Friday Four-September 19, 2016

Learning, Laptop Note taking, Feedback, and being the only one in the room

What Can People Do to Get Better at Learning?

The Atlantic

At this year’s Aspen Ideas Festival, we asked a group of professors, engineers, and journalists how to absorb information effectively and move towards creativity. “What we need to work on is getting comfortable with struggle in learning,” says the journalist Amanda Ripley. “With the discomfort that comes from not knowing something.” Other panelists include Josh Kaufman, Susan Greenfield, Anne Libera, Tim Brown, and Jo Boaler.

Thanks to Emily Pressman for this find.

Your Nostalgia Isn’t Helping Me Learn

Michael Oman-Reagan

Rethinking recent “common sense” claims about technology as distraction in the classroom.

I’d suggest that if you have good note taking skills, you can take good notes in any format. If you are taught to discern what matters in a lecture or article, you can learn to take useful notes about anything in any format. This problem the article mentions — i.e., students acting as stenographers — is an issue of learning to learn and think critically. Yes, these are skills that students need. That they don’t have them certainly isn’t the fault of laptops. In fact, we should be grateful that we can see they don’t have these skills by seeing how they are (mis)using the laptops.

Get Better at Receiving Feedback

Harvard Business Review

A great short video about how we can all improve when it comes to receiving feedback.

On Wyatt Cenac, ‘Key & Peele,’ And Being The Only One In The Room

Gene Demby, NPR Code Switch

There’s evidence that when people feel like they’re The Only One in a group, even a group that professes to care about diversity in its ranks, it actually gets in the way of everything said diversity was supposed to achieve in the first place.