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What Necessary Adult Skills Were You Never Taught Growing Up? Eric Ravenscraft, LifeHacker, 2015/03/02 Doug Belshaw flags this article in LifeHacker asking people to comment on the life skills they never learned growing up. As one commenter says, "I just realized, this entire article boils down to 'give Lifehacker ideas for future articles'." But hey, why not? In any case, the comments section is filled with ideas for good life lessons. Here's a sampling: basic hygiene habits like flossing/brushing teeth, taking showers, shaving, cosmetics, and hairstyling. education on how to have constructive relationships basic finance. My parents handled everything and didn't teach me about budgeting at all how to exercise or be physically fit emotional intelligence. Being able to communicate exactly how I feel instead of sticking my head in the sand knowing a little bit about car repairs and maintenance how to wear makeup how to handle repeated failure. How to be content with doing "alright", not "outstanding" in life how to cook Sensing a theme?

Idea for 300th Sandwich -- Daily Create Movie Poster

The bad news is that I wasn't ever actually able to play a clip (and sharing isn't supported yet), but the good news is that this is a useful concept and conforms to my idea of the reuse of educational resources - leave the resources where they are (in this case, sitting on YouTube) and link specifically to the bits you you need to use in your course or project. YouTube does support links to specific time intervals in its videos, so this project is basically a framework making it easy to create those and then (eventually) share them. Here's the home page, here's a video, and here's the current version of the editor.

This is a terrific article on NASA's use of virtual reality to train astronauts. A lot of the focus of VR is on skills training, but the article makes it clear that one of it's key roles is to give the astronauts a feeling of familiarity with the environment and to help them develop the right intuitions for working in a weightless environment. "There's a great advantage in just feeling as though the environment isn't entirely new. 'It means everything. It's not hard to realize that just beyond that thin little visor is instantaneous death. It's oblivion,' Wheelock said." E-learning (including VR) can prepare us far better than traditional instruction for such situations (indeed, the idea of teaching it in a classroom is laughable). So - to answer the traditional objection to e-learning - I wouldn't want to employ an astronaut (or a pilot, or a brain surgeon) who didn't use e-learning.--oldaily

Icon Sam Chaltain is gaining traction for some ideas that will be familiar to readers of this newsletter (plus one about school buses that is new to me). From his newsletter: "What if... we started to design schools in ways that imagined young people moving more like a murmuration of Starlings than, say, a regiment of soldiers? What if, in order to reimagine schooling, we got specific about all the things we have always done that we will need to hold onto - and all the things we must let go of in order to make space for something new? And what if, instead of viewing a thing like a school bus as merely a vehicle for transporting children to and from school, we viewed it (as one community has done) as an essential link in the chain of our overall effort to support the needs of children?" -- OLDaily

Technology and the Imminent Disruption of Higher Education: Is Fear the Path to the Dark Side? David Wheeler, Academica Forum, 2016/01/14 Good article from Cape Breton University president David Wheeler examining some of the major trends in university education today. Here's a quick summary (quoted from the article): Gamification - enhancing emotional engagement with learning Rewards - from points and badges to certificates and degrees Adaptive learning - from artificial intelligence to tutoring Simulations - from apprenticeships to virtual reality Social learning - reproducing the classroom and peer support online One of the strengths of Wheeler's article is that he clearly identifies the impact of the trend on learning and provides examples of companies or applications that are innovating in this space. He also links back to a Guardian article from a couple weeks ago citing studies which show clearly the idea that knowledge is a web of associations, and not like disk storage or memory tape. And his message has a hard edge: "If an institution cannot support flexible, high quality, and competitively-priced learning journeys for students of all ages and backgrounds, then another institution will, and it may be based anywhere from Arizona to New Zealand." [Link] [Comment] oldaly

I have said many times that learning is a lot more like exercising than it is like storing stuff in a computer. Thatès sort of the sense behind this post. John Spencer asks, "But what if the relaxation you get from creative work is closer to the relaxation you feel after working out? In other words, what if creative work actually includes work? What if there's a certain grind to it that ultimately leads to success?" To me, that's what it is - writing this newsletter, for example, is a creative exercise that makes me feel good and makes me smarter (well, I think it makes me smarter).