Hit Lit–Top Ten Books & Learning Tools of 2017 for Learning How to Learners!
14th December 2017
Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!
Books of the Week
As LHTLers know, we love biographies! This week, we reread Jack Weatherford’s monumental Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, which is one of our top two biographies of all time (our other top favorite biography is Robert Massie’s Peter the Great: His Life and World). Coupled with the Genghis Khan biography, we read Weatherford’s sister volume, The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire, which gave great insight into how the Great Khan’s children and descendants affected his legacy. If you like either history or biography–or would like to give these types of books a try, you couldn’t do better than to dig into these titles!
Hit Lit! Top Ten Books & Learning Tools of 2017 for Learning How to Learners!
Here are the books and tools that LHTLers have found to be most useful this year (not counting our own A Mind for Numbers and Mindshift, which of course ranked at the top!)
Schools that Don’t Teach
Here’s a disquieting article from the New York Times about the shocking percentages of children in California who lack even the most basic literacy skills. It’s all too easy to focus on the most interesting aspects of what’s folding in education, particularly higher education, while neglecting the vital fact that basic literacy is of paramount importance. (If you’re able to read books and do the assignments on MOOCs, count yourself lucky with your education, and take advantage of it!)
Nearly 5 Million Americans Default on Student Loans
This perceptive Wall Street Journal article by Josh Mitchell shows the increasing personal costs of largely face-to-face education. Sadly, while most universities embrace exorbitant infrastructure spending, few are willing to invest in low cost, high value online learning.
MOOC of the Week
And on a happier note, we’ve heard great things about The Modern and the Postmodern, by Professor Michael Roth of Wesleyan University. This course examines how the idea of “the modern” develops at the end of the 18th century in European philosophy and literature, and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change.
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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