Barbara oakley learning how to learn

Learning How to Learn: впечатления

Я закончил августовскую сессию курса Learning How to Learn (LH2L) на Coursera и хотел бы поделиться впечатлениями с хабрасообществом, а также дать несколько советов и предостеречь.

Постулируемая цель курса — рассказать об эффективных методах обучения. В том числе и самообразования.

Курс проходил с 1 августа по 1 сентября. Лекторы — Barbara Oakley (подавляющее большинство записей) и Terence Sejnowski (появлялся изредка). К курсу прилагался опциональный учебник «A Mind for Numbers», который авторы старательно рекламировали.

Вот, в принципе, и всё. Месяц с запасом помещается на одну страничку.
Помимо видеолекций, в курсе были:

Самой интересной лично для меня частью курса был рассказ про Mind Palace (который сразу напомнил о Sherlock от BBC). Об этом я немного сказал выше. Но здесь есть тонкость: LH2L предлагает использовать Mind Palace, запоминая не маршруты между локациями, а весь Palace целиком. Соответственно, хранятся там не разрозненные списки, а просто информация, без привязки к спискам. Помимо этого, больше деталей в курсе не упоминалось. А жаль.

Неожиданно было узнать, что такая простая техника, как Pomodoro, удостоилась отдельного названия. Я пробую реализовать её через Workrave, но он не слишком хорошо подходит для такой задачи.

Стоит ли лично вам пройти этот курс? Следующая сессия пройдёт в октябре. Если выбор стоит между пройти и не делать ничего, я бы порекомендовал первое. Но если есть желание потратить время на поиски и изучение более сжатых и содержательных источников информации, то лучше не стоит. Впрочем, у LH2L есть одно важное преимущество: курс заставляет вспоминать, снова и снова, о том, что многое ещё можно оптимизировать. А это немаловажная часть сдвигания с мёртвой точки.

TED Summaries

TED Talks Worth Sharing

Barbara Oakley: Learning how to learn

Speaker

Barbara Oakley is a Professor of Engineering at Oakland University. She is involved in multiple areas of research, ranging from STEM education, to Engineering education, to learning practices.

Summary

Barbara is now a professor of engineering, but at a young age she was terrible at maths: preferring languages. A student asked her how she rewired her brain: after years as a Russian translator how did she learn engineering when she previously struggled. She looked into the issue from a neuroscience perspective.

The brain is in 2 different ‘modes’: a focussed or a diffused mode. In focussed mode you think tightly through familiar problems you have solved before. However, the diffuse thought is needed to search for new ideas – you can’t solve problems, but it is needed to find the answer if you haven’t seen it before. You need to activate this diffuse mode to think through a problem creatively: to do this Salvador Dali and Edison both sat comfortably with keys or a steel ball in their hands and started to drift off to sleep while thinking about it. When they dropped the object it woke them up and they could harvest thoughts from the diffuse thought, and start to focus on them. They found a way to get the benefits of both.

A problem in learning is procrastination: it is a natural response in the brain which feels pain at the idea of doing something you don’t want to do. One reaction is to delay – or do other more pleasant things. However if you force yourself to do it, the ‘pain’ feeling fades quickly. The ‘Pomodoro method’ is to set a timer (traditionally 25minutes on an old fashioned timer) and really focus on your task, then to take a 5minute reward break. Don’t expect to finish the task, just work on it. You are training your brain to focus on a task, and to reward yourself frequently.

People can also trick themselves into thinking they understand with poor study habits – they are just ‘spinning their wheels’ for a long time. For example simply reading or highlighting texts doesn’t make you understand, better to read a section then look away and recall the key messages. People who learn slower can gain a deeper understanding of the subject. Also, it is important to do a few problems before you can claim mastery – reading alone will not help you learn.

Learning is an amazing skill, and Barbara implores us all not to just follow our passions, but to broaden them.

My Thoughts

Barbara is an amazing presenter, and I really wish I had seen her presentations while I was at uni. I am currently doing her MOOC (starting yesterday), and the first module is relatively similar to this talk (strongly recommended here https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/). While doing this I am questioning how much I have really ‘thought’ about something – I tend to be so task focussed that I don’t take a step back and activate diffuse thinking.

The pomodoro method is a new name to me, but is similar to other time management strategies: to break your time into modules with rests. I’ve heard 45 mins then 15mins break, as opposed to 25mins work, 5mins break. Personally I’m not sure the length of time matters (though I wouldn’t go longer than 45mins), so much as breaking your day into work and rest sessions.

Anyway, I can’t recommend this talk and the MOOC enough. I challenge everyone to think about how often they really think or learn something, as opposed to just ‘completing’ it.

Learning to Learn: You, Too, Can Rewire Your Brain

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The studio for what is arguably the world’s most successful online course is tucked into a corner of Barb and Phil Oakley’s basement, a converted TV room that smells faintly of cat urine. (At the end of every video session, the Oakleys pin up the green fabric that serves as the backdrop so Fluffy doesn’t ruin it.)

This is where they put together “Learning How to Learn,” taken by more than 1.8 million students from 200 countries, the most ever on Coursera. The course provides practical advice on tackling daunting subjects and on beating procrastination, and the lessons engagingly blend neuroscience and common sense.

Dr. Oakley, an engineering professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., created the class with Terrence Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and with the University of California, San Diego.

“It’s actually not rocket science,” said Dr. Oakley — but she’s careful where she says that these days. When she spoke at Harvard in 2015, she said, “the hackles went up”; she crossed her arms sternly by way of grim illustration.

This is home-brew, not Harvard. And it has worked. Spectacularly. The Oakleys never could have predicted their success. Many of the early sessions had to be trashed. “I looked like a deer in the headlights,” Dr. Oakley said. She would flub her lines and moan, “I just can’t do this.” Her husband would say, “Come on. We’re going to have lunch, and we’re going to come right back to this.” But he confessed to having had doubts, too. “We were in the basement, worrying, ‘Is anybody even going to look at this?’”

Dr. Oakley is not the only person teaching students how to use tools drawn from neuroscience to enhance learning. But her popularity is a testament to her skill at presenting the material, and also to the course’s message of hope. Many of her online students are 25 to 44 years old, likely to be facing career changes in an unforgiving economy and seeking better ways to climb new learning curves.

Dr. Oakley’s lessons are rich in metaphor, which she knows helps get complex ideas across. The practice is rooted in the theory of neural reuse, which states that metaphors use the same neural circuits in the brain as the underlying concept does, so the metaphor brings difficult concepts “more rapidly on board,” as she puts it.

She illustrates her concepts with goofy animations: There are surfing zombies, metabolic vampires and an “octopus of attention.” Hammy editing tricks may have Dr. Oakley moving out of the frame to the right and popping up on the left, or cringing away from an animated, disembodied head that she has put on the screen to discuss a property of the brain.

Sitting in the Oakleys’ comfortable living room, with its solid Mission furniture and mementos of their world travels, Dr. Oakley said she believes that just about anyone can train himself to learn. “Students may look at math, for example, and say, ‘I can’t figure this out — it must mean I’m really stupid!’ They don’t know how their brain works.”

Her own feelings of inadequacy give her empathy for students who feel hopeless. “I know the hiccups and the troubles people have when they’re trying to learn something.” After all, she was her own lab rat. “I rewired my brain,” she said, “and it wasn’t easy.”

As a youngster, she was not a diligent student. “I flunked my way through elementary, middle school and high school math and science,” she said. She joined the Army out of high school to help pay for college and received extensive training in Russian at the Defense Language Institute. Once out, she realized she would have a better career path with a technical degree (specifically, electrical engineering), and set out to tackle math and science, training herself to grind through technical subjects with many of the techniques of practice and repetition that she had used to let Russian vocabulary and declension soak in.

Along the way, she met Philip Oakley — in, of all places, Antarctica. It was 1983, and she was working as a radio operator at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. (She has also worked as a translator on a Russian trawler. She’s been around.) Mr. Oakley managed the garage at the station, keeping machinery working under some of the planet’s most punishing conditions.

