That’s how I want to learn. Don’t give me a book; I don’t want a lecture, and I don’t want a list of topics to memorize. Give me ample reason to memorize them and a sandbox where I can safely play. Test me when I least expect it, shock me with the unknown, but make sure you’ve given me enough understanding and practice with my tools that I have a high chance of handling the unexpected.

But that’s not to say that gamification doesn’t work. Quite the opposite, in fact. The problem is that it was defined wrongly, not that it doesn’t work. So what is gamification then? That’s easy. Gamification is actually this; adding non-game elements to games. There you go. That’s how you do it. 

Have fun and make games, or hack your homework using Ruby!
Just tell your parents or teachers you're learning Ruby programming... ;)
Free and works on any computer.

And so I became Pac fan. I began increasing my reading because he was an avid reader. I considered this the source of his power. I began reading periodicals every day, even if I was tired and had to reach for the dictionary for every other word. I didn’t care though, I knew it would help me in the long run. I started off with The Times for about two months and realised it was too right wing for me and so turned to The Guardian. After a while I wanted a completely different opinion so went to The Independent. I began asking my teachers about books that they hadn’t heard of, and thought I was taking the pee out of them. I didn’t care though. I wanted to aspire to that level of articulation and passion that Tupac seemed to deliver in his songs. Ok, so after about a year I came to realise that he had other talents such as rapping, which I’ll never posses, but it did not matter. I was hooked on knowledge, and every time I listened to one of his tracks he reminded me that I should be reading, learning and debating where possible.

Project Euler, named for the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, is popular (more than 150,000 users have submitted 2,630,835 solutions) precisely because Colin Hughes — and later, a team of eight or nine hand-picked helpers — crafted problems that lots of people get the itch to solve

As a general rule, avoid Foo in 24 hours books – they are a waste of your money and time. They are usually awfully written, and a sketchy treatment makes most of topics that you are interested in a lot MORE difficult to learn. Don't concentrate on any specific frameworks or languages – it's perfectly OK to learn these on the go (if you work as a programmer your job will simply force you to do it). Learn the science.

If you’re interested in learning something new, this article is for you.  Broken down by subject and/or category, here are several top-notch self-education resources I have bookmarked online over the past few years.

Assignments are incomplete until one is competent. If it’s not good enough, change it. If you don’t understand the premise fully, redo it. Failing and moving on isn’t an option because every bit is important.

Whisper it, but the periodic table does not exist even in the way that the Tube map exists, representing the actual position of the stations on the ground. But the table traps the elements it represents in a kind of prison and stops us seeing them for themselves.

At readings of my new book, Periodic Tales, parents have come up to me afterwards and told me their child is having “to do the periodic table”, and how can they help?

Here’s how: get them thinking about the individual elements instead. After all, the periodic table is only a checklist of what is truly elemental. Mendeleev’s table shows how the properties of each are similar, but this tends to obscure their uniqueness. What is more, each element is linked to our lives in unique and often unexpected ways. We know them through our human culture, how they have been woven into our objects and stories, not by entering the privileged space of a laboratory.

The story of the Arctic is about people and place. Explore this region and how it is changing with the help of the people who live and work there. Start by meeting Aaju, an Inuk lawyer. Listen to her greeting in the Inuit language, Innuktitut. Then journey across the top of the world with the help of your Arctic guides below, and discover more about this remote, cold, challenging and amazing wilderness!

Take a journey through this site to discover Antarctica for yourself. Each section features activities, images, video clips and fact sheets, to help you learn about this distant, frozen wilderness.

With Ruby, and the gosu gem you can do it. It is fairly easy to get going. And if you follow our screencasts, you can have a game going in minutes!

The rare case of a decent how-to:<br />
<br />
"I shouldn’t be able to read most of the books on my shelf. I never took a single classical history class and I cheated through most of Economics 001. Still, the loci of my library are Greek History and Applied Economics. And though they often are beyond me educationally, I’m able to comprehend them because of some equalizing tricks. Reading to lead or learn requires that you treat your brain like the muscle that it is–lifting the subjects with the most tension and weight. For me, that means pushing ahead into subjects you’re not familiar with and wresting with them until you can–shying away from the “easy read.”<br />
"This is how I break down a new book."

