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A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop

A Learning Secret: Don’t Take Notes with a Laptop
“More is better.” From the number of gigs in a cellular data plan to the horsepower in a pickup truck, this mantra is ubiquitous in American culture. When it comes to college students, the belief that more is better may underlie their widely-held view that laptops in the classroom enhance their academic performance. Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. What drives this paradoxical finding? To evaluate this theory, Mueller and Oppenheimer assessed the content of notes taken by hand versus laptop. If the source of the advantage for longhand notes derives from the conceptual processes they evoke, perhaps instructing laptop users to draft summative rather than verbatim notes will boost performance. Wrong again. Beyond altering students’ cognitive processes and thereby reducing learning, laptops pose other threats in the classroom. Related:  Learning to Learn

35 Psychological Tricks To Help You Learn Better Have you ever considered letting your students listen to hardcore punk while they take their mid-term exam? Decided to do away with Power Point presentations during your lectures? Urged your students to memorize more in order to remember more? If the answer is no, you may want to rethink your notions of psychology and its place in the learning environment. Below are 35 proven psychological phenomena that affect you and your students every day: 1. Definition: It is easiest to recall information when you are in a state similar to the one in which you initially learned the material. Application: Urge your students to sit in the same room they studied in when they complete their take-home quiz. 2. Definition: The tendency to overemphasize internal explanations for the behavior of others, while failing to take into account the power of the situation. Application: Sometimes students need your help distinguishing between internal and external factors that affect academic performance. 3. 4. 5. 6.

5 Reasons You Should Keep All Your Notes in One Place Do you ever find yourself searching for that one note that you know you wrote down somewhere? Perhaps, it is a last-minute frantic search for a piece of information that you need. Or you have been endlessly searching for days for that missing document. You need to keep your notes in one place. Where are Your Notes? A complete time management system includes many productivity tools. You need the ability to capture notes and pieces of information. A common trap is to write notes everywhere. Simply put, the more places you take notes… the more places you have to look later when you need a piece of information. A better solution is to record all of your notes in one place, one tool. Here are 5 Reasons You Should Always Keep Your Notes in One Place: Reduced Cutter – If your desk is covered in notebooks, pads, and loose pieces of paper, then you are taking notes in too many places. One Place for Your Notes Choose the solution that works best for you. No time for time management?

Anki Flashcards - powerful, intelligent flashcards Personal information management Personal information management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of the activities people perform in order to acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve and use personal information items such as documents (paper-based and digital), web pages and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks (work-related or not) and fulfill a person’s various roles (as parent, employee, friend, member of community, etc.). There are six ways in which information can be personal: [1] Owned by "me"About "me"Directed toward "me"Sent/Posted by "me"Experienced by "me"Relevant to "me" One ideal of PIM is that people should always have the right information in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient completeness and quality to meet their current need. Technologies and tools such as personal information managers help people spend less time with time-consuming and error-prone activities of PIM (such as looking for information). History and background[edit] Tools[edit] Study[edit]

From Self-Discovery to Learning Agility in Senior Executives by Suzanne Goebel, Richard Baskerville Suzanne Goebel Georgia State University Richard Baskerville Georgia State UniversitySeptember 20, 2013 Third Annual International Conference on Engaged Management Scholarship, Atlanta, Georgia. Abstract: In the complex world of the senior executive, one of the single most important predictors of executive success is learning agility. Number of Pages in PDF File: 19 Keywords: Learning Agility, Mental Agility, Self-Awareness, Executive Coaching, Resilience, Managing Uncertainty, Managing Change, Dealing With Ambiguity, Reflection, Metacognition, Complex Learning, Managing Complexity