She had noticed him largely because, unlike so many men at the lonely pole, he hadn’t made any moves on her. “You can be ugly as a toad out there and you are the most popular girl,” she said. She found him “comfortably confident.” After he left a party without even saying hello, she told a friend she’d like to get to know him better. The next day, he was waiting for her at breakfast with a big smile on his face. Three weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, he walked her over to the true South Pole and proposed at the stroke of midnight. A few weeks after that, they were “off the ice” in New Zealand and got married.

Dr. Oakley recounts her journey in both of her best-selling books: “A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if You Flunked Algebra)” and, out this past spring, “Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential.” The new book is about learning new skills, with a focus on career switchers. And yes, she has a MOOC for that, too.

Dr. Oakley is already planning her next book, another guide to learning how to learn but aimed at 10- to 13-year-olds. She wants to tell them, “Even if you are not a superstar learner, here’s how to see the great aspects of what you do have.” She would like to see learning clubs in school to help young people develop the skills they need. “We have chess clubs, we have art clubs,” she said. “We don’t have learning clubs. I just think that teaching kids how to learn is one of the greatest things we can possibly do.”

Learning How to Learn: Mastering the Science of Learning with Dr Barbara Oakley

by Olly Richards

Dr Barbara Oakley is a lifelong learning enthusiast with a colourful past.

After struggling with mathematics and science at school, she joined the army, so she could get paid to learn another language.

She studied Russian for years, even working on Soviet trawlers in the Bearing Sea for months at a time.

Later, she shrugged off her struggles with the sciences at school and retrained to become an engineer. She had such success in her new career, that she went on to become a professor of engineering, a position she now holds at Oakland University.

Fascinated by the learning process itself, Barb went on to create the most successful massive open online course (MOOC) of all time – Learning How To Learn – which has 2 million registered students.

In this conversation, we discuss Barb’s time learning Russian in the military, and how adults can learn how to learn.

While learning how to learn can help you get fluent in a new language, using the right method is also key.

My courses teach you through StoryLearning®, a fun and effective method that gets you fluent thanks to stories, not rules. Find out more and claim your free 7-day trial of the course of your choice.

A Little About Dr Barbara Oakley

“Learning another language helps you understand how the world works” – Barbara Oakley

How the Coursera Learning How to Learn Course Came to be

“Do you think anyone will watch these videos?” – Barbara Oakley, before creating the world’s largest online course

Here’s the outline of Barbara’s 4 week Learning How to Learn online course:

When Do We Begin to Take an Interest in Learning?

Do You Learn Languages the Same Way as the Sciences?

Barb’s Approach to Teaching

How Barb Learnt Russian

Learning Russian in the Military

“You know too much – it’s time to kill you!” – Dr. Barbara Oakley

Barb found the 18-month programme useful for a number of reasons:

Learning activities typically involved:

What Level of Russian Did Barb Reach in the Military Programme?

Beginner’s Russian was a 1-year programme, followed by Intermediate Russian, which was another 6-month class

However, most interactions in class were with other American students, some of whom were not really devoted to the language.

She got a very good foundation in Russian, but would still struggle in conversation with native speakers.

It wasn’t till she went to work on Russian ships that she really began to feel a sense of domination of the Russian language.

How Can Busy Adults Learn Languages?

Barb has recently begun learning Spanish.

Here are her reflections on beginning to learn a new language at this stage of her life:

“What does it mean to fall in love with a language? It’s the smell!” – Barbara Oakley

Barbara Oakley’s New Book – Mindshift

The book is for anyone who wants to learn more broadly than what they think they’re capable of.

There you’ll find out about things such as:

Learning How to Learn with Dr. Barbara Oakley

[This episode is from the Leading Learning archives. Most of it was originally published as Episode 104.]

When it comes to engaging learners and designing truly effective learning experiences, it may not be as complex—or costly—as you may think.

Dr. Barbara Oakley, professor, speaker, and author of Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Potential and Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying has proven this in her research and the wildly popular massive open online course (MOOC) she created, Learning How to Learn. With more than 2 million participants in the Coursera course thus far (yes, 2 million!), Barb’s work proves that learners appreciate practical methods and materials grounded in research about how the brain learns.

In this encore episode of the Leading Learning podcast, Celisa talks with Barb about why helping people learn about learning is so effective, the importance of creating better online materials, and tips for organizations who provide learning to create more value by focusing on these areas.

To tune in, just click below. To make sure you catch all of the future episodes, be sure to subscribe by RSS or on iTunes. And, if you like the podcast, be sure to give it a tweet!

Listen to the Show

Read the Show Notes

[00:20] – This is the second of two episodes in which we are going back to the archives to present some content that we feel is worth another listen. In this case, we are going to replay our conversation with Barbara Oakley, professor of engineering at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, author of multiple books, creator of a hugely popular massive open online course, or MOOC, on learning how to learn.

[00:49] – Our sponsor for this episode is Learning • Technology • Design™ (LTD), our annual virtual conference designed specifically for those who work in the business of lifelong learning, continuing education, and professional development. This will be our fourth time offering LTD, and we know from all the feedback we have received that past attendees have found it a unique and highly valuable experience. Registration is open at ltd.tagoras.com.

We are also offering the opportunity to be a Patron for the event, an option that may be of interest to companies that serve learning businesses. You can find out about that by going to ltd.tagoras.com/patron. And we would like to spotlight some of our current patrons including:

We have also highlighted these Patrons on the LTD Web site. Definitely do take the time to find out more about them because these companies have demonstrated their commitment to learning businesses by becoming Patrons, so we encourage you to support them.

[02:14] – A preview of what will be covered in this encore episode where Celisa interviewed Dr. Barbara Oakley, author, speaker, professor, and co-creator of the hugely popular MOOC: Learning How to Learn.

[03:47] – Introduction to Barb and some background information about herself and her interests.

Barb found that if you use innovative new methods with practical, well grounded in research, online materials, learners absolutely love them. It’s her mission now to help people learn about learning and to help them create better online materials.

Providing Value to SMEs

[08:25] – One of the trends Jeff and I here at Tagoras (and in Leading the Learning Revolution) have noted is the rise of the eSME—the entrepreneurial subject matter expert [and you’re clearly an eSME]. Because tools and technologies have gotten simpler and cheaper, it’s easier than ever for SMEs with an entrepreneurial bent to put out their own educational content—they don’t necessarily need associations for production purposes or even for marketing purposes. Do you have any advice for the organizations, like associations, that rely on experts? How can these organizations provide value to experts so they remain relevant?

Barb explains there are several ways to do this, particularly with online learning materials because it’s not necessarily obvious to the SME about how to get those materials out there to the public. At the same time, really good, well-made online materials can be an enhancement for whatever institution is using them.

Because of this, one of the most important things any institution can provide is a good, easy-to-use framework that a SME can put their materials online with—she uses Coursera which she’s been very happy with but notes some online providers are restrictive with who they will accommodate—other platforms include, for example, Santa Fe Institute and Udemy. Barb says there’s a growing need for simple platforms that institutions can use to easily house and accommodate online SMEs, which enhances both the expert and the institution affiliated with the expert.

Barb adds that another important idea is that any kind of presentation needs to be a two-way street, to enhance both the institution and the SME. If the institution develops their own basic courseware that the expert can put their materials on, it serves as a way to help enhance that institution. Revenues that come in from online materials can go more directly to the institution instead of some of the cut going to whatever other provider you may be going through—and they can be substantial.

Helping Adult Learners Become Better Learners

[13:22] – If you think about organizations that provide education and learning, as do most professional and trade associations, how do you think they can help the adult learners they serve become better learners? What might that look at the context of an online course or a multi-day conference, for example?

One of the big mistakes we make with relation to learning is that we overlook the most obviously important things to help learners.

For example, Barb recommends a good thing for institutions to do is to introduce learners to basic ideas about learning. Most people go through 12-16 years of educational institutions and they never get a course on how to learn effectively. Even in conferences, Barb says you can have a keynote of sorts that gives a common way of talking about important aspects of learning. All of this is why the MOOC, Learning How to Learn is so popular.

Watch Barb’s TED Talk on Learning How to Learn

[17:59] – A further discussion about why learning how to learn is so important including that it’s particularly important because everything is changing so rapidly now with artificial intelligence. The ability to be quick on your feet with learning new ideas has never been more important. And the focus needs to be on smart learning—not just the typical old-fashioned academic approach—but practical insight based on neuroscience to leverage in order to learn more quickly.

Mindshift

[19:53] – You define mindshift as “a deep change in life that occurs thanks to learning”. What led you to focus on deep changes that happen thanks to learning, with an emphasis on career changes that can happen in life?

Barb recognizes one of the most important trends in modern society today is the importance and value of having some sort of technical expertise or insight, which can be of real value no matter what career you choose. We are in a period of transition and many individuals have grown up under the idea of following your passion, and those tend to develop around what you’re good at—this can end up giving you something that has a limited appeal in the job market. Because of this, many people are trying to retrain themselves (or they want to), but they aren’t sure if they can do it.

Her books, Mindshift and A Mind For Numbers as well as the MOOC, Learning How to Learn, are basically to help people realize that not only can they make big changes and learn something they thought they could never learn, but they also get the practical insight in how to do it. People like the practical aspect but they are also smart and enjoy learning the neuroscience behind what they’re doing.

[24:28] – One of the themes in Mindshift is the idea that past knowledge and experience often—maybe even always—wind up being helpful in our present, even if her past and her present are wildly different. Would you talk a little bit about how the past can be leveraged to support change rather than confining us to continuing the same path that we’ve started down?

Barb recalls how somebody once told her she’d be surprised that whatever she might learn about will come in handy one day—and she has been struck over the decades as to how often this has come true. She emphasizes, if you learn something well, there’s all sorts of ways it can help you in another area. This is why it’s important to remain open and flexible in your learning—if not, it’s harder for you to get creative in what you’re looking at and you can get stuck in functional fixedness, which means you get used to one way of looking at things.

A good way to prevent this from happening is to take a little bit of time to start learning something completely different. This will help build flexibility in your thinking and through metaphor, you can bring ideas from this other area into your fundamental area and be more creative. This relates to a theory called neural reuse theory which is once you create a certain sort of pattern in your brain involving one skill, you can more easily transfer that pattern and use it in a completely different area.

[30:33] – You end the book Mindshift with a suggestion—a challenge that we readers don’t just settle for making our own mindshift—which would be a weighty enough accomplishment—but that we also try to share the “beauty and joy of learning” with others. I’m thinking again of the associations that are focused on learning, where education and professional development are a key part of the value they offer, are central to the mission and vision of the organization.

What are your thoughts about how such organizations might go about sharing and instilling this idea of learning and mindshifts as joyful, beautiful things in those they serve?

Barb shares that before she did her MOOC, she had no previous experience with video or photography so when it came to doing the videos for the MOOC, she did almost all of the editing herself. She points out that editing is a beautiful, creative process that adds so much to the materials and it’s easy for institutions to forget how beautiful and creative the materials they’re putting forth for their learners can be—it’s truly an artistic process so creating online materials that have a heart and aren’t just thrown out there is key.

[34:16] – What’s going on in learning these days that most excites you? And, perhaps, related to that, what topic or phenomenon do you want to learn more about?

Barb talks about the big project she’s working on now which is related to the fact that there aren’t really any good materials out there currently which focus on how to learn effectively. Most of the ideas she shares about how to learn effectively are not only powerful, but they’re also easy to understand, even for kids. If you teach kids about how to learn effectively when they’re young, it can help them in so many ways. Barb’s new book for kids has very simple, yet impactful ideas, called Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens. Note this will also come with a parent-teacher workbook on how to use the materials.

She also teaches around the world about how to do truly effective online learning that doesn’t just make people continually drag their attention back to the screen, but rather their attention is actually riveted on the screen because it’s so intriguing. Barb is passionate about sharing information about how to create online materials that help do that and knowing what we know about neuroscience and applying that can help make superb online materials.

[38:17] – What is one of the most powerful learning experiences you’ve been involved in, as an adult, since finishing your formal education?

Barb shares that it’s been around learning how to make online materials. She talks about a professor she had about 25 years ago (who was not very good) who inadvertently got her to start watching television. She explains how that helped build skills in her subconscious about how to make good video edited materials.

[40:56] – How to learn more about Barb and her work:

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