Productive lifetime learning

Productive lifetime learning

What Bode was saying was this: “Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.” Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more…

After posting obscene memes to Facebook, students lose their acceptance at Harvard

After posting obscene memes to Facebook, students lose their acceptance at Harvard

Harvard College rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat. A handful of admitted students formed the messaging group—titled, at one point, “Harvard memes for horny bourgeois teens”—on Facebook…

Miami University’s business school requires all freshmen to take a coding course

Miami University’s business school requires all freshmen to take a coding course

We’re all accustomed to the typical assortment of core classes at universities: math, language, English 101. While the “real-world value” of core classes is often debated, one university is introducing a core class requirement that undoubtedly adds value to graduates’ post-college portfolios—a coding course. The school is Miami University’s Farmer School of Business, and the…

The way our brains age helps us develop more self-control as we get older

The way our brains age helps us develop more self-control as we get older

I’m much better at controlling myself now than I was when I was a kid. I’m more organized and less impulsive. Why is that? What happened in my brain to make this happen? A study published yesterday in Current Biology could have a clue. Scientists studied the changes that happen in the brain as kids…

Standard eBooks offers updated and fixed public domain ebooks

A lot of the ebooks from Project Gutenberg suffer from poor typography and transcription errors. Standard Ebooks is fixing that: Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade…

Teach digitial citizenship with Google’s “Be Internet Awesome”

Teach digitial citizenship with Google’s “Be Internet Awesome”

With school out and summer break giving kids more time to spend on the Internet, it’s a great time to introduce Be Internet Awesome: a new way to encourage digital safety and citizenship. Developed in collaboration with online safety experts like the Family Online Safety Institute, the Internet Keep Safe Coalition and ConnectSafely, Be Internet…

Teaching coding and play games with a mechanical computer

Teaching coding and play games with a mechanical computer

Turing Tumble is a new type of game where players (ages 8+) build mechanical computers powered by marbles to solve logic puzzles. It’s fun, addicting, easy-to-learn, and while you’re playing, you discover how computers work. I’m all about teaching kids to code. When I was a professor at the University of Minnesota, I saw how valuable…