I wrote this article about what a four-year-old should know many years ago but it continues to be the most popular page on the Magical Childhood site.  I don’t think a week has passed in the past eight or so years when I have not received a letter from a parent, grandparent or teacher about it.  Parents and principals especially have said they wish more parents realized these things.

It’s the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie. In the following pages, you’ll find our updated core curriculum, which fills in the gaps of your 20th-century education with the tools you need now. Call it the neoliberal arts: higher learning for highly evolved humans.

This is a web site (still under construction) for young students - and anyone else - who are (like me) thrilled by the challenges posed by real science, and who are - like me - determined to use their brains to discover new things about the physical world that we are living in. In short, it is for all those who decided to study theoretical physics, in their own time.

In this day and age, why would I do a PhD?Where is the wisdom and philosophy in today's Doctorate of Philosophy? What defense might the status have against commodified certification, credential inflation, and otherwise collaborative and crowd sourced knowledge? How might an autodidact approach a PhD with integrity? Would they?These are open questions looking for the heart and meaning of a PhD in today's context. Leigh will explain his approach to developing in-depth knowledge, and invite challenges, suggestions and responses to it...

As odd as it sounds, “edgy” these days seems to mean creating characters for kids that are unabashedly smart. Phineas and Ferb put their energy into building things—a lot of highly imaginative and complicated projects, actually—like their own backyard beach or a teleportation device that sends people to Mars. Phineas and Ferb’s world is wild and inventive, more like a Boing Boing post than a Saturday morning cartoon. In other words, they’re geeks. They just don’t know the word for it yet.

We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience.

Some of these books will definitely help us to evolve our coding skills and thought processes for developing better solutions. We will do our best to keep updating this list, hope you find this list useful, here we go.

The finding undermines the common assumption that intensive immersion is the best way to really master a particular genre, or type of creative work, said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College and the lead author of the study. “What seems to be happening in this case is that the brain is picking up deeper patterns when seeing assortments of paintings; it’s picking up what’s similar and what’s different about them,” often subconsciously.

I remember clearly the day I first found out that you could see page view statistics for Wikipedia articles. I came into class and asked the students if they had any idea how many people were reading their work. Instead of the usual assignment of an exam or term paper read by exactly one person, their professor, they were now writing for a real public. 
They were shocked to find out (for example), that the Gabriel García Márquez article that they were rewriting was read by something like 1,500 people a day: 62,000 a month, or close to three-quarters of a million people a year. That really gave them a sense that what they were doing mattered in some way.

His idea goes like this: Assign each student a single, specific topic, which he or she will study over and over again, from every possible angle, from early elementary school through high school. Egan, a professor of education at Canada's Simon Fraser University, hopes that by the time such students finish high school, they will be world-class experts on their topics - as well as more effective citizens and better people.

"Even now (I’m twenty-four), people ask me what my days were like, as an unschooler. What did I do? How did I learn? And the truth is—I’m not exactly sure. Because they were almost never the same. There were some textbooks along the way. Maybe two. I was supposed to complete a certain amount of lessons a week from them. I did a lot of them on Fridays, when I remembered. I remember reading all the time. And writing all the time. And painting. And playing music. I did these things because I loved them. I loved them in a way that I sometimes think people have forgotten they can be loved by children and young adults. Because these activities weren’t school, or work, or homework, or a requirement. They were me. And when you love something enough to do it constantly, it will always lead to other things, and you will always get better at it. It sounds so simple. People want more of an answer…"

Easily incorporate computational thinking into your curriculum with these classroom-ready lessons, examples, and programs. For more resources, including discussion forums and news, visit our ECT Discussion Forums.

