Cheery Friday Greetings from Learning How to Learn! Feb 26, 2016

Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Interleaving

One of our learners, Quin Benson, has used the discussion forum to mention an excellent article: “The Interleaving Effect: Mixing It Up Boosts Learning.” We’ve often found that learners in math, science, and engineering benefit greatly from tricks like placing problems on flashcards. Write out the solution by hand on the back of the card to help “neurally encode” it. You can mix the cards up and pull them randomly to check your ability to solve the problem. Not knowing in advance what section a problem is from forms the very essence of interleaving. (Hat tip: Senior Mentor Linda Walker.)

Upcoming Visits by Barb to the Hague, Anaheim, and Princeton

Barb and some of the Learning How to Learn Mentors will be in the Hague for the Coursera annual conference on March 21-22. If you’re interested in attending a meetup with us there, please post on the discussion forum, here.

And here’s an intriguing video about the upcoming On Course Conference, April 7-9, 2016, in Anaheim, California. Barb will be headlining this one. She’s been to On Course conferences and events in the past, and loves them—they have a great way of helping you to nudge students to start thinking for themselves. Barb will have plenty of time between sessions, so please come up and say hello. Hopefully you can share some coffee or tea while you discuss learning.

And don’t forget the upcoming IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference in Princeton, New Jersey on March 5th. This is going to be a great event, with lots of insights about teaching in STEM, kicked off by Barb’s keynote. So do come if you have the chance! Here is the complete program description.

Fantastic Biographies!

Both Terry and Barb are big fans of biographies—they’re one of the best ways to learn from the lives of other people you admire, or about history. One of Terry’s recent favorites is Tales From Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, written by Terry’s friend Mike Gazzaniga. The book describes how Mike’s work led to a whole new insight into how consciousness is distributed broadly between the two hemispheres. And one of Barb’s all time favorite biographies is Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, by Jack Weatherford. Weatherford traveled thousands of miles, many on horseback, in the Great Khan’s footsteps. Biographies just don’t come better than this.

Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

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