Cheery Friday Greetings from Learning How to Learn! Apr 1, 2016

Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Help our friend Nelson Dellis Kickstart his “Art of Memory” project

Many of you have seen our previous videos from Nelson Dellis, the four time US Memory Champion. (Nelson is also a champion for research into Alzheimer’s, which led to the death of his grandmother and Barb’s father.) Nelson is building an online application/website called Art of Memory, which is a one-stop-shop for learning memory techniques, managing strategies and memory palaces, and for training your memory. He is running the Kickstarter campaign so he and his team can develop the idea and build a fully functional beta version of the site so people can start training and memorizing. If you’d like to help him out on this campaign, it would be much appreciated, and also potentially useful for you. Here’s the link for you to see some short videos and explanations of how it works. (Membership is much reduced for folks who back the project on Kickstarter.)

Misuse of p-values

We’ve been asked by statistician and epidemiologist Sander Greenland to please help spread the word about misuse of p-values in relation to research. Here are two easy-to-read articles that can help you avoid pitfalls: “Statisticians issue warning over misuse of p-values,” from Nature, and “Statisticians found one thing they can agree on: It’s time to stop misusing p-values” from FiveThirtyEight. (Here is Sander and his colleagues’ comprehensive paper about this important topic.)

How MOOCs foil distraction

Here’s a great article by George Leef, Director of Research for the John William Pope Center for Policy Research, on how MOOCs can improve education by providing great new approaches for effective teaching. Leef notes that: “by expanding the range of choice for students, online courses catalyze healthy competition. That is vital in education, a field that has long rested contentedly.” Our very own Learning How to Learn receives mention!

If You’re So Smart Why Aren’t You Happy?

One of our fellow Coursera instructors, Raj Raghunathan, has written the intriguingly titled If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Happy? Barb’s read it, and it’s a thought-provoking, excellent read.

Our minds often encounter negative stimulation, which we of course tend to focus on. After all, if our ancestors hadn’t been focused on negative stimulation, they might not have had kids and we might not be here! So it’s healthy for us to look for positive insights like those in Raj’s excellent book. Plus, it’s a real treat for us to find a fellow MOOC instructor who isn’t afraid to step beyond the usual expectations and to explore a vitally important issue like happiness!

Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

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