: Camillo Golgi, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, and the Birth of Neuroscience, by Wallace B. Mendelssohn, MD. One of the more intriguing rivalries in the history of science is that between the Italian Camillo Golgi and the Spaniard Santiag …
More >Guatemala and more!
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Barb Giving a Dizzying Array of Talks in Guatemala in September If you are anywhere in Central America, take a look here and sign up for any of the many different talks, workshops and conferences that Barb will be giving in Guatemala City in the first two weeks of September. If Learning How t …
More >
Lincoln in the Bardo
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Books of the Week Lincoln in the Bardo: A Novel, by George Saunders. While spending time in the Tibetan Tergar Monastery in Kathmandu, Barb heard a lot about Buddhist theories of reincarnation and the “bardo,” an intermediate state between death and rebirth that might also be related to West …
More >
Frozen Hell
(Partly) Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Books of the Month We continue our reading of history and society—reading books is one of the best ways to broaden your learning about everything! This week, we have two books to share: Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40, by William Trotter. It’s all too easy to th …
More >
