[tweetmeme]Much as I deplore his early politics, it would be difficult as the writer of a blog like Mission to Learn not to be greatly saddened by the recent death of Senator Robert Byrd. As the obituary in the Washington Post noted, Byrd was "a lifelong autodidact and a firm believer in continuing education." He was also a musician - an avid fiddler who even recorded an album including one of my old-time favorites, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." Most of all though, I will miss Byrd as a prodigious and talented quoter of poetry. I haven’t located a source, but I’ve heard on more than one occasion that Byrd had memorized so much poetry that he could recite non-stop on the 6-hour trip from Charleston, West Virginia to Washington, DC and back. Perhaps that story is apocryphal, but judging solely from his use of Shakespeare on the Senate floor, it is clear that he had stored away a huge amount - and he knew how to retrieve it in highly appropriate ways. Of course, you don’t get much credit for memorizing much of anything these days. Memorization has long since fallen out of favor in education circles. At least in the rhetoric. And poetry - well, it seems no one reads poetry anymore, much less memorizes it. That’s a true shame. As Byrd clearly understood and appreciated, rote memorization may be of little value, but memorization as a path to expand your thinking, as a way to dig more deeply into your subject is of immense value. And poetry - well, personally I believe that to memorize and deeply know a poem is among the more sublime learning experiences there is. So, with the hope of inspiring you to take up the challenge of memorizing a poem - or renew your commitment if you are already a converted memorizer, here are seven reasons to master a bit of verse, no matter how small: 1. It Helps You Appreciate How Much Things Change As absorbed as each of us tends to be in our day-to-day lives, it’s easy to lose perspective on exactly how much things have changed - even over the course of the past several generations. Poems from other times often bring the forces of change into stark relief. I clearly recall the first poem I had to memorize a poem back in high school - and yes, it mostly still survives somewhere in the depths of my hippocampus.  It was a chunk of the General Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales in Middle English: Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote And bathed every veyne in swich licour, Of which vertu engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open eye- (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages); Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages Yes, folks. This is English. An earlier version of the same stuff you and I speak today. And it was well under a 1000 years ago that people were walking around talking in this bizarre fashion. We all thought Mrs. Dunning was a bit off her rocker for making us memorize and recite these lines, but I carry them with me to this day, and among the many other purposes they serve, they make it clear to me how malleable our language is and always has been - a point that everyone who is uptight about texting and the various abuses that plague the younger generations’ use of language might do well to keep in mind. (See Librarius for a side-by-side Middle/Modern version) 2. It Helps You Appreciate How Much Things Stay the Same Of course, we all know that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The next poem I memorized - this time in college - was William Wordsworth’s sonnet "The World is Too Much With Us." I’ll just quote the first few lines of this one, but I encourage you to read the full text. The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! Ah, fine Romantic sentiment - but also completely applicable today and to pretty much every age of the human race. How many of us do not feel on a regular basis - if we take the time to stop and reflect - that we are too bogged down in the trivialities of day-to-day worldly existence? I quoted this one often to my infant son when putting him to sleep at night. Its rhythms had a soothing effect, and of course, I hoped secretly that a bit of its message might sink in! 3. It Helps You Connect with Other Human Beings This one is strongly tied to the first two points, but I think it is so important that it deserves its own bullet.  There is a school of thought that says you should not confuse the "I" of a poem with the author. I understand that point of view to a certain extent, but for the most part I think it is rubbish. Regardless of whether the speaker in the poem is the same as the poet, the words of a poem always form a bridge between reader and poet. They make that "connection" that there is so much buzz about these days on the social Web, and they do it in a much more distilled and intense fashion that pretty much any other form of communication. Yes, time for another poem. Here is all of "Spring," a sonnet by Philip Larkin: Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings, Their children finger the awakened grass, Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings, And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass, Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark, The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me, Threading my pursed-up way across the park, An indigestible sterility. Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous, Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water, Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter; And those she has least use for see her best, Their paths grown craven and circuitous, Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. I suppose you could argue that T.S. Eliot summed things up much more concisely when he wrote simply "April is the cruelest month," but I’ll take Larkin’s words any day for beautifully capturing the mixed emotions the arrival of spring often brings. What you know of Larkin from this poem, you also know of yourself. 4.  