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Remember those moments when you just don’t feel like doing a task, but you know you have to?

Contrary to many Vince Lombardi-type motivations, willpower is more like an energy that can be depleted. Willpower is a finite resource. It works in cycles; it is something that you build on and know when to maximize.

As psychologist Roy Baumeister and science writer John Tierney pointed out in their Willpower book, it works a lot like a muscle. Like a muscle, it can get tired and need recovery.

Junot Díaz’s Drown and Edwidge Danticat’s Krik? Krak!—both of those collections, from the late ’90s—and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which I still think is one of the most perfect short stories ever written.

Zora Neale Hurston and Mules and Men. In that book, she writes, “Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing.”

And this tends to turn into the idea that writers of color are in some sort of “identity corner,” whereas white writers just get to write about life. I will never forget one night in workshop when the professor asked our brilliant mutual friend Brit Bennett to explain what her story had to say about the black experience. Like her story had to be some after-school special, either harrowing or uplifting, just because her characters were black.

Connected learning is when you’re pursuing knowledge and expertise around something you care deeply about, and you’re supported by friends and institutions who share and recognize this common passion or purpose. Click here to learn more about the connected learning model and the research that supports it.

There is no doubt that we need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st-century” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you need to know what came before. To collaborate, you must contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information with knowledge you’ve already mastered.

There is no doubt that we need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st-century” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you need to know what came before. To collaborate, you must contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information with knowledge you’ve already mastered.

There is no doubt that we need to innovate, collaborate and evaluate, to name three of the “21st-century” so dear to digital literacy enthusiasts. But such skills can’t be separated from the knowledge that gives rise to them. To innovate, you need to know what came before. To collaborate, you must contribute knowledge to the joint venture. And to evaluate, you have to compare new information with knowledge you’ve already mastered.

Algorithms have become one of the most powerful arbiters in our lives. They make decisions about the news we read, the jobs we get, the people we meet, the schools we attend and the ads we see. Yet there is growing evidence that algorithms and other types of software can discriminate.

The people who write them incorporate their biases, and algorithms often learn from human behavior, so they reflect the biases we hold.

Fairness, Accountability and Transparency in Machine Learning workshop, which considers the role that machines play in consequential decisions in areas like employment, health care and policing.

1. Weekly lunch and learns.

2. Training budgets.

3. Tuition reimbursement and recognition programs. 

Therein lies the tension that makes wikiHow so spellbinding. It's a bare-bones SEO play, living and dying on the search queries of frustrated homemakers and maladjusted teens, but it's also, for better and often for worse, one of the web's foremost resources for the frustrated, annoyed, sad, or depressed. It lacks the scruples to compensate the army of contributors without whom its for-profit business model would quickly crumble, but thanks to the infinite idealism of those volunteer editors and a bounty of articles on navigating the terrors of adolescent social life, it is a place of startling warmth. It's one of those magical places where the collision between the web's structuring algorithms and its users' idiosyncratic humanity is on full display.

Online discussion forums and bulletin boards provide a means to share our ideas in a format that is not constrained by time, that saves all our thoughts, and that allows students to return to their contributions and even change them once they’ve read others’ posts.

I cannot imagine returning to a non-collaborative environment. I find that everyone learns so much more this way.

The technologies of online learning serve many purposes for me. My main loves are the organization of the material, the easy access to web-based tools, and the ability to building bridges for collaborative learning.

It’s learner-centered teaching—it’s those instructional strategies and approaches designed and used by teachers who want learners to be motivated, independent, and self-regulated.

We criticize students for their surface learning approaches and yet I see a lot of surface learning when it comes to teaching. Our infatuation with teaching techniques—the tips, tricks, and gimmicks that can make our teaching dance—yes, they’re important, but so are the assumptions and premises on which they rest. We quest for “right” answers to what we think are simple questions. “Should I call on students or let them volunteer?” The answer depends on a host of variables including; how you call on students, who you call on, when you call on them, and what’s the motivation behind calling on them. Thinking that good teaching results from having right answers trivializes the complexities that makes teaching endlessly fascinating.

learning about teaching. I have talked with teachers who admit they don’t do any pedagogical reading and others who don’t do any professional development activities. How can you expect to stay instructionally alive and well when you’re not taking actions that promote health? It’s not about needing to improve; it’s about wanting to grow. It’s about taking our love of learning and tackling teaching as a subject to be mastered, a skill to be developed.

One of the devastating weaknesses of university learning, of the store of knowledge and opinion that has been handed down through academic training, has been its almost total erasure of women’s experience and thought from the curriculum… What you can learn [in college] is how men have perceived and organized their experience, their history, their ideas of social relationships, good and evil, sickness and health, etc. When you read or hear about “great issues,” “major texts,” “the mainstream of Western thought,” you are hearing about what men, above all white men, in their male subjectivity, have decided is important. And yet Rich is careful to counter any misperception that taking

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work. It means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic security; for our bodies to be treated as objects, our minds are in mortal danger. It means insisting that those to whom you give your friendship and love are able to respect your mind. It means being able to say, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre: “I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”

Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions