Cheery Friday e-mails
Every Friday I send a “Cheery Friday” email chock full of insights about learning and changing to a million registered learners from the massive open online course (“MOOC”) Learning How to Learn. To receive these emails, just register for the course here (it’s free, and registration takes only a few seconds). “See” you on Friday!
Artificial Intelligence: Rethinking Business Strategy
Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! Headed to Cambridge In a couple of weeks I’ll be giving the opening keynote and a workshop at the Cambridge Schools Conference in Cambridge, UK (July 15–16). If you’ll be there, come find me! Stranded in the Rain in Taiwan’s Silicon Valley — the Lesson Behind Teresa Martín-Retortillo’s New Book on Business …
More >The Science of Learning
Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! Does Explicit Instruction Cause Learned Helplessness? Nidhi Sachdeva (University of Toronto) and Jim Hewitt have an excellent Substack called The Science of Learning. They just put up a great piece that takes apart one of the most widely repeated objections to explicit instruction — the claim that giving st …
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Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Impact Our Future
Reflections from Hsinchu, Taiwan Book of the week: Why Taiwan Matters: A Short History of a Small Island That Will Impact Our Future If you think Taiwan is just a tiny blip on the map, Why Taiwan Matters will quickly disabuse you of that notion. Kerry Brown (a former diplomat and longtime China scholar who knows the players and the history) pulls o …
More >Ulearn
Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! Turn YouTube Bingeing into YouTube Learning We all watch YouTube videos to learn things — but how much do we actually retain? A talented young developer has built a free tool called Ulearn that solves this problem beautifully. It’s a Chrome extension that automatically generates quiz questions after you wat …
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Attention Required
Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! Attention Required: What a Memory Champion’s Brain Reveals About Learning Nelson Dellis—the six-time US Memory Champion whose new book Everyday Genius I recommended a few weeks ago—has just had his brain studied in unprecedented detail by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. Nelson had an ordi …
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The Death of Trotsky
Cheery Friday: The Ecstasy of Certainty I just finished a book I couldn’t put down—Josh Ireland’s The Death of Trotsky—and it gave me a new way of thinking about patterns I’ve noticed in the world of education. A bit of context: Leon Trotsky was one of the architects of the Soviet state, once second only to Lenin. Joseph Stalin, who eventually seiz …
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Everyday Genius
Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! Happy Friday! If you’re looking for a book recommendation, here’s one I genuinely mean: Nelson Dellis’s new Everyday Genius (Abrams Press)—and yes, I wrote the foreword, so you know I’m not just being polite. Nelson is a six-time USA Memory Champion, which sounds impressive until you realize he started with …
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More Research, Worse Results—What’s Going On?
Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! More Research, Worse Results—What’s Going On? I’ve launched a Substack! My first post, “The Teaching Method That Can’t Fail (and Why That’s the Problem),” asks a question that’s been nagging at me for years. We have more research than ever on how to teach well. There are more education PhDs, more journals, …
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A Brief History of Intelligence
Why We Have Two Learning Systems: Max Bennett Made This Click One book that has given me great insight as I dipped into it over these past few months was A Brief History of Intelligence by Max Bennett. What I appreciated most was how clearly it laid out why we have two fundamentally different learning systems—an older, model-free system for fast, a …
More >A Big Christmas Present!
Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley! How to Fall in Love with Math (Even If It’s Broken Your Heart Before) What happens when a playwright-turned-mathematician, an engineer-turned-neuroscience educator, and a math professor walk into a podcast? You get a delightful, eye-opening conversation that just might change how you see math forever. Join …
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