HOW To Organize Your Files – Mission: Office - Organize With Sandy February 15, 2011 by Sandy I did a post on organizing your files in a general sense. But I wanted to go a little deeper with you. Files can be our Friends But for them to be our friends, they have to be organized well enough so that you can find what you are looking for. With that being said… there is no one way that is “the way” to organize your files. There are many recommended methods, but it all comes down to what works for the person who has to use the files… right? I am going to recommend to you what I do. Some people file Do you need to make labels from a label maker? I showed you what my files looked like before and after I reorganized them last month. This is how I organized them. Drawer 1: Family / Personal Files 1) Bank – Monthly Statement (you can also have just online version) and receipts (only need to keep until you check your statements) 2) Bills Paid – statements after I pay bills ( some I shred right away after they are pd. Drawer#2 – My Business Information I keep files for:

Learn Difficult Concepts with the ADEPT Method After a decade of writing explanations, I’ve simplified the strategy I use to get new concepts to click. Make explanations ADEPT: Use an Analogy, Diagram, Example, Plain-English description, and then a Technical description. Here’s how to teach yourself a difficult idea, or explain one to others. Analogy: What Else Is It Like? Most new concepts are variations, extensions, or combinations of what we already know. In our decades of life, we’ve encountered thousands of objects and experiences. Here’s an example: Imaginary numbers. Argh. Negative numbers were distrusted until the 1700s: How could you have less than nothing? Instead of just going East/West, we can go North/South too – or even spin around in a circle. Analogies are fuzzy, not 100% accurate, and yet astoundingly useful. Diagram: Engage That Half Of Your Brain We often think diagrams are a crutch if you aren’t macho enough to directly interpret the symbols. So, here’s a visualization: Example: Let Me Experience The Idea Nope. so Prof.

How to Test For One Hundred Percent Truth - the 3 Emergence Truth Tests This article was written only months before I discovered the map of the mind. And while these ideas are still true, our standards for accessing truth have since been raised a thousand fold. More important, in 2010, I began work on a new scientific method, one with which discoveries are guaranteed. This method also contains a far more stringent test for truth. On What Do We Base Our Three Emergence Based Theories? The First Truth Test - the Two Geometries (the meta truth test) Socrates had four main areas of study. Despite the immense value of these latter three things, none could exist without the first; the nature of Truth. Logically, one cannot fault Socrates here. Interestingly enough, the essence of modernity's underpinnings; the scientific method, begins with this very same idea. Unfortunately, there is a logical flaw in their practice, one which exists primarily in their test for knowing they've arrived at a sine qua non. Truth for Socrates was a much purer goal. Why this order?

Beating the Forgetting Curve with Distributed Practice “If you read the research on how much people forget after training, it’s depressing. Do a search for the ‘Forgetting Curve’. Once we know something like this, we need to change our approach and educate others.”- Connie Malamed (The eLearning Coach)The above quote is from our interview with Connie Malamed. After our inspiring and thought-provoking interview with Connie Malamed, we were left wondering about the interesting human nature that is revealed with the ‘forgetting curve’, and its impact on learning design. We set out on a journey to explore and learn more about this phenomenon.Below are the questions we had in mind when we embarked on our journey: What is the ‘forgetting curve’? One of the most intriguing features of the human mind is that it is volatile in nature (just like the Random Access Memory (RAM) in a computer). These findings have great significance for learning professionals while developing learning interventions. Excerpts from Experts Infographics Presentations Articles

Project Information Literacy: Smart Talks Howard Rheingold: "Crap Detection 101: Required Coursework" Project Information Literacy, "Smart Talks," no. 5, January 3, 2011 Subscribe our Smart Talk RSS feed Printer-friendly version Photo Credit: Judith Maas Rheingold If one word captures Howard Rheingold's writing about the political, cultural, and social impact of new technologies, that word is prescient. In 1987, Howard was one of the first to write about the peer-to-peer power of virtual communities building collective intelligence. Not only does he detect change before everyone else does, but Howard also writes about the complex interplay of technology, society, and culture with clarity, depth, candor, and profound insight. We caught up with Howard in late December and shared some of Project Information Literacy's (PIL) latest findings with him. PIL: Since 2003, you have been teaching college students at Berkeley and Stanford. Dealing with the rate of change is also an issue. Your last question is a big one. Howard: Meet Buffy J.

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