1,961 karma · joined August 17, 2010
I personally just use Google Tasks for deadlines, Google Keep for shopping lists, etc., and a private Google Doc for notes (like a private blog/journal). And of course there are kanban board tools like Trello for collaborative productivity/projects.
But he's done and continues to do a lot of good work. He helped found the Learning Sciences (an offshoot of cognitive science, AI, psychology, etc.) in the late 80s and early 90s. He continued and continues to do work in education, including founding experiential schools and writing books on education: http://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywor...
The article mentioned radical enactivism from Anthony Chemero. Another person who's written a lot from this perspective is Dan Hutto: https://uow.academia.edu/DanielDHutto
Here for example is an article describing "Remembering without Stored Contents" https://www.academia.edu/6799100/Remembering_without_Stored_...
and he has a book: Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content. First chapter: https://www.academia.edu/1163887/Radicalizing_Enactivism_Bas...
But for a more general, less radical background on this topic, see also work by Rafael Nunez and others: http://www.cogsci.ucsd.edu/~nunez/web/publications.html
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience http://www.amazon.com/Embodied-Mind-Cognitive-Science-Experi...
George Lakoff & Rafael Nunez: Where Mathematics Come From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being http://www.amazon.com/Where-Mathematics-Come-Embodied-Brings...
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson: Philosophy in the Flesh http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-We...
Mark Johnson: The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason http://www.amazon.com/Body-Mind-Bodily-Meaning-Imagination/d...
And there are now around 30-40 books on this topic, at least.
Personally, I would start with code.org or Scratch. If you have an ipad, there is Hopscotch. Here is a huge list of more tools to teach young kids programming: http://bit.ly/ortonacode
But if you start with basic or python, you'll be teaching them that coding is basically similar to solving boring puzzles - not of any real use, and not as fun as videogames.
Start instead with something they would find motivating or useful, not you. Making a game, or creating a useful little app/tool that solves some problem they think is important, etc.
The way I've been doing it (I'm no expert), is after pedaling normally for a minute or two, I turn up the resistance and pedal all out for 30 seconds or so, then turn the resistance back down and pedal normally for a few minutes until my heart settles back down, then repeat a few times or so. I go more by distance than time. I try to pedal at least a mile, with high intensity bursts of at least a tenth of a mile or more. It will make you sweat and heart race if you are really going all out.
And all dentists, at one point, were non-dentists.
That's all I said about growth mindset in my comment. For a good explanation of growth mindset, I usually show faculty and college students this video as a start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN34FNbOKXc
Because it makes math solely about memorization and doesn't involve number sense (discussed in the original article, too), and causes anxiety for those students who struggle to shallowly memorize the table. See also work on 'growth mindset' vs. 'fixed mindset'. When or if students make mistakes at memorizing, they might simply give up and think they just can't do math.
I don't think it's an either/or - you can introduce the tables, but do so in funner or more subtle ways. As an example of the latter, I was in a combined 2nd & 3rd grade class. We weren't supposed to learn multiplication until 3rd grade. There was a huge times table on one of the walls that I'd walk by several times a day all year in 2nd grade. Gradually I'd get curious about the patterns I saw in the table. I never 'memorized' it (until 3rd grade when we had to), but I felt like I had begun to understand it and how it 'worked' after repeated exposure to it.
But I like the idea of the original author to make games about it. Another idea is to have students create their own tables.
Here is some more up to date research and information on his theories:
This recent special issue of Intelligence critiques Ericsson's work: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01602896/45
The 10,000 hour rule has been pretty refuted in my opinion. There are so many exceptions to the rule that it's not really a valid rule.
In fact, one of the articles in that special issue is a meta-analysis that found no evidence for the 10,000 hour rule. Here's a summary: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not...
Now there are free services like Gamocosm which shut down your digitalocean server when not using it, so that it might only cost $1 or so a month: https://gamocosm.com/ Meaning it would take 8 years before it cost as much as a Mineserver box.
Most of the popular books on learning now suffer from this, emphasizing strategies that work fine for short-term rote memorization tasks (like memorizing random word lists), but have little impact on or can even hurt higher-order learning and understanding.
This page contains a partial list of security issues that have not affected web apps when they run in Sandstorm -- typically because of the hardening we do to apps, or because of the hardening we do against the attack surface of the Linux kernel. The purpose is to demonstrate that our security practices provide some degree of useful protection in the face of real-world vulnerabilities."