“I’m taking a month off of work to learn everything I can about the brain." (This is a great post.) http://bit.ly/cCvnpl

I’m feeling somewhat vindicated by the NYT opinion piece “End the University as We Know It” — a call for restructuring the old, creeky ways of the graduate university. The trajectory from graduate school to teaching positions is serpentine, at best. Specialization creates smaller and smaller communities of practice who talk to all seven or twenty or fifty of the other specialists. Ways of knowing become increasingly limited, confined to these small communites. Interdisciplinarity — worthwhile in spirit, certainly — often means getting some disciplines together in a room, rather than transcending the notion of the discipline all together, something that would allow more focus on problems from the top down, rather than as sub-problems of, say, economics or history or whatever.

Only Collect; that is to say, collect everything, indiscriminately. You’re five years old. Don’t presume too much to know what’s important and what isn’t. Photocopy journal articles, photograph archives; create bibliographies, buy books; make notes on every article or book you read, even if it’s just one line saying “Never read this again”; collect newspaper clippings and email them to yourself; collect quotes; save your ideas for future papers, future projects, future conferences, even if they seem wildly implausible now. Hoarding must become instinctual, it must be an uncontrollable, primal urge. And the higher, civilizing impulse that kicks in after the fact is organization, or librarianship. You must keep tabs on everything you collect, somehow; a system must be had, and the system must be idiot-proof. That is to say, you should be able to look back on it six months for now and not be completely stymied as to why you’ve organized things that way.

RT @rob_schmitt: How do I learn to program? http://t.co/1rkOOce via @37signals

Fry's turning of the tables is done with courtesy and logic, and again makes you think. The only true sin in Fry's world is incuriosity. He doesn't despise people who don't know anything, but he despises, truly despises, the fact that they don't want to know anything, ever.

The following links will take you to some sample linguistics puzzles. These puzzles are copyrighted by the University of Oregon Department of Linguistics, but may be copied or printed for personal or classroom use.

Online degrees and video courses from leading universities.

@rogre I can't overstate just how fantastic this post is: http://bit.ly/9r0tQa I've been reading each link over last few days. Thank you.

The Accidental News Explorer is a new type of news app that celebrates chance encounters and serendipity. Start by searching for a subject. Once you've browsed the suggested articles taken from hundreds of news sources, tap the “related topics” button to discover connected topics, which in turn lead to more articles. Each article leads to new things; the more curious you are, the longer your journey will be. What will you discover?

Welcome to HTML Dog, the web designer's resource for everything HTML and CSS, the most common technologies used in making web pages.

Coping with the troubling tradeoff between depth of what we know and how fast we retrieve it may require something like peripheral intellectual vision

The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine. When little Chinese kids go through the "terrible twos", it's Chinese they use to drive their parents crazy, and in a few years the same kids are actually using those impossibly complicated Chinese characters to scribble love notes and shopping lists. So what do I mean by "hard"?

Psychologist Anders Ericsson and other researchers in the field of ‘expertise studies’ have, in recent years, introduced a plethora of new information about how people develop advanced skills that is beginning to change our view of human potential and its limits. This is an opportunity to move the public conversation beyond clichés such as innate talent, giftedness and nature versus nurture, instead moving towards a more nuanced discussion of how human skills actually develop, ultimately helping people to maximise their potential.

Reading mathematics too quickly results in frustration.  A half hour of concentration in a novel might net the average reader 20-60 pages with full comprehension, depending on the novel and the experience of the reader.  The same half hour in a math article buys you 0-10 lines depending on the article and how experienced you are at reading mathematics. There is no substitute for work and time.  You can speed up your math reading skill by practicing, but be careful.  Like any skill, trying too much too fast can set you back and kill your motivation.  Imagine trying to do an hour of high-energy aerobics if you have not worked out in two years.  You may make it through the first class, but you are not likely to come back.  The frustration from seeing the experienced class members effortlessly do twice as much as you, while you moan the whole next day from soreness, is too much to take.

In this clearly written summary of the field, Dehaene is primarily interested in two separate mysteries. The first mystery is how the individual human brain learns to read. What changes take place inside our head between kindergarten and second grade, when most of us start to take literacy for granted? How do we go from sounding out syllables, carefully parsing the phonetics of each word, to becoming fluent readers? And how does this incredibly complicated act become automatic, so that evn ths sntnce cn b quikly undrstd?

“What’s the one thing I need to know?” she asked.

