Group items tagged

Researchers at the University of Washington, Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco, have created a remote, non-invasive brain-to-brain interface that allowed Rao to move Stocco's finger remotely on a keyboard using his thoughts. "The Internet was a way to connect computers, and now it can be a way to connect brains,"

""This flies in the face of all these traditional views that all structural development happens in infancy, early in childhood," Schlegel said. "Now that we actually do have tools to watch a brain change, we are discovering that in many cases the brain can be just as malleable as an adