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Funny: Smart tips to make life easier. Get inspired. Get motivated. Practice. Improve your drawing skills! Free History Video Lecture courses. All The Cheat Sheets That A Web Developer Needs. Lesley Hazleton: On reading the Koran. Life Hacks @imageBlog. How_To_Win_Friends_Influence_People_-_Courtesy_of_www.synergieconsulting.org. 10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)

This week, the OCW Consortium is holding its annual meeting, celebrating 10 years of OpenCourseWare.

10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should)

The movement to make university-level content freely and openly available online began a decade ago, when the faculty at MIT agreed to put the materials from all 2,000 of the university’s courses on the Web. With that gesture, MIT OpenCourseWare helped launch an important educational movement, one that MIT President Susan Hockfield described in her opening remarks at yesterday’s meeting as both the child of technology and of a far more ancient academic tradition: “the tradition of the global intellectual commons.”

We have looked here before at how OCW has shaped education in the last ten years, but in many ways much of the content that has been posted online remains very much “Web 1.0.” But as open educational resources and OCW increase in popularity and usage, there are a number of new resources out there that do offer just that. 8 Things Everybody Ought to Know About Concentrating - StumbleUpon. “Music helps me concentrate,” Mike said to me glancing briefly over his shoulder.

8 Things Everybody Ought to Know About Concentrating - StumbleUpon

Mike was in his room writing a paper for his U.S. History class. On his desk next to his computer sat crunched Red Bulls, empty Gatorade bottles, some extra pocket change and scattered pieces of paper. In the pocket of his sweat pants rested a blaring iPod with a chord that dangled near the floor, almost touching against his Adidas sandals. On his computer sat even more stray objects than his surrounding environment. Mike made a shift about every thirty seconds between all of the above. Do you know a person like this? The Science Behind Concentration In the above account, Mike’s obviously stuck in a routine that many of us may have found ourselves in, yet in the moment we feel it’s almost an impossible routine to get out of.

When we constantly multitask to get things done, we’re not multitasking, we’re rapidly shifting our attention.

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50 Problem Words and Phrases - StumbleUpon. Anthropology Tutorials Menu - StumbleUpon. The Global Dialogue Platform - StumbleUpon. How to Plant Ideas in Someones Mind - StumbleUpon. Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1% It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened.

Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. Some people look at income inequality and shrug their shoulders. First, growing inequality is the flip side of something else: shrinking opportunity. None of this should come as a surprise—it is simply what happens when a society’s wealth distribution becomes lopsided.