It Anchors Other Memories Wordsworth wrote "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting." I’d go further and say that sentiment characterizes much of our lives. We forget vastly more than we remember as we go through life. (And, of course, we sleep away a lot of our time as well!). I’ve already mentioned that I remember memorizing the General Prologue back in high school - and I even remember my teacher, Mrs. Dunning, quite clearly. I also remember the teaching assistant at the University of Virginia who insisted that his students memorize a poem - and I recall sitting in his office tremulously speaking of "glimpses that would make me less forlorn." Whether clearly or vaguely I associate every poem I have memorized (and many I have since forgotten) with particular events or time periods in my life. I always recall these times better for having a poem associated with them. I also tend to recall them very fondly. 5.  It’s Downright Impressive In the Right Circumstances Admittedly, it doesn’t happen often, but my wife and I occasionally have the opportunity to recite a poem from memory at a dinner or some other such occasion. Given how unusual it is for someone to be capable of such a feat these days, there is always an amusing amount of oohing and ahhing. (And, no doubt some mumbling behind our backs about what geeks we are!) Certainly Robert Byrd understood how powerful it could be to recite a bit of poetry in the right context - and the political arena is ripe for such contexts. I remember (of course) a while back when a friend who was running for office lost. He had to give the obligatory concession speech in front of his gathered supporters, and I offered him the following lines from Robert Frost’s "Reluctance": Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season? It fit the context well and made the impression my friend wanted to make.  Having lines like these tucked away in your memory can come in handy more often than you may think. 6. It Can Be a Platform for Learning New Things I should be crystal clear that when I talk about memorizing a poem, I am not talking about "rote" memorization. Memory should come out of really getting to know a poem; out of reading it closely and living with it over time. If you do this, you can’t help but learn in the process. At a minimum, you may pick up some new vocabulary - like "gratuitous," or "circuitous." Or you may find yourself diving into the world of mythology. Who was Zephirus? Who was Proteus? What does Tennyson’s Ulysses mean when he says, we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew Or stretching across time in a different way, you might try to understand what Adrienne Rich’s "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" could possibly have to do with the John Donne poem of the same name. The possibilities are as endless as learning itself. Dive down the rabbit hole of any given poem and you will emerge much the wiser for it. 7. Who Knows, It May Actually Inspire You To Write A Poem I said earlier that the "General Prologue" was the first poem I ever memorized, but that is not precisely true. When I was a boy, my father would occasionally recite a small bit of doggerel that stuck in my mind: You’re a poet and you don’t even know it But your feet show it They’re Longfellows Well, I’m no Longfellow. And I am certainly not a Frost or a Larkin, but I have from time to time tried to write a poem or two. Whether or not you produce a work of genius, simply trying to capture a thought or feeling in focused, intense language is a great learning exercise. And who knows, maybe someday a high school English teacher will assign your poem to be memorized. ** So, those are my reasons for memorizing poetry. I’m sure I could come up with many others, but what about you? If you are someone who memorizes, or aspires to memorize poetry, why? And what are some of your favorite poems? Jeff Related posts:5 Powerful Reasons to Make Reflection a Daily Learning Habit, and How to Do It

Could it be that, in some sense, the point of evolution has been to create these social brains, and maybe even to weave them into a giant, loosely organized planetary brain? [tweetmeme]Once upon a time, the idea of all humanity being connected into a single, universal mind was confined to the realms of science fiction and mysticism. Lately, though, I notice that it has gone mainstream. The quote above the photo is from a recent OpEd column in The New York Times in which Robert Wright speculates that we may be missing the point in our hand-wringing over the intellectual impact of the social Web. Whether Google is making us stupid - as Nicholas Carr has provocatively argued - or not is beside the point. What we are experiencing as we become hooked more and more tightly into the social Web is something much bigger than we are. It is technology that is blasting forward, and humanity just happens to be caught in its evolutionary wake. As Carr himself has made clear in the past, Google is hardly unaware of this possibility. In The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google, Carr cites a Playboy interview in which Google co-founder Sergey Brin asserts that far from wanting to stem the flow of information our goal should be to tap into as much of it as possible. "The solution isn’t to limit the information you receive," Brin says. "Ultimately you want to have the entire world’s knowledge connected directly to your mind." [p. 212] Larry Page, the other Google founder, took that thought several steps further when he later said that "For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence."[p. 213] You didn’t think Sergey and Larry were just interested in building a better search engine, did you? The upbeat side of linking our brains together is persuasively articulated by Clay Shirky in his latest book, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. Shirky views television and other traditional forms of mass media as forces that essentially hijacked our minds over the past century. The non-work time that we had available to us for mental activity was absorbed by watching Gilligan’s Island, Dancing with the Stars, and other mindless programming. The social Web has now given us the opportunity to take back that time, to use our "cognitive surplus" in much more dynamic and meaningful ways. But as positive as this may sound, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that there is something not just disturbing, but downright creepy lurking just below the surface.  By connecting human minds through machines we open up the possibility that the machines themselves begin to acquire something akin to a "mind."  That appears to be what Sergey and Larry are thinking, and it is certainly what the well-known and widely-read futurist Ray Kurzweil has in mind when he talks about concepts like "the singularity." "The Singularity" - at least as Kurzweil sees it - is "an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity." Certainly there could be upsides to such a civilization, but the descriptor "nonbiological" makes my back tingle just a bit at the place where the plug will be inserted just before I am placed in my pod next to Keanu Reeves. (Not coincidentally, Kurzweil’s Singularity University is partially funded by Google.) Kevin Kelly - a Wired founder, future thinker, and generally very smart guy - will apparently cap off the Summer of the Big Brain in a forthcoming book titled What Technology Wants. I’ve already pre-ordered a copy on Amazon and can’t wait to hear what Kevin has to say. But in the meantime: What do you think? Have you been paying attention to the growing conversation about the "big brain?" What do you think the implications are for you personally and for the world in general? Please comment and share your thoughts. Jeff Related posts:25+ Sites and Tools to Exercise Your Brain Beef Up Your Brain and other Assorted Edutweets

In spite of being involved with technology in one way or another for most of my working career, I’ve never been much of a gadget guy. So, I was a bit surprised when I saw the iPad and immediately felt like I had to have one. Apple excels at marketing to our irrational side (hilarious video to drive home that point), and I guess the iPad was the path into mine. Of course, plunking down hundreds of dollars for a highly breakable mobile device that doesn’t even feature a camera wasn’t an entirely crazy thing to do. The iPad is a great tool for lifelong learning, and since that happens to be the focus of this blog, here are the ten apps I have found useful so far as part of my iPad learning mix: [tweetmeme] (Note: You can find all of these simply by going to the app store on the iPad and searching, but I’ve also provided Web site URLs where available.) Evernote Regular readers know I am a big believer in taking notes. I’ve been using the note-taking app Evernote on my laptop for some time, but since having it available on the iPad, it has assumed a much more prominent place in my learning mix. Partly this is a matter of convenience - using Evernote helps greatly with synching notes between the iPad and my laptop - but by having it on a mobile device, I am also in a much better position to take notes when I am out and about. At this point I am still using the free version, but an upgrade to the pro version may be in my future. http://www.evernote.com. Free.  Pro version available. MobileRSS RSS feeds have become the backbone of my learning mix, so not having one on the iPad is unimaginable. MobileRSS is a free app that connects to your Google Reader account and puts into a user-friendly iPad form. The free version is ad supported, or you can upgrade to a no-ad version for $2.99. (So far, I have stuck with the free version and have not found the ads obtrusive.)  http://www.nibirutech.com/mobilerss-google-reader-iphone.html. Free.  Pro version available for $2.99. Pulse Pulse bills itself as a "visual news reader" and makes sure to mention on its download page that Steve Jobs himself referenced the app in a recent keynote address.  It’s somewhat new to my mix, but I am trying it out to address a particular issue. Namely, I like to separate out mainstream news and the "mega" blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch from my more focused RSS feeds. So, I’ve decided to chunk all of those into Pulse as a place where I can have a quick look at them from time to time. http://www.alphonsolabs.com. $3.99. Free Books With 23,469 public domain books in its text collection (all from the Gutenberg Project, I am assuming), Free Books is well worth the price tag - free! You can also download the Free Audiobooks app, which claims 2,947 classics, for $1.99. The audio app has not been specifically formatted for iPad yet, but that doesn’t really matter much once you click "Play." http://freebooksapp.com. Free. Kindle Yes, that’s right - there is a Kindle app for the iPad. I tried out Apple’s own iBooks app initially, but you just can’t beat Amazon’s selection - or the somewhat reassuring knowledge that your eBooks will work on both an iPad and a Kindle.  I’ve already read a number of books on the iPad and have particularly liked the ability to highlight and make notes. Now someone just needs to come up with a great way to harvest those into Evernote. http://www.amazon.com/kindleapp. Free. Dragon Dictation I’ve only played around with this one a bit so far, but the Dragon Dictation app is pretty impressive. You can easily record voice notes and then copy and paste them into other applications or post them to Facebook or Twitter. You can also easily e-mail them - which means they can be e-mailed to your Evernote account.  Now if Evernote and Dragon would just fully integrate so that the voice note recordings in Dragon would be automatically transcribed! www.dragonmobileapps.com. Free. Seesmic or TweetDeck You do by now think of Twitter as a learning tool, right? I’ve tended to be torn between using TweetDeck or Seesmic as my desktop Twitter client. I lean a bit more towards Seesmic because I like the way it handles multiple Twitter accounts, but I’ve always felt the TweetDeck interface was a bit better. The same applies, I find, in the iPad environment, but really you can’t go wrong using either for real-time updates on people and topics of interest. As far as I can tell, though, neither offers Twitter search functionality - a deficiency I hope will be addressed in the near future. http://seesmic.com/seesmic_mobile.  