- Currently Listening to:
- Leonard Cohen — Everybody Knows
Many well-regarded universities are actively putting much of their course material up online so that anyone can pull down audio recordings of lectures and teach themselves (here’s ten universities with free science courses). As someone’s who’s never been able to constrain my interests to only the things I’m supposed to be working on, this is both a blessing and a challenge. On top of Google Tech talks and aforementioned TED conferences, that adds up to hours and hours of terrific educational content to load up an iPod with, both audio and visual.
So far I have been using UC Berkeley’s podcasts and am almost finished “attending” the Introduction to Astronomy course (which has been an excellent way to sate my fascination for the subject since catching The Sky at Night on TV is a non-trivial task). I’m planning on brushing up on my heretofore lacking Economics skills next.
- Autodidact | Define Autodidact at Dictionary.com
a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.
- Designing My Ideal Work Mix | Smarterware
Fact is, when you're the boss of you, you've got to be a really good editor: recognize the good gigs and avoid everything else. Over at the FreelanceSwitch blog this morning, I published a piece called How to Craft Your Personal Business Model, in which I describe how I am attempting to do just that. Part of it was designing my ideal work mix, a high-tech pie chart I scribbled on a piece of paper, which you see here.
- Jean Piaget - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jean Piaget (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ pjaʒɛ]; born in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a Swiss developmental psychologist well known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
- Two-year-olds exclude novel objects as potential referents of novel words based on pragmatics - Powered by Google Docs
Many studies have established that children tend to exclude objects for which they already have a name as potential referents of novel words. In the current study we asked whether this exclusion can be triggered by social-pragmatic context alone without pre-existing words as blockers. Two-year-old children watched an adult looking at a novel object while saying a novel word with excitement. In one condition the adult had not seen the object beforehand, and so the children interpreted the adult’s utterance as referring to the gazed-at object. In another condition the adult and child had previously played jointly with the gazed-at object. In this case, children less often assumed that the adult was referring to the object but rather they searched for an alternative referent – presumably because they inferred that the gazed-at object was old news in their common ground with the adult and so not worthy of excited labeling.
- Your Brain on Computers - Plugged-In Parents - NYTimes.com
Much of the concern about cellphones and instant messaging and Twitter has been focused on how children who incessantly use the technology are affected by it. But parents’ use of such technology — and its effect on their offspring — is now becoming an equal source of concern to some child-development researchers.
Sherry Turkle, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Initiative on Technology and Self, has been studying how parental use of technology affects children and young adults. After five years and 300 interviews, she has found that feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition are widespread.
- Learning the functional significance of mnemonic actions: A microgenetic study of strategy acquisition : Deep Blue at the University of Michigan
How children learn to use memory strategies in a microgenetic investigation of learning and metacognition is examined. Seven- and eight-year-olds were given two memory trials with 24 pictures on each of 5 consecutive days. Days 1 and 2 were baseline, practice trials; Day 3 included strategy training; and Days 4 and 5 were unprompted tests of strategy maintenance. All children were taught how to label, rehearse, and group the pictures as well as to self-test their own memories and use blocked recall. Half of the children were shown the actions and told to do them; the other half received elaborated feedback on the usefulness and appropriateness of the techniques for remembering. The elaborated instructional group exhibited significantly greater recall, clustering, strategic study behavior, and metamemory regarding the mnemonic techniques than the other group. Path analysis provided evidence of a causal role of training and metacognitive awareness that mediated the use of sorting and hig
- Creating Passionate Users: The hi-res user experience
Learning music changes music. Learning about wine changes wine. Learning about Buddhism changes Buddhism. And learning Excel changes Excel. If we want passionate users, we might not have to change our products--we have to change how our users experience them. And that change does not necessarily come from product design, development, and especially marketing. It comes from helping users learn.
- Lost Garden: Ribbon Hero turns learning Office into a game
The coming revolution
Ribbon Hero, in part, was born from a speech I gave back in October 2007 on applying the design lessons of Super Mario Bros. to application design. I made the following bet:
If an activity can be learned…
If the player’s performance can be measured…
If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…
Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.
- What have you tried? » Matt Legend Gemmell
- The elephants in the room at TED
You might think that doesn’t matter, but it does. It’s a fabric that encourages your mind to absorb and synthesize the ideas discussed. But it does more than that. It makes being at TED an ultra-HD experience. One that you can’t really get from the TED Talks, although even in video you notice a visual richness that’s just not there in other conferences. It’s the details and the details cost money.
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