education - eyal matsliah on Diigo

You need to add new
skills. You need to learn how to manage money better when your
steady income is replaced by feast and famine cycles in business. You need to learn how to market and sell, how to convince people to pay
you for what you can do for them. You need to be able to spot needs
in the marketplace and move in to provide what people will buy for as
long as they want it. Then how to move on to the next opportunity. You'll need to replace your dependable salary with multiple streams of
independent income, so that if one opportunity dries up you won't be
tossed on the rocks.

Probably the biggest thing you need now, that nobody
ever planned for, is the ability to figure out what it actually is that you need to know and how to
best acquire that knowledge. It might be additional schoolwork and
certification, perhaps Internet research, books and tape courses, or
interviewing those already in the know.

05 Oct 07

A Star Is Made - New York Times

www.nytimes.com/...07wwln_freak.html - Preview

education learning

When someone is very good at a given thing, what is it that actually makes him good?
And the best way to learn how to encode information meaningfully, Ericsson determined, was a process known as deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
3 more annotations...
- makes a rather startling assertion: the trait we commonly call talent is highly overrated. Or, put another way, expert performers — whether in memory or surgery, ballet or computer programming — are nearly always made, not born. And yes, practice does make perfect.
- Ericsson's research suggests a third cliché as well: when it comes to choosing a life path, you should do what you love — because if you don't love it, you are unlikely to work hard enough to get very good.
- Students should be taught to follow their interests earlier in their schooling, the better to build up their skills and acquire meaningful feedback. Senior citizens should be encouraged to acquire new skills, especially those thought to require "talents" they previously believed they didn't possess.

01 Sep 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 10

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edge education learning predictions science thinkers

24 Aug 07

THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2006 — Page 2

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edge education science thinkers

My
dangerous idea is one that most people immediately
reject without giving it serious thought: school
is bad for kids — it makes them
unhappy and as tests show — they
don't learn much.
Schools
need to be replaced by safe places where
children can go to learn how to do things
that they are interested in learning how
to do. Their interests should guide their
learning.
2 more annotations...
- In fact, emergence and complexity theory
  explains how the principles of self-organization
  and emergence cause complex systems to arise
  from simple systems without a top-down designer.
- Unfortunately,
  what appears to be a rather modest proposal
  on some counts, is dangerous on another. It is dangerous to those who abhor biologically
  grounded theories on the often misinterpreted
  perspective that biology determines our
  fate, derails free will, and erases the
  soul. But a look at systems other than
  the human mind makes it transparently clear
  that the argument from biological endowment
  does not entail any of these false inferences.

09 Aug 07

What You'll Wish You'd Known

www.paulgraham.com/hs.html - Preview

education growth life-purpose personal-development

I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high
school: what you want to do with your life. People are always
asking you this, so you think you're supposed to have an answer.
But adults ask this mainly as a conversation starter.
I'll start by telling you something you don't have to know in high
school: what you want to do with your life.
20 more annotations...
- but this is a bad way to put it,
  because it implies you're supposed to be bound by some plan you
  made early on. The computer world has a name for this: premature
  optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster.
- But if you're
  trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse
  for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
- Upwind
  
  I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead
  of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
  This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
- Upwind
  
  I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead
  of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
  This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
- I propose instead that you don't commit to anything in the future,
  but just look at the options available now, and choose those that
  will give you the most promising range of options afterward.
- Look for smart people
  and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you
  can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it.
- The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.
  Writing novels is hard. Reading novels isn't.
  Hard means worry: if you're not worrying that
  something you're making will come out badly, or that you won't be
  able to understand something you're studying, then it isn't hard
  enough. There has to be suspense.
- It's that adults take responsibility for
  themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.
  Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
- That's what you need to do: find a question that makes
  the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same
  world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's
  compellingly mysterious.
- Now
  