http://ww.tweetdeck.com/ipad. Free. iWiki You can, of course, simply access Wikipedia on the iPad using Safari, but I think that iWiki does a nice enough job of optimizing presentation of the site and adding valuable features that it is well worth $2.99.  The easy saving of articles for offline viewing is perhaps the most valuable of its features, though it also adds some nice navigation tools and a simple way to see your search history on Wikipedia.http://comoki.com/iwiki/. $2.99. Delicious This one may fall a bit short of "excellent," but I use Delicious so much as part of my ongoing learning mix that I can’t see being without it on the iPad. The Delicious app makes it possible to add a bookmark to your Delicious account from the iPad. The problem is that you either have to know the URL you want to add by memory or you have to cut it from another application, close that application, open the Delicious app, and paste it in. With a few relatively simple steps, you can make the process for saving URLs to Delicious from Safari a bit speedier, but it still leaves a lot to be desired. I think this app is worth having, but I hope it becomes a lot more user friendly in the future. http://delicioussafari.com/bookmarks.php. Free. YouTube and iTunes I’ve lumped these two together and put them last because they are pre-installed on the iPad, so you don’t need me to tell you about them. It’s always worth emphasizing, however, what amazing tools these are for lifelong learning.  If you have never checked out Open Culture’s Intelligent You Tube Channels or educational Podcast Library, you now dial them up on your iPad. Free. Granted, nearly all of the above could be done on an iPhone, and most of it also mirrors what I already do on my laptop, but Apple is definitely on to something by offering a device that is somewhere between the two.  As of right now, it is looking like Apple might sell nearly 13 million of them in 2010. So, I may be crazy, but it looks like I’ve got plenty of company - and hopefully there are many lifelong learners in the crowd. What about you? Are you using any of the apps above on your iPad, or are there others you can suggest for avid lifelong learners? Please comment and share. Jeff P.S. - Be sure to check out 10 Killer Content Sources for your iPod Learning Mix. These work on the iPad, too! Related posts:25 Free Online Resources and Web Apps for Lifelong Learners

If there is one thing I have realized through writing Mission to Learn - and blogging in general - it’s that I already know quite a lot that I don’t tend to act on all that well. So, I am starting to focus more on knowledge I have accumulated - particularly knowledge related to everyday life - and trying to put it to better use. Eating certainly is one of the top items on this list - all the more so because diet can have such an impact on how well the brain functions. There are countless books out there about how to eat better, what not to eat, and how our whole approach to eating is destroying us (and the world), but it seems to me that I already know the things that are likely to have the biggest impact on my day-to-day habits - i.e., the 20 percent that will make 80 percent of the difference. I just need to act more consistently on what I already know - whether from past reading and research or simply from having observed what works in my own life. Here’s what I have been able to simplify my knowledge of food down to so far. Let me know if you have suggestions about how to make this simpler (or any glaring omissions or errors you think I have made): 1. Eat less, but eat - and at more frequent intervals Don’t load up on huge meals that suck away all your energy for digestion and cause you to store calories you don’t need. And don’t go for hours on end without eating anything. (I have tendency to do this when I am holed up in my office.) Lighten up on the traditional three meals and fill the in-betweens with some small, nutritious snacks like nuts and or fruit. 2. Avoid Things Are Pretty Certainly Bad Every time we turn around there is something else that is supposedly bad or good for us. It can be dizzying to try to keep up. But it seems to me there is a pretty clear list of "greatest hits" in the bad camp that we should mostly consume in moderation, or in some cases, avoid altogether. These include: In moderation: Saturated Fat Cholesterol Sugar Salt/Sodium Alcohol Avoid altogether: Partially Hydrogenated Fats (Trans Fats) Plastic with PCBs The last one, plastic, is a perhaps not as well-established as some of the others, but I have read enough about it at this point to feel that avoiding anything that has PCBs in it is a good "better safe than sorry" move. To get your recommended dietary intakes (DRIs) on those in the "moderation" group, you can check out the USDA’s dietary guidance Web page. Like so many government efforts around diet (the "Food Pyramid" comes to mind) it is not the most user friendly of resources, but you can find what you need with a little effort. 3. Avoid Processed Foods There are any number of benefits to being able to grab something out of the freezer and pop it in the microwave, or to cook up something our of a can or jar. It’s easy, in a lot of cases it is (or at least seems) relatively cheap, and it can make it possible to juggle a busy schedule while still managing to eat decent meals. The down side, though, is that processed foods tend to be full of a lot of the items in the bullets above. They also are not very eco-friendly to produce and distribute. It’s better to avoid them to the greatest extent possible, and maybe enjoy the many benefits of preparing more of your own food. 4. Eat More Fruits, Vegetables, and Whole Grains This is a natural counterpart to avoiding processed food and I don’t think I have ever encountered legitimate research on healthy eating that didn’t highly recommend a variety of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Make an effort to include a larger percentage of your daily intake. 5. Go Local As Much As You Can Food sourced locally is generally fresher than food brought in from far away, and the energy costs and related environmental impact of getting it to market is just bound to be lower in most cases.  