Suggestions to learn better

The Online Education Database has an interesting article from yesterday, "Hacking Knowledge: 77 Ways to Learn Faster, Deeper, and Better." Funny how many of them deal with things which seem more peripheral to learning but definitely make a difference. Here are some samples:

Food for thought, part 2: Eat a light lunch. Heavy lunches have a tendency to make people drowsy. While you could turn this to your advantage by taking a "thinking nap" (see #23), most people haven't learned how.

For the multitaskers:

Focus and immerse yourself. Focus on whatever you're studying. Don't try to watch TV at the same time or worry yourself about other things. Anxiety does not make for absorption of information and ideas.

And in the category of "This is just not going to work":

Learn by osmosis. Got an iPod? Record a few of your own podcasts, upload them to your iPod and sleep on it. Literally. Put it under your pillow and playback language lessons or whatever.

But this one will work:

Set a goal. W. Clement Stone once said "Whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve." It's an amazing phenomenon in goal achievement. Prepare yourself by whatever means necessary, and hurdles will seem surmountable. Anyone who has experienced this phenomenon understands its validity.

Comments

Learning to Teach Online - new online series from UNSW

I have been watching some of the videos in the Learning to Teach Online series from the University of New South Wales . The series covers various topics related to online teaching and they are divided into episodes which include a short video plus a PDF. I had some trouble getting the PDFs to download, but the videos played fine for me. I think the Managing your Time video is a good one for new online instructors: Overall, this looks like a good resource.

Change the Text Editor in Moodle

This lesson shows how to choose an alternate text editor in Moodle. Edit profile After you login, click Edit profile under My profile settings in the Administration block. If you have moved the Administration block to the dock on the left edge of your browser, you can choose Edit profile from the menu by moving your mouse over the Administration menu on the left edge of the screen. Text editor The currently selected text editor is shown in your profile in the General section. Change the editor Click on the Text editor menu to choose a different option. The TinyMCE HTML editor was the default editor in versions of Moodle prior to 2.7 and it has a few more options than the new default editor, the Atto HTML editor. The Atto editor works with all browsers while the TinyMCE editor does not work completely with Chrome or Internet Explorer. Update Click Update profile at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

Podcast features in Blackboard 7.3

The new podcast features in Blackboard 7.3 are actually part of the Podcast Learning Object from LearningObjects.com . This learning object makes it possible to easily add podcasts to your course and syndicate them to your students using an RSS feed. In English, this means your students can subscribe to the podcasts you make available, whether you create them yourself or download them from someone else. This way, students will be automatically updated with the latest podcast in your course and they can listen/watch them on an iPod, Zune(!), or a computer. Here's a 4 page overview of the podcast tools [PDF]. You may also find these resources useful: A tutorial from Dave Taylor on subscribing to podcasts in iTunes. Create your own Podcast (CNET). Kirk's Eight Rules of Effective Podcasting .

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