Heroes & Hormones

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Heroes & Hormones: From Screen Slave to Superhero, by Mali Alcobi.  Mali is an expert in  work-life balance who helps both employees and organizations develop systems that help people lead productive, yet happy lives.  Mali speaks around the world on this topic—which is how Barb happened to meet her and to read her book. Heroes and Hormones is one of those deceptively simple reads that teaches a few critical points—like how to train yourself to prioritize family even as you are pulling your weight at work.    This book also has a good review of what you need to be doing healthwise, from exercise to the right foods, to keep your life on track—and not wake up one day at your seeming career peak only to find your family has given up on you, and your body is beginning to show the aftereffects of too much stress and too little care. This quick read will help you balance your priorities with dozens of practical tips.  

Mali is the founder of Dynamix – Work-Life Balance. Barb and Mali will be speaking for Microsoft together next month—Barb can say with confidence that Mali is a great choice if your company is looking for a work-life balance speaker.   

200+ Hours of FREE Conference Recordings on Online Learning

This excellent article by Heba Ledwon of Class Central provides links to hundreds of hours of information, up-to-the-minute insights on online learning from top conferences around the world. As Heba points out “Class Central contributed to a number of events. 

Also check out the presentation by Class Central’s Dhawal Shah at Learning with MOOCS VII on the recent development of the MOOC world.”  Take a look at all the MOOCs Dhawal has done—it’s no wonder Class Central is so in-the-know!

Massive List of Thousands of Free Certificates and Badges

And Class Central knocks it out of the park again with this listing of thousands of courses with free certificates and badges offered by MOOC platforms, universities, companies, and nonprofits worldwide. Our thanks to authors Rui Ma & Heba Ledwon for pulling this useful compendium together!

The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide: How to Be the Best

Here is a wonderful overview by Farnam Street of deliberate practice. “Deliberate practice means practicing with a clear awareness of the specific components of a skill we’re aiming to improve and exactly how to improve them. Unlike regular practice, in which we work on a skill by repeating it again and again until it becomes almost mindless, deliberate practice is a laser-focused activity. It requires us to pay unwavering attention to what we’re doing at any given moment and whether it’s an improvement or not.”  If you are trying to improve in any area, let this article be your guide.

How Coining a Phrase Can Lead to an Inigo Montoya Moment

Okay, we’re not only fans of etymology–we’re also fans of the movie and book The Princess Bride.  So we really enjoyed this article on the term “to coin a phrase,” which can mean, on the one hand, “to use a cliché,” and on the other, “to create a new phrase,” Say what–aren’t those two meanings the opposite of one another?  Teasing out what’s actually going on is why we so enjoyed reading this article.

Course Hero, Meet CourseVillain

This is a fascinating article about how technology can be used to ferret out whether your tests and projects might be being posted online against your wishes.  Personally, we favor making tests and old classwork available for other students–it helps level the playing field and prevents cliques with special inside knowledge from having a special advantage that outsiders or newcomers don’t have. This is why we’re such big fans of Course Hero.  No surprise, Course Hero, great company that they are, are working graciously with CourseVillian to try to ensure that professors can easily see if there’s material they want removed.  Five stars to Course Hero!  

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

• Get in early on the upcoming critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching!
• Get the course recommended text, A Mind for Numbers!
• And Learning How to Learn, a book for kids and parents.