Consider joining a community supported agriculture (CSA) provider in your area. And don’t just stop at supporting your local farmers, bakers, and other food producers, try growing a small garden of your own - maybe even a guerilla garden - baking something, or figuring out other ways you can produce your own food. I guarantee you will learn a lot in the process! 6. Drink Water The whole bottled water, super-hydration craze makes me cringe. There’s no telling how much plastic we have churned through unnecessarily as result of this fabricated market "need." Nonetheless, I know I generally feel better when I drink several glasses of water a day. It’s kind of like the oil that keeps the body engine running smoothly. Chances are your existing tap water is just fine for this purpose. If you have doubts, have it tested and/or get a Brita filter pitcher. 7. Play First, Then Eat You can substitute "aerobic exercise" or whatever you like for "play," but I took the idea for this subtitle from a recent New York Times article that pointed out the highly positive impact of scheduling recess for school children before lunch rather than after.  I think this makes sense at any age. Physical activity is a natural and necessary complement to food, and in general, it seems better for the exercise to come first.  (And of course, whatever you do, don’t go swimming until at least 30 minutes after eating! So that’s it. No rocket science here, but that’s the beauty of everyday knowledge - you can get so much out of identifying and sticking to a fairly small and simple set of guidelines. The magic is in the "identifying and sticking to" part. What are some simple lessons that guide your approach to eating? Please comment and share. Jeff P.S. - If you want to dive deeper, you may want to check out Nutrition Made Clear, a great course from the Teaching Company. No related posts.

[tweetmeme] Here’s a simple (though perhaps not easy) proposition: Let’s value schools based on their ability to help produce happy adults. Not adults who can pass certain tests, or display mastery of those skills that we (in the U.S.) are worried other countries are trouncing us in, or even adults who possess college degrees, but rather adults who are well-prepared to live fulfilling lives, doing work they care about and contributing in positive ways to the communities to which they are connected. I’ve probably already lost the cynics and defeatists by the beginning of this second paragraph, but for everyone else, I’m betting the idea sounds at least vaguely attractive. Maybe it’s even what you thought schools were supposed to be doing.  As I have been researching and writing a book on K-12 education this summer, however, I’ve been struck by how little weight is given to fulfillment and happiness as a desired outcome of our educational system - at least in the U.S.  And this in spite of the fact that our children from ages 5 - 18 (and often starting earlier), spend nearly half their waking hours in educational institutions. It matters greatly what we think the outcome of these many hours should be because how we define the outcomes determines the strategies, tactics, and measurements we will use to get there. If it is all about higher test scores, then guess what, our educational institutions will develop approaches aimed at producing good test takers. There are already plenty of people wailing about how No Child Left Behind has resulted in just such a situation. But most of the "solutions" don’t sound much better. They are geared towards producing more college graduates - which will inevitably lead to kids excelling at getting into and out of college, but not necessarily significantly better off for having done it. Or they are geared towards meeting the supposed skill set needs of a vocal set of large business leaders. Or they are geared toward the mastery of a core set of knowledge - as if that isn’t likely to lead to more rote memorization and assessment for the sake of assessment. There may be valuable forms of educational attainment contained in all of these solutions, but they have little to do with real achievement, much less fulfillment. Trying to gauge whether schools have contributed in a meaningful way towards fulfillment, towards the type of happiness associated with "the good life," as Aristotle put it, may seem messy, but it strikes me as increasingly possible. The research that Martin Seligman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and others have done in the field of positive psychology suggest numerous approaches that might be tried if we have the collective will to test and implement them. A focus on fulfillment also strikes me as increasingly necessary - particularly from the perspective of curing the ills of the U.S. educational system.  If our goals is to reassert ourselves as leaders in educating our children, why are we acting like followers who are doggedly playing catch-up to the test scores and college graduation rates of other nations?  Is it possible that as leaders we need to be thinking differently? Don’t get me wrong: I value things like a college education and mathematical brilliance. We need people who are educated to a high level; we need people who can understand the intensely complex calculations that underlie so much of our current science. But more importantly, if we expect to achieve new heights, we need the people who do these things to love them, to be passionate about them, to see them as part of a fulfilling, happy, engaged life. We don’t need to be shoving them down the throat of every student who enters our educational system.  That devalues both the outcome and the student. I’d say we should focus instead on helping people find what will make their lives as fulfilling as possible, and then support them in excelling at it. Let’s figure out the best possible role the schools can play in achieving that outcome. What do you think? Please comment, or if you have a "What if…" for schools, please Tweet it with the hashtag #whatifschools. Jeff P.S. - You might also find what Leo has to say about education interesting. And be sure to check out Clark Aldrich’s provocative Unschooling Rules blog No related posts.

