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!
Journey of the Mind
Cheery Friday Greetings (from Bucharest!) to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month Journey of the Mind: How Thinking Emerged from Chaos, by Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam. This engrossing book provides a step-by-step understanding of how consciousness, language, self-awareness, and civilization itself arose. What’s unique about this book is its …
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The Girl Who Ran
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week (special for kids!) The Girl Who Ran: Bobbi Gibb, the First Woman to Run the Boston Marathon, by Kristina Yee and Frances Poletti, illustrated by Susanna Chapman. Bobbi Gibb was the first woman to—despite staunch opposition—run the Boston Marathon. (We still remember the new …
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The Bottomless Well
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy by Peter W Huber, Mark P. Mills. This book is considered a classic on energy, lauded by everyone from Bill Gates to, well, the best economist we know in energy studies, Ga …
More >Cracks in the Ivory Tower
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education, by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness. This fascinating book is framed around an important premise – it’s not that people in a given problematic institution, say, academia, are necessarily bad people. It is inste …
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Raising Critical Thinkers
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month Raising Critical Thinkers: A Parent’s Guide to Growing Wise Kids in the Digital Age, by Julie Bogart. As one endorser notes: “Julie Bogart is a brilliant educator who’s written a wonderful book that shows us how to nurture children’s ability to think critically and carefull …
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Icebound
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Heads up—as Barb is heading into heavy work on the final two MOOCs of the Uncommon Sense Teaching specialization, and another exciting three-MOOC specialization to be announced, we will be moving to a “once a month” schedule, (along with occasional bonus emails), for our Cheery Friday email. …
More >Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, by David Sinclair with Matthew D. LaPlante. [Hat tip, Adam Trybus] This fascinating, beautifully written book explores a common—but ignored—factor in many lethal diseases. That is, the effects of aging. Sinclair describes why a …
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In the Garden of Beasts
Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Year In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, by Erik Larson. We have read many books over the years about the rise and fall of the Third Reich (including Shirer’s definitive classic by that name). But In the Garden of the Beasts is one of the be …
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The Great Upheaval
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Week The Great Upheaval: Higher Education’s Past, Present, and Uncertain Future, by Arthur Levine and Scott J. Van Pelt. If you’re looking to understand the future of higher education, you couldn’t do better than to look at The Great Upheaval. What makes this book so interesting …
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The Fire and the Darkness
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners! Book of the Month The Fire and the Darkness: The Bombing of Dresden 1945, by Sinclair McKay. This riveting book held us spell-bound each evening over the past week—only when sleep called with urgency was Barb able to draw herself away. It is hard to do justice to Dresden’s horrific bombing, …
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