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Current:
Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston
Beginning CakePHP, David Golding

Past:
Outliers, Malcom Gladwell
The Rock Rats, Greg Bear
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fifth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois
The MouseDriver Chronicles, John Lusk, Kyle Harrison
The Greatest Salesman in the World, Og Mandino
The Breakthrough: politics of race in the age of Obama, Gwen Ifill

I don’t consider myself a teacher, although I do teach a class this semester. However, I am very interested in methods of education. I believe we are in a golden age of educational methods, having languished in a system for the past 30 years that was designed for the industrial revolution.

One of the biggest problems in teaching is keeping students engaged. I found an amazing teaching method called Power Teaching linked to over at EduFire.

You can watch this method in use in a reading lesson in grade school, playing the Crazy Professor reading game. I find this the most fascinating because reading exercises are genuinely dull and I think a lot of kids are very turned off by reading. This shows that you can make reading exciting and engaging.

Meet Chris Biffle, one of the co-founders of the Power Teaching method. His method started from trying to have a more effective classroom management method, since teachers get very frustrated with their students, and students are unhappy with their classes.

What are the key tenants? Well, what I find most interesting are:

1. Micro-learning: Information is delivered in small bites. This is more suited towards our current age of information overload and short attention spans.

2. Peer-teaching: Every lesson involves reviewing and teaching your neighbor what it is you just learned.

3. Engagement: Students are having fun and intensely focused on the activities of the class. I can tell that not all of it is fun, but it is still very engaging. It reminds me a lot of the way new recruits are trained in the military. When the teacher makes a statement, the students immediately respond because they are conditioned to be. But it isn’t a mindless response. It keeps the student’s attention focused.

Karl Kapp started an interesting discussion on what exactly the benefits of immersive learning are. He called it learning in 3D worlds. I called it situated learning but I got this term from my background in AI and robotics.

Interestingly, his list of benefits are almost exactly the conclusions I made on my own. The one benefit he was missing I mentioned in the comments is that immersive worlds allow users to communicate with each other non-verbally in ways they couldn’t do otherwise online. In particular, body language and expressions which are lost when only interacting with text, voice, or webcams.

Another commenter named Gaby, said in her comment that users have been known to unconsciously develop subtle new methods of social behavior within the virtual worlds they live in. I think that’s fascinating and it kind of confirms my intuition.

This tells me that there is definitely potential for developing high impact learning environments if we understand the rules of human behavior and learn to exploit them.

My particular interest is language learning and has been the project I’ve been working on for the past 2 years. Hopefully I’ll be able to show off what I’ve been working on soon enough

Update: Gaby finally posted in her blog about this subject. I didn’t see it earlier. She adds her two contributions of the water cooler effect, people bantering with each other in the interstitial moments of training, and the fun factor, that being people are more engaged.

I’ve found the latter to be a double-edged generational sword. Particularly in East Asia, education is considered hard work. If something is fun, it is not taken seriously. Of course, this probably doesn’t apply as much to the young who are more open to different approaches.

However, something can be engaging, but not necessarily perceived as fun. That’s a little bit of psychological kung-fu that you need to get good at if you’re targeting these more conservative people.

Jacob

So you want to start a blog?

Here is a checklist:

1. Choose a blog software or provider. There’s no reason you should do anything complicated. Just go to either TypePad, WordPress, or Blogger. Register, pick a name for your blog, and you’re ready to go! I use WordPress myself, coming from Blogger. However, TypePad looks promising as well.

2. Decide what you’re going to talk about. According to Seth Godin’s free Ebook on blogs, there are 3 types of blogs. The boss blog, the cat blog, and the viral blog.

The boss blog is for talking shop. That is, talking about your work with a group of similarly inclined people. The details are specifically related to your work and the day-to-day challenges you encounter.

The cat blog is for talking about your personal life. This is like having a personal diary, and there are no shortage of these on the internet. These would probably be of most interest to your friends and family.

Finally, the viral blog is a blog about ideas. If you want to take the lead on some new concept or start a micro-revolution, this is what you call a viral blog.

I’m trying to make the latter type of blog.

3. Write articles on a regular basis. Choose how often you plan to blog and try to keep with that schedule. Once a week is a good conservative schedule that you can probably start with. Once you start to get the hang of it, blogging may come more naturally to you and you may find yourself posting more frequently.

4. Plan a blog marketing campaign. In order for people to know how to find you, you need to interact with the community you want to be involved in. You also need to know all the modern tools people use in the blogosphere such as commenting, trackbacks, tags, etc. I am still learning these tools and I am still searching for the community I want to join, so I’ll post more when I learn more.

Hopefully this is good to get you started, so please let me know if this was helpful.

So this blog has been a kind of learning experience for me. I did a blog once before about 6 years ago, describing the adventures I had in South Korea. But there, I was just talking to myself and a handful of people that I knew.

But the blogosphere has changed momentously since then. Everything is networked. We have trackbacks, pingbacks, blog networks, tags, categories, satellite marketing, guest blogging, article marketing, etc. All these are ways to get yourself out there so the people who are interested in what you have to say can find you.

Of course, until that happens, you’re just talking to yourself like I am.

So, when you start a blog, talking to yourself is the order of the day. I personally have tried to use the blog as a scratch paper for my thinking. The best way to learn something is to teach it to others. So that’s what these blog posts are all about.

Hopefully some will find it helpful.

I’ve been using a website called ODesk to hire a number of people to do different things. It is quite an amazing site. You can find people to do web development, graphic design, online research, writing, or even find someone to be a personal assistant.

Of course, the catch is that all of this stuff is done remotely. So, nothing that requires a geographical presence can be done through this website. Plus, you are required to interact with that person using any number of communication tools such as the phone, video-conferencing, email, and text chat.