Education is a social process. Education is growth. Education is, not a preparation for life; education is life itself. - John Dewey from Democracy and Education I’ve come across a number of interesting items on the Web and in my inbox lately. Many of them I will be sharing in a new edition of the Free Learning Monitor (due out later this week), but I thought I’d go ahead and share a few things in a blog post as well. First up - Dan Lewis dropped me an e-mail to alert me to his "Now I Know" daily e-mail newsletter. He’s on a mission to prove true the old adage "you learn something new every day." Worth checking out if you want a little learnin’ delivered to your inbox every day. On the other hand, if you are mobile and poetically inclined, you really need to know about Cell Phone Haiku, where Erik Lanke has authored more than 600 haiku’s to help him with reflecting upon and making sense of his day-to-day life. In a somewhat different vein, I think Seth Godin’s recent post on monitoring your internal dialogue provides a great example of what I mean by putting consciousness and reflection to work as everyday learning habits. Finally, what NY Times columnist David Brooks describes as a "metacognition deficit" is very much in line with what Seth says, though his description of A Case of Mental Courage drives the point home in at a much more emotional level. I’ll leave the details of the story for you to explore on your own, but I will cite a sentence from Brooks’ column that I happen to like: "Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate." Indeed - though I think we may as well go ahead and strike the world "public." Enjoy, Jeff P.S. - Subscribe to the Learning Monitor now, and you will automatically receive the previous edition. Related posts:35+ Delicious Learning Links - a new Monitor is out!

I put out a new edition of the Free Learning Monitor yesterday, and as part of an effort to attract new subscribers (may as well be up front about it, eh?), I thought I’d highlight the 10 items in it that have received the most clicks from readers. Here they are, starting with the most popular. 1. Unschooling Rules http://unschoolingrules.blogspot.com/ Ongoing Research on the Perspectives and Insights from Homeschoolers and Unschoolers on Deconstructing Schools and Reconstructing Education and Life. Via http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=52177 2. Now I Know: Learn Something New Every Day, By Email http://dlewis.net/nik/ We’ve all heard the adage, "you learn something new every day." It’s definitely true.   Want to keep learning all sorts of interesting things? "Now I Know" is my free daily email where I share these things.  No more than once a day.  No spam. 3. Reading in a Whole New Way http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Reading-in-a-Whole-New-Way.html [Kevin Kelly's contribution to a recent 40th Anniversary edition of Smithsonian Magazine to which 40 thinkers were asked to contribute (you guessed it) 40 "things you need to know about the next 40 years."] 4. Very Important Study On Learning & The Brain http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2010/05/26/very-important-study-on-learning-the-brain/ Learning Strategies Are Associated With Distinct Neural Signatures is the not-very-"sexy" title of a report in today’s Science Daily about a very important study on learning and the brain. It appears — at least, to me — to provide more scientific evidence to the perspectives on motivation that Daniel Pink and others have written about. 5. Nixty: Empowering Education for Everyone http://www.nixty.com/ NIXTY is a Virginia-based startup that is revolutionizing education. The co-founders wanted to create a service with the outrageous goal of empowering education for everyone. They had experience in the eLearning/LMS market, but needed to learn more about open education. They consulted with several thought leaders, professors, and students around what a next generation learning platform might look like. The result is NIXTY! NIXTY combines powerful technology with open education to meet the audacious goal of empowering education for everyone! NIXTY provides an educational platform that students, educators, and institutions harness to meet their learning goals. Primary products include ePortfolios, Courses, WikiCourses, and Continuing Education Courses. 6. iPad Curriculum http://www.ipadcurriculum.com/ [I recently wrote about my own use of the iPad as a lifelong learning tool and subsequently stumbled upon the iPad Curriculum site.] iPad Curriculum is a collection of the best in applications, practices, and deployment of the iPad as a learning device. Via Go Sky Watch Planetarium ~ Stephen’s Web http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=53007 7 through 9 The following three are currently tied: Email College - Free Online Learning At Your Convenience http://www.emailcollege.co.uk/ Want to develop a new skill, be entertained, get on at work, start a business, earn an extra income, unleash your creativity or discover new ideas and interests? Our Free Online Learning Courses are effective, powerful, easy to use and give you world-class training on your desktop along with a completion certificate. There’s no paperwork, no exams, no commitment, no sales, no advertising, no junk mail and no catch. Just practical online courses that have relevance to your life. Via http://allwomenstalk.com/8-free-online-courses/ *** Effective Learning Skills (concentration, memory, and