I made her wait, of course, so that I could explain the premise of the book. It turns out the vast majority in the United States and other nations believe that the way to get ahead is to focus on your weaknesses and try to fix them. That’s wrong, Buckingham says.

This site is dedicated to informing people about words that are not verbs, even though people misuse them that way.

"A 2007 scholarly review of hypertext experiments concluded that jumping between digital documents impedes understanding. And if links are bad for concentration and comprehension, it shouldn’t be surprising that more recent research suggests that links surrounded by images, videos, and advertisements could be even worse."

"We need to keep learning about Everything, not just about the technical skills common to our own field." http://bit.ly/9ytGXq #learning

Reference material for beginning iPhone OS development.

Tom Henderson is the self-described 'mathpunk'. He argues that the world is stacked against the general public's lack of mathematical understanding. He tries to get students interested in maths and foster real understanding and awareness rather than memorisation of formulae: 'the steps'.

He discusses mathematics in the context of things that humans are likely to be interested in: social conflict, sex and beauty.

Doug Lemov strives to improve the education of children in the US by using data-driven programs to identify outstanding teachers. Will incentives such as substantial financial benefits help attract and retain the most talented individuals?

He finds that many teachers understand 2 of the main pillars of their career: their main subject(s) themselves, and 'foundations', the history and philosophy of educations. What is often missing is 'methods'; literally, how to teach.

Can a series of 49 techniques ('What To Do') help?

"Learning and using TRIZ can be very rewarding. While no two people are exactly alike in their motivation to learn and practice TRIZ, there are some immediate benefits that come with increased proficiency. One of the primary benefits is confidence to tackle difficult inventive problems and to raise the bar on products and services."

"A realization has been dawning on me as of late, one that I’ve always known, but that is easy to forget, easy to misplace, easy to neglect. The best way to learn anything is to do it, to struggle through, to forge on, to fight and gnash teeth and curse at. There is no knowledge as highly regarded as that which you have to work for."

"This tale of two boys, and of the millions of kids just like them, embodies the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter. Put concretely, if Mr. Taylor’s student continued to learn at the same level for a few more years, his test scores would be no different from those of his more affluent peers in Northwest D.C. And if these two boys were to keep their respective teachers for three years, their lives would likely diverge forever. By high school, the compounded effects of the strong teacher—or the weak one—would become too great."

"With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 Months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts."

"I’m an avid reader, a bookworm, a bibliomane, call it what you will. I’m seldom caught without a book in my bag. I’ve just finished several non-fiction which have been gathering dust on my shelves and before I launch into a few reviews I thought I’d share my top 7 tips for reading, in particular non-fiction (with a major hat-tip to Ben for writing about this very topic back in March 2007 and also to Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader which in itself is fiction but expresses the joy and wonder that comes from reading in a way I can never hope to capture here)."

"The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials. This is the LearningSpace, where you'll find hundreds of free study units, each with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others."

"For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds."

"If you’re like me, there are times when you get so excited about learning something new that you spend a day or two on it non-stop, only to get tired of it and move on to something else. [...] When trying to develop a new skill, the important thing isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it."

"You've always wanted to learn how to build software yourself—or just whip up an occasional script—but never knew where to start. Luckily, the web is full of free resources that can turn you into a programmer in no time."

"The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition postulates that when individuals acquire a skill through external instruction, they normally pass through five stages. This model, first proposed by Stuart Dreyfus and Hubert Dreyfus in 1980 proposes that the five stages of skill acquisition are: Novice, Advanced beginner, Competent, Proficient and Expert."

"A wandering mind can do important work, scientists are learning - and may even be essential."

"Learning on Sesame Street, as in school, means learning Right Answers, and as in school, Right Answers come from grown-ups. We see children figuring things out. As in school, we hear children responding, without much animation or imagination, to leading questions put by adults. But we rarely see them figuring things out; in fact, we rarely see children doing anything."

"In November, I posted about an alternative MBA program that I was going to launch. Unaccredited, residential, free and six months long. A new way to learn about a new way of doing business. We’re almost done, and it has exceeded every expectation I had for it, and I think there are some broader lessons worth sharing."