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Find What You Actually Want to Learn About First things first, you need to figure out what you're actually interested in.

Figure Out How You Learn Best Full sizeWe all learn a little differently, and while we're fans of learning by doing, you can't always do that with everything.

Learn By Doing Whenever Possible Full sizeIn most cases you're going to learn best by doing. That means practicing programming by actually making a program or learning a new language by speaking it. If you're having trouble getting over the learning hump and sticking with it, you might simply need to provide better context for the process.

encourage a Twitter backchannel discussion, in which quiet, shy, and unable-to-get-a-word-in-edgewise students are able to speak up in class without actually speaking up in class, sharing their comments, insights, and even relevant links through Twitter as the discussion goes on

Educators have found that Twitter backchannel discussions provide for more interaction not just in the classroom, but beyond, as students often enjoy further carrying on the conversation even after class time is over.

This quick exercise allows students to further digest and understand the material at hand, while at the same time creating a great resource for future review.

Wired: You’re interested in massive open online courses and have championed Salman Khan’s videos. If these had been around when you were young, would it have affected your schooling? Gates: No. For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good. Now, if you’re the kind of person who gets stuck on Chapter 5 and will give up if you don’t have someone to answer questions, don’t try and pick up the Feynman lectures on physics. That’s true whether it’s online or offline. A MOOC is an attempt to gather a group and encourage students, almost like a typical classroom, forcing you to interact during the lecture so that it kind of wakes you up and keeps you engaged. A hyperlearner doesn’t have to have those things.

he heartbeat of social media, social business, planning, integration, goals, objectives, measurement, content, ROI, ROR (return on relationships), marketing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, blogs, and more is you. It’s you and me and everyone else out there. It’s people. It’s human beings behind the avatars that keep the heart beating, not the spam links and self promotion, automated Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Recent efforts by organizations like Coursera, edX, Udacity and Khan Academy have produced thousands of educational videos logging hundreds of millions of views in their attempt to make learning freely available to the masses. While the presentation style of the videos varies depending on the author, they all share a common drawback: videos are time-consuming to produce and cannot be easily modified after release. With that in mind, we present VidWiki, an online platform to leverage the massive numbers of online students viewing videos to iteratively improve video presentation quality and content, similar to other crowdsourced information projects like Wikipedia. Through the platform, users annotate videos by overlaying content on top of the video, lifting the burden on the instructor to update and refine content.