more) http://www.asa3.org/ASA/education/learn/203.htm#i [I can no longer remember how I came across this site, but it has some useful tips.] These "power tool" ideas for studying really work, and your improved learning skills will help you immediately and will continue paying dividends for a long time. *** School of the Future | Unschooling Education http://schoolofthefuture.org/ [It's a little hard to get a grip on what this is all about, but then, I think that is part of the point.] School of the Future is a project about what a school can be. The mission/hypothesis of the future is that the best learners/teachers are the best teachers/learners. School of the Future invites anyone to propose classes, workshops, apprenticeships, installations, or moments that add to our active research about how to make a better education.The project defeats the notion that school is as it should be, and to offer witnesses of the school the freedom to experiment with what their learning and teaching process can be. In the process of exploring the possibilities of school, we aim to become a body of unschooled and educated teaching students. 10: 100 Intro Open Courses on Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Learn http://www.bestcollegesonline.com/blog/2010/05/12/100-intro-open-courses-on-everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-learn/ While the classes you take through online college  are a great resource, you can augment your learning by taking some time to see what entirely free courses are out there offered by universities. Taking these courses can be a great way to get a foundation of knowledge or expand on what you already know. Here are 100 open courses that are designed for beginners, so you can start your educational journey on the right foot. *** There’s plenty of other great stuff in the Monitor to go along with the items above. Subscribe now and the latest edition will be sent to your inbox automatically. Jeff Related posts:Getting a First-Rate Business Education Online - Free 35+ Delicious Learning Links - a new Monitor is out! Great Learning Resources for 2010 - A New Learning Monitor is Out!

[tweetmeme] Somewhere along the way I began to write less about games here on Mission to Learn, but my interest in them as an approach to learning has never faded, and after seeing the Jane McGonigal video below it has multiplied many times over. McGonigal begins with the startling - and no doubt disturbing to some - news that we now spend around 3 billion hours weekly playing games. Where she takes that statistic, however, is what is most fascinating about this video. From McGonigal’s point of view, we need to multiply the number of hours we spend gaming by 7 (yes, that means 21 billion hours weekly), if we want to solve big problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, and obesity. Why all this game play? Because it is practice. It is learning in a virtual world the types of skills and behaviors we need to solve the seemingly intractable problems of the real world. For example, collectively all of the players of the highly popular World of Warcraft multi-player online game have spent 5.93 million years solving the problems of that world. In perhaps the most provocative turn of her talk, McGonigal frames this amount of time in evolutionary terms - human beings "stood up" approximately 5.93 million years ago, and everything else has happened since. I’ll stop there, because I think you really need to see the entire video to appreciate McGonigal’s thinking fully. The video runs about 20 minutes, and I guarantee you that if you are the least interested in how we learn and change on a large scale, it will be worth your time. I’m eager to hear your thoughts once you have watched it.  Do you buy the evolutionary analogy and the potential for transferring the benefits of gaming into the real world? Please comment and share your views. Jeff P.S. - If you like this post, you may also be interested in an article I did a while back for WE magazine called Playing for Change. Related posts:Serious Games Round-Up 5 Learning Games for Climate Change - Blog Action Day 12 More Learning Games for Change - and a Bonus

I hadn’t intended to follow my long dry spell on writing about games with two game-related posts (or two TED videos) in a row, but the Marketing Over Coffee guys mentioned the following video with SCVNGR CEO Seth Priebatsch (@12 minutes), and it sounded too good not to explore and pass along. It also happens to be a great follow up to my previous post on learning to save the world by playing games. Seth says in his talk that he doesn’t want to lose competitive advantage by revealing too many of the game dynamics that SCVNGR uses, but you can actually get the entire Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck over on TechCrunch. I’m sure I don’t have to point out to the average Mission to Learn reader that this is powerful stuff from a teaching and learning standpoint. The ability to wield influence - which is what these dynamics are all about - has always played a significant role in effective teaching, and skilled learners should be able to recognize and manage influence. Of course, as social networks become more and more pervasive, the importance of these abilities multiplies dramatically. At a minimum, we need to be able to recognize game mechanics whenever and wherever they are used, and determine whether the intent behind them is for good or evil. Yet another layer of complexity in the massive, multi-player game of life. Jeff P.S. - If you have not ever read it - or haven’t read it lately - I highly recommend Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. As far as I am concerned, it should be read in high school, college, and multiple additional times throughout life. Related posts:5 Learning Games for Climate Change - Blog Action Day 12 More Learning Games for Change - and a Bonus