There are a couple of issues with the research though that I have questions about. One is that, as most of us who program know, the syntax is just one part of it. The tools, the community, the documentation, the libraries and platforms, and so on all factor into our decisions and productivity when programming.
A second issue is more about the research. A/B tests and randomized trials are all great and useful. But that also is not enough. What is the theory or theories you are testing? I wouldn't choose a keyword over another just because one short, lab-based study showed a p-value under .05. You also need to do other styles of research to get a richer picture of what is going on, such as design-based research and qualitative research methods.
"Ultimately, using a technique we call Token Accuracy Mapping, which is basically a way to figure out which tokens may have caused the problems, it appeared that C-style syntax was plausibly the culprit."
Bryan Caplan has written much about 'signaling theory' and education in posts like this one: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/02/mixed_signals.ht...
And no instructions on how to even do that. Plus it's an image, instead of text. This is not for kids.
In case you don't have an ipad, there are other visual coding tools that work with robots, but not drones, like Scratch. Someone did make a hack to connect Scratch to the Parrot AR Drone, which is more like $300: https://github.com/campk12/ScratchForARDrone
There are so many other languages that do compile in the browser and can be used without relying on command line tools that there's no reason to pay any attention to dart at all, even though I like everything else about dart: https://github.com/jashkenas/coffeescript/wiki/List-of-langu...
If that's not enough or too hard, find someone who knows what you want to learn, and talk with them, work with them.
Sorry if that's vague, but provide some more details about what you want to learn and/or your goals, and more help can be provided.
But your intuitions are right - video is not ideal at all for learning. Most people stop watching after the first 4-6 minutes (http://blog.edx.org/optimal-video-length-student-engagement). See also: http://linkis.com/papers.ssrn.com/sol3/mYfya http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/in-online-courses-stu... http://www.wired.com/2015/08/learning-physics-tough-get-used... http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/01/why... http://pgbovine.net/publications/edX-MOOC-video-production-a... http://www.tonybates.ca/2012/03/10/pedagogical-roles-for-vid...
But everytime I use Windows and Macs again, I get even more annoyed. Mainly with how slow things are. Even on a new Windows 10 desktop or laptop, it's not uncommon to have to wait minutes for things to settle down after booting and logging in, or waiting while updates are installed during startup or shutdown. And on OS X, the spinning beachball was one of the main reasons why I stopped macs for the most part in 2002 or so. I figured it was just a byproduct of OS X still being early in development and computers not being fast enough or having enough RAM. But no, everytime I try a brand new mac, it still pops up, especially when trying to type in a URL or something like that. The bouncing in the dock and not knowing if an app is running or shutdown or not is annoying, too.
But as long as you keep your stuff backed up or in the cloud (like google drive, google music, etc.), and stick mostly to stuff that works cross-platform (Chrome browser, Libreoffice, cross-platform IDEs, etc.), it's very painless to switch being OS's or devices or to wipe and reinstall things. Even Microsoft Word and Excel work in the browser nowadays, though I still usually just stick with Google Docs.
Or for iPads there is the Tickle app: https://tickleapp.com/
and of course the code.org site which I believe uses Blockly: https://code.org/
If you show this book or go through this book with a true novice, like a child or complete non-programmer (no one has 'zero' knowledge like he says), this would turn them off programming for a long time.
To hook people in, to give them an actual /reason/ to learn programming, you need to show them how programming can be used to do something fun or useful. For example making a little game, or making something to help with a spreadsheet or so forth.
Instead, he waits until the very end of the book to start thinking about using the language to create something useful: "OK, so now everything is ready to talk about deploying things to the web. And at this point, people will be able to start creating useful, practical pieces of software that they can share with the world."
Start with how to make a simple web page, or a simple game that others can play, etc. Don't end with that. Make it easier for people to use your tool to make games or practical applications.
Then again, as others have pointed out, the fact that this tool is proprietary though makes it a non-starter for novices, anyway, in my opinion.
The point of evidenced-based X (medicine, teaching, etc.) is improvement and change, things that people are often hostile to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semmelweis_reflex
Research found that the number one cause of errors in learning Python was its case-sensitivity, and you can guess what people's reactions were when it was suggested that python support a case-insensitive option: (NIMPY - not in my python) https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2000-May/03710...