Cheery Friday Greetings from Learning How to Learn! Oct 28, 2016

Cheery Friday greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Month

Our top book this month is Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, by Tim Harford. We love this book, which speaks to the extraordinary power of serendipity and seeming sloppiness. One of our favorite writers, Adam Grant, summed Messy up this way: “Utterly fascinating. Tim Harford shows that if you want to be creative and resilient, you need a little more disorder in your world.” Adam’s own terrific complementary book is Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World.

Barb at DevLearn

Barb will be at one of her favorite conferences—DevLearn, in Las Vegas, on November 14-16th. Unlike many more academically-focused conferences, DevLearn is eminently practical and has marvelous sessions and pre-conference workshops. Along with giving her own talk (check out the 45 second video), Barb will be taking the pre-conference workshops on the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite and on Mastering the Visualization of Storyboarding for eLearning. We must always keep learning, after all!

Help in discovering “Super-learners” Scott Young is an intrepid “Marco Polo of Learning.” (We featured him in the bonus interview at the end of week 2 of Learning How to Learn). Scott is looking for superlearners—people who have completed, interesting, aggressive self-education projects in the past. If you fall into this category, please email Scott at personal@scotthyoung.com.

Learning How to Learn trending on front page of Reddit

If you’d like to read one of the most thorough and careful summaries of the key ideas of Learning How to Learn that we’ve ever seen, please check out this excellent post on Reddit, which apparently rode to the top in popularity.

Exercise and Learning

Here’s a very readable article from Quartz about the importance of exercise in learning, and in top mental performance: “A neuroscientist says there’s a powerful benefit to exercise that is rarely discussed.” (Hat tip, Manuel Ataíde). Of course, Terry reinforced that point in week four of Learning How to Learn, in the video “How to Become a Better Learner.” An excellent book by a developmental molecular biologist that expands on the value of exercise, and many other ways to get the most value from our brain,s is John Medina’s Brain Rules.

MOOC of the Week

We’ve discovered a new MOOC platform, World Science U, that is putting forth exceptionally high quality science courses. These kinds of courses can be difficult to do well, but physicist Brian Green is doing a fantastic job spearheading just the kind of approach that suits how our brains best learn.. (Incidentally, we loved Green’s book The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory), Check this new MOOC platform out, especially if you have always wanted to learn about subjects like relativity, but never thought you could. .

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

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

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