I’ve been increasingly disturbed in recent years by the amount of misinformation that seems to flow through the political system in the United States. In relative terms, I doubt it has increased any over previous times, but as the magnitude of the issues the world faces grows, the need for collective understanding of the facts seems stronger than ever. And yet, significant numbers of people persist in believing, for example, that Barak Obama is a Muslim, in spite of no evidence to support this belief. Or, during the health care reform debates in the U.S., the notion that "death panels" would have the power to deny benefits to the sick and elderly took root and grew with relatively little resistance among certain ideological groups. Why is this sort of misinformation and misperception possible, and can it be corrected?  Based on a recent report, the outlook for the second part of the question is less than promising. The report, titled When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions, is based on four experiments designed to test whether false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics can be corrected.  Participants in the experiments read mock news articles about politically charged issues like stem cell research, tax cuts, and the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq.  Each article contained content that could be misleading or deceptive. For a random set of participants, however, the articles also contained a factual correction of the misleading content at a later point in the article. Participants’ reactions to what they read were correlated with their ideological beliefs. Here’s one of the major findings, as stated by the report’s authors: In each of the four experiments, which were conducted in fall 2005 and spring 2006, ideological subgroups failed to update their beliefs when presented with corrective information that runs counter to their predispositions. Indeed, in several cases, we find that corrections actually strengthened misperceptions among the most strongly committed subjects. For example, participants in one of the experiments were given a mock article that contained a statement George W. Bush actually made: "There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks, and in the world after September the 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take." For a random subset of participants, the article also contained corrective information from the official report that established there were no WMD stockpiles or any evidence of production in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion. Liberal and moderate participants who received the corrective information were less likely than their counterparts who did not receive this information to believe there were WMDs in Iraq prior to the invasion.  The impact on conservative participants, however, was just the opposite: the corrective information actually strengthened their view that there were WMDs. Liberals have little reason to be smug, however. In a different round of experiments, participants were asked to read an article with potentially misleading information about stem cell research and were then asked about their level of agreement with the statement "President Bush has banned stem cell research in the United States." Again, some participants received a version of the article that contained clarifying information - namely, that Bush’s policies limited only government funded stem cell research, not privately funded research. Conservative and moderate readers who received the corrective information were less likely to agree with the statement about a ban on research than their counterparts who did not receive this information. But liberal readers were significantly less likely to be impacted by the corrective information - they stuck to their belief that Bush had banned all stem cell research. So, how do you change beliefs that are deeply held but factually incorrect? The reports authors’ reference other studies suggesting that, over time, bombarding people with a "sufficient" amount of clear, correct information can work. But I find it hard to place much faith in that approach given how fragmented our information channels have become. We no longer live in a world with three major news channels and one or two local newspapers to which everyone in a community subscribes. Instead, we tend to pick and choose among a wide variety of information sources that support what we already believe. Game environments - the subject of my previous two posts (here and here) - may, in fact, be among the better choices for bringing together people of diverse beliefs and helping them form a common, accurate understanding of major issues.  More fundamentally, we need to place more emphasize than ever on developing and practicing good learning habits - like critical thinking and reflection - that prevent misinformation from making inroads in the first place.  As the report suggests, once the truth gets twisted, straightening it back out is no easy matter. Jeff No related posts.