  If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you do now,
  at sixteen? Work toward finding one. Great questions don't appear
  suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes
  them congeal is experience.
- The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for
  big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you,
  and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can
  take roost.
- Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems
  interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
  or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less
  than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
  Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
  at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
  seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
  till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This
  could take years.)
- Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems
  interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
  or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less
  than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
  Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
  at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
  seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
  till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This
  could take years.)
- Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some
  goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you
  think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important
  thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you
  learn.
- Don't disregard unseemly motivations. One of the most powerful is
  the desire to be better than other people at something.
- Another powerful motivator is
  the desire to do, or know, things you're not supposed to. Closely
  related is the desire to do something audacious.
- Beware of bad models. Especially when they excuse laziness.
- The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of
  waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
- You start being an adult when you decide to take
  responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age.
- The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions
  it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with
  it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure
  how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment:
  set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think.
  You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing
  else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books,
  newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a
  strong craving for distraction.

11 May 07

Making Connections #5 - 5/8/07 | EdTechTalk

www.edtechtalk.com/1624 - Preview

diigo education review

We jumped in with both feet to Diigo. Using Yugma we set up the Diigo toolbar, created a group for Making Connections, and added sticky notes to those pages. We all agreed this tool has great possibilities in a classroom setting.

03 May 07

Seeking the Wisdom of the Ages Through Our Student’s Eyes » Blog Archive » Finally some states are getting it right…

tnturner.edublogs.org/93 - Preview

diigo edublog education favorable user-testimonial

One of the reasons I love diigo so much is the highlighting capability it brings. I’ve not used any of the other tools out there, as again, I’m a loyalist. But as I was reading, if I was reading it off a newspaper, magazine or any other print media I would have probably run my highlighter dry.

21 Apr 07

Beyond School - a blog by Clay Burell

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diigo_evangelist e-learning education related:diigo

09 Apr 07

What You'll Wish You'd Known

paulgraham.com/hs.html - Preview

education growth high-school paul-graham personal-development research science

You
don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you
need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff
you like if you want to be good at what you do.
So I'm going to tell you what we all wish
someone had told us.
32 more annotations...
- But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is
  doing them yet.
- The world changes fast,
  and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a
  world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.
- The computer world has a name for this: premature
  optimization. And it is synonymous with disaster.
- What they really mean is, don't get demoralized. Don't think that
  you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't
  underestimate your potential.
- If they were just like us, then
  they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one
  reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for
  being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because
  of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our
  fault if we can't do something as good.
- if you're
  trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse
  for being lazy, the other one is probably right.
- Upwind
  
  I think the solution is to work in the other direction. Instead
  of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
  This is what most successful people actually do anyway.
- It's not so important what you work on, so long as you're not wasting
  your time. Work on things that interest you and increase your
  options, and worry later about which you'll take.
- Look for smart people
  and hard problems. Smart people tend to clump together, and if you
  can find such a clump, it's probably worthwhile to join it.
- This may seem a
  scandalous proposition, but it has been experimentally verified,
  in the famous Social Text affair. Suspecting that the papers
  published by literary theorists were often just intellectual-sounding
  nonsense, a physicist deliberately wrote a paper full of
  intellectual-sounding nonsense, and submitted it to a literary
  theory journal, which published it.
- The best protection is always to be working on hard problems.
- If you'd asked me in high school what the difference was between
  high school kids and adults, I'd have said it was that adults had
  to earn a living. Wrong. It's that adults take responsibility for
  themselves. Making a living is only a small part of it.
  Far more important is to take intellectual responsibility for oneself.
- Working at something
  as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined
  by it.
- When I ask people what they regret most about high school, they
  nearly all say the same thing: that they wasted so much time. If
  you're wondering what you're doing now that you'll regret most
  later, that's probably it.
- So what do you do? What you should not do is rebel.
- Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let
  yourself be defined by what they tell you to do. The best plan, I
  think, is to step onto an orthogonal vector. Don't just do what
  they tell you, and don't just refuse to. Instead treat school as
  a day job. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. You're done at 3
  o'clock, and you can even work on your own stuff while you're there.
- Curiosity
  
  And what's your real job supposed to be? Unless you're Mozart,
  your first task is to figure that out. What are the great things
  to work on? Where are the imaginative people? And most importantly,
  what are you interested in? The word "aptitude" is misleading,
  because it implies something innate. The most powerful sort of
  aptitude is a consuming interest in some question, and such interests
  are often acquired tastes.
- And passion
  is a bad word for it. A better name would be curiosity.
- It has to: you can't get anything done if you're always
  asking why about everything. But in ambitious adults, instead of
  drying up, curiosity becomes narrow and deep.
- So I was surprised when, early
  in college, I read a quote by Wittgenstein saying that he had no
  self-discipline and had never been able to deny himself anything,
  not even a cup of coffee.
- Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same
  with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible
  procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves
  do anything they're not interested in.
- If you want to do good work, what you need is a great curiosity
  about a promising question.
- That's what you need to do: find a question that makes
  the world interesting. People who do great things look at the same
  world everyone else does, but notice some odd detail that's
  compellingly mysterious.
- The way to get a big idea to appear in your head is not to hunt for
  big ideas, but to put in a lot of time on work that interests you,
  and in the process keep your mind open enough that a big idea can
  take roost.
- Put in time how and on what? Just pick a project that seems
  interesting: to master some chunk of material, or to make something,
  or to answer some question. Choose a project that will take less
  than a month, and make it something you have the means to finish.
  Do something hard enough to stretch you, but only just, especially
  at first. If you're deciding between two projects, choose whichever
  seems most fun. If one blows up in your face, start another. Repeat
  till, like an internal combustion engine, the process becomes
  self-sustaining, and each project generates the next one. (This
  could take years.)
- Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to be on the path to some
  goal you're supposed to have. Paths can bend a lot more than you
  think. So let the path grow out the project. The most important
  thing is to be excited about it, because it's by doing that you
  learn.
- The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of
  waiting to be taught, go out and learn.
- You start being an adult when you decide to take
  responsibility for your life. You can do that at any age. [10]
- Well, most adults labor under restrictions
  just as cumbersome, and they manage to get things done. If you
  think it's restrictive being a kid, imagine having kids.
- [3] A day job is one you take to pay the bills so you can do what
  you really want, like play in a band, or invent relativity.
- [5] The key to wasting time is distraction. Without distractions
  it's too obvious to your brain that you're not doing anything with
  it, and you start to feel uncomfortable. If you want to measure
  how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment:
  set aside a chunk of time on a weekend and sit alone and think.
  You can have a notebook to write your thoughts down in, but nothing
  else: no friends, TV, music, phone, IM, email, Web, games, books,
  newspapers, or magazines. Within an hour most people will feel a
  strong craving for distraction.
- Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are
  simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good.

31 Mar 07

How to Read a Scientific Research Paper--

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education howto research tips

How to Read a Scientific Research
Paper--

a four-step guide
1. Skimming. Skim the paper quickly, noting basics like headings,
figures and the like. This takes just a few minutes. You're not trying
to understand it yet, but just to get an overview.
6 more annotations...
- In the Introduction, note how the context is set. What larger
  question is this a part of? The author should summarize and comment on
  previous research, and you should distinguish between previous research
  and the actual current study. What is the hypothesis of the paper and the
  ways this will be tested?
- Look up simple words and phrases.
- Get an understanding from the context in which it is used.
- Flag this phrase as belonging to one of the major concepts of the paper--it's
  bigger than a vocabulary question. For example, a paper about diet and
  cancer might refer to "risk reduction," which you would need to understand
  in context and in some depth.
- 3. Comprehension, section by section. Try to deal with all the words
  and phrases,
- 2. Vocabulary. Go through the paper word by word and line by
  line, underlining or highlighting every word and phrase you don't
  understand. Don't worry if there are a lot of underlinings; you're still
  not trying to make sense of the article.

20 Mar 07

Scientific American: The Expert Mind

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chess cognition education expert memory psychology science

July 24, 2006

The Expert Mind

Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well

By

Philip E. Ross
7 more annotations...
- How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one."
- The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.
- Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking--the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.
- Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory--the scratch pad of the mind--in a 1956 paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details.
- Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.
- In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.
- The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" perhaps educators should ask, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?"

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