Communication is key. If you find that it is difficult to communicate with the person you want to hire, don’t even bother. No matter how talented they are, if you can’t communicate your needs, you’re going to get bad service, and you may even have personal conflict.

In my first experience with ODesk, I hired a graphic artist to put together a custom Christmas card. I used it as an experiment in outsourcing. It was minimal risk because it was a small project and I chose a fixed cost bid. The results were great and I had a stand-out Christmas card this year.

It went so well, I began using it for a side project I’ve been working on. So far, I’ve hired a graphic designer and 3 developers from such locations as Belarus, India, and Austria.

Of course, you’re going to find yourself in the role of a manager. This is something new to me, and I’ve developed my own technique for this type of remote management.

1. Have general knowledge of the qualities and semantics of the area you want to hire in.

So for instance, when I hired a designer, I first bought a book on design and read on what makes good design. In the applications, I looked for people who actually knew the principles of design and separated them from the people who just have good Photoshop skills.

For the developers, it helped that I’m a technical person, so I could study up a bit on the technologies I was looking to work on.

2. Look for passionate people.

In my application browsing and in my interviews, I tried to find people who were passionate and enthusiastic about the work I wanted them to do. Passionate people do better work, because they’re doing what they love.

3. Look for people who specialize in your specific task.

A good way to separate the passionate from the people who are just telling you what you want to hear is to only look at people who specialize in the exact kind of job you’re looking for. If you try and hire a person who is an “expert” in 20 different things, it is likely you’ll get a substandard performance because they’re not really an expert.

4. Deal directly with workers, not managers

This is my personal preference. I’m not sure if this is right for everyone. I feel I need to be able to speak with the worker directly so we’re on the same page. If I deal with an intermediary, there’s a good chance that information will be lost and it will take more time and money to get the result I’m looking for.

Of course, this only works for small manageable projects.

5. Good communication, or no deal.

Like I said above, if you don’t have a good rapport with the freelancer, it’s not worth your time and money. There’s plenty more options.

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I’m sure there’s more lessons. I’ll add them when I think of them.

Jacob Everist

I don’t really like social networks. I don’t like spending time on a site watching what other people are writing on their Wall or all the Pokes you get and application invites. Of course, I’m mainly talking about Facebook here, but I guess I was born about 10 years early to thrive in this type of environment.

There’s another social network that interests me called LinkedIn, that I’ve been using for some time, but again, I don’t really understand how to use it.

LinkedIn is essentially a “professional” social networking website. It’s been unclear to how I can use this system and make it work for me. Obviously it works for a lot of people already.

According to Tony Karrer, LinkedIn is a great tool for finding expertise in a subject you need answers to or need to hire someone for. Of course, the quality of your response is entirely dependent on how well you build your network.

I don’t really use LinkedIn for much other than linking to people. I haven’t really seen any value from it yet, but my guess was that I wasn’t really using it the way it’s supposed to be used. Thus, my interest in trying learn more about how people are using the site.

My link count is already up to 153 (wow how did that happen?). I’ll post more here when I learn more about leveraging your LinkedIn network.

Link to me if you’d like!

Jacob

I’ve stumbled upon a community of blogs that focus on something they call “e-learning”.

According to wikipedia, E-Learning is something where the medium of instruction is computer technology. This may or may not include human interaction, and is often used in the context of software product tutorials. Also, it seems that a lot of work in this field is now being directed towards lots of diverse subject matter.

So can we use computer-mediation to make learning seamless and fun? Certainly yes, but e-learning is just a tool, not a solution. Just like Powerpoint is a tool, not a presentation. Tools are often used incorrectly and lead to ineffective solutions. But over time, we learn how to use these new tools and we come up with a set of best practices.

I must confess that I’m working on something right now that can be classified as e-learning. However, I didn’t start out from the premise that a computer was the solution in search of a problem. I found a problem, an education niche that needed to be addressed, and determined that computers were probably the best solution in this case.

I still need to figure out how to use the tool correctly, though.

In my previous post, I said that learning should be at least easy, good to be seamless, and at best be fun. I now think I was wrong.

Easy implies that it requires no effort. In fact, this is not how learning is accomplished. All learning requires effort. If something is easy, you are not really stressing your mind and nothing is being learned.

This is not the same as seamless though. Seamless means that you don’t really notice that you are exerting yourself. This is a great place to be in because it means you are totally engrossed in your activity.

Fun is the remedy I envision to make people want to learn. That is, the incentive is already there and there’s no need to coerce the student. Fun could mean that it is entertaining, interesting, or satisfying. But like I said, there are cultural and psychological problems accepting education that is fun.

In my recent studies, I have been focusing on games as a learning tool. A simple example of a learning game was discussed by Rupa on her post about applying instructional theories on game-based learning.

The particular game is about physics and simple machines. I can’t find a link to it, but I’ll update if I do. Basically, there’s a lot of art work, points to be scored if you can identify things and make more complicated systems work. Rupa Rajagopalan identifies a number of principles of instruction called Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction. These principles identify key features that a lesson should have.

One of the things that concerns me and that I have been dealing with for some time is that the life of an educational game is very short. After you’ve gone through the game once, you’ve learned what you needed to know and there is no more value playing it again. Some lessons may require repetition, but that’s not the point.

The point is that you need to build this entire game to teach a very narrow topic. The resources required to put something like this together is quite expensive and time-consuming. So the question is, how do you build a comprehensive curriculum for a broad subject in a cost-effective way?

There needs to be a process, a careful recycling of artwork and widgets, and a team with a division of duties. This is something that I need to do, and I need to figure out how best to put it together.