Let's save millions: What's your 100 hour challenge? {*style:<b> Changes happen all the time in schools. But, in the same way as it’s hard to realise that the flight you’re on is moving swiftly through the air until either all 24,000 kms are up, I think change in education often goes unseen. And those iterative changes cost a lot of dosh . I reckon this lack of marking time could be costing us millions of education dollars, pounds and euros, but could be resolved by every teacher undertaking one simple challenge. </b>*} Why is marking time on our learning important? Research proves that most professional development does very little developing at all, since we rarely do anything significant with the input and conversations we have: Professional Development - A great way to avoid change is a pretty seminal paper in that respect (pdf). This is serious. I had thought years ago that all schools, once a year, could aspire to achieve 100 innovations in 100 days . {*style:<i><b>. </i>*} Killer Marathon Lifestreaming teaching
How Brain Imaging Could Help Predict Alzheimer's Developing drugs that effectively slow the course of Alzheimer’s disease has been notoriously difficult. Scientists and drug developers believe that a large part of the problem is that they are testing these drugs too late in the progression of the disease, when significant damage to the brain makes intervention much more difficult. “Drugs like Lilly’s gamma secretase inhibitor failed because they were tested in the wrong group of patients,” says Sangram Sisodia, director of the Center for Molecular Neurobiology at the University of Chicago. People in the mid or late stages of the disease “are too far gone, there is nothing you can do.” New brain imaging research may help solve that problem. “Brain changes that predict progression will hopefully allow us to detect the disease early, before it has caused irreversible damage,” said Sarah Madsen, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, at a press briefing at the conference.
7 Skills To Become Super Smart People aren’t born smart. They become smart. And to become smart you need a well-defined set of skills. Here are some tips and resources for acquiring those skills. Memory If you can’t remember what you’re trying to learn, you’re not really learning. If you want to amaze your friends with remembering faces, names, and numbers, look to the grand-daddy of memory training, Harry Lorayne. Reading Good scholars need to be good readers. Evelyn Woodski Slow Reading Course Announcer … Dan Aykroyd Man … Garrett Morris Woman … Jane Curtin Surgeon … Bill Murray … Ray Charles Announcer V/O: [The following words rapidly appear on a blue screen as they are read by the fast-talking announcer:] This is the way you were taught to read, averaging hundreds or thousands of words per minute. Psychologists have found that many people who take speed reading courses increase their reading speed for a short time but then fall right back to the plodding pace where they started. Writing Speaking Numeracy Empathy
Anne Murphy Paul: Lessons on Creativity from Jazz Greats The improvisational flights of jazz greats like Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane are so transporting that they can seem almost otherworldly — especially when the listener is aware that these musicians weren’t following any score, but were making up their riffs in the moment. New research on what happens in the brain when we improvise, however, is showing that it is very much an earthbound activity, grounded in the same neural processes at play in every one of us when we engage in spontaneous self-expression, like a conversation with a friend. “Creativity is far from a magical event of unexpected random inspiration,” wrote researchers Charles Limb and Mónica López-González in an article published in the journal Cerebrum last month. “Instead, it is a mental occurrence that results from the application of ordinary cognitive processes.” (MORE: Paul: Why Morning Routines Are Creativity Killers) (MORE: Paul: Speaking Thark: What Invented Languages Can Teach Us) MORE: Forgetful?
Religion May Cause Brain Atrophy -- Science of the Spirit Faith can open your mind but it can also cause your brain to shrink at a different rate, research suggests. Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre in the US claim to have discovered a correlation between religious practices and changes in the brains of older adults. The study, published in the open-access science journal, Public Library of Science ONE, asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious group, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Protestants who did not identify themselves as born-again were found to have less atrophy in the hippocampus region than did born-again Protestants, Catholics or those with no religious affiliation. Although the brain tends to shrink with age, atrophy in the hippocampus has been linked with depression and Alzheimer's disease. The study authors Amy Owen and David Hayward said the changes were not explained by other factors that affect hippocampal atrophy, such as age, education, depression or brain size.
120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power Here are 120 things you can do starting today to help you think faster, improve memory, comprehend information better and unleash your brain’s full potential. Solve puzzles and brainteasers.Cultivate ambidexterity. Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, comb your hair or use the mouse. Write with both hands simultaneously. Switch hands for knife and fork.Embrace ambiguity. Learn to enjoy things like paradoxes and optical illusions.Learn mind mapping.Block one or more senses. Readers’ Contributions Dance! Contribute your own tip! There are many, many ways to keep our brains sharp.
Our Manifesto Education is what someone tells you to do. Learning is what you do for yourself. The traditional way of education forces square pegs into round holes. It's a one-size-fits-all solution that forces people down a predetermined path. Our mission is simple. Reunite learning with education and make it accessible to every single person on this planet. Learning has no roadblocks, prescribed paths, tests, quizzes, or outdated majors and degrees. Teachers are passionate. Learn by Doing Rather than memorize equations for a test, learn by taking action. Your statement of accomplishment no longer needs to be a degree, certificate, or stamp of approval. Proof of learning is in progress and action. Everyone is a Teacher You can learn from anyone – which means we’re all teachers. Why teach? Learning Can Happen Anywhere Our cities are our best and biggest campuses, and any address can be a classroom. We Can Change Education The world’s most abundant resources are excess knowledge and skills.
how to turn your creative online platform into an art* Art isn’t only a painting. Art is anything that’s creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator. What makes someone an artist? I don’t think it has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. Strange concept, developing an audience before you have something to sell. Maybe it makes perfect sense, if you tilt your head and shift your angle. When you’re randomly shoving your book in people’s faces, what are the odds that that particular reader is going to be your right reader? There’s an element of subjectivity to art. Maybe you can’t truly sell or market your work online. You create, online, a sense of who you are and what you stand for as an artist. You put yourself out there to be found. You see yourself reflected back in them. This is known as a bond. This is known as a sense of authenticity. Or not. It’s a process.
Visual Thinking « The Multidisciplinarian Do you think in words – or in pictures? Various communities use the term visual thinking in different but related ways. Thinking about pictures, communicating with pictures, advertisement and propaganda, visualization of data, and storyboarding share this concept. Football coaches, branding experts, math gurus and choreographers think and communicate in pictures. Visual Thinking champions, like XPlane founder Dave Gray, make an excellent case that everyone else should learn to do the same. Do a web search on visual thinking and you’ll find that most of the results apply to visual learning, a closely related concept. The term visual thinking appears often in the study of art – particularly ancient art. Art historians observe that what we see – or how we interpret what we see – is controlled by our culture. Most of us consider seeing an essentially biological and “natural” process. Alex Osterwalder conducting a business model innovation session. A business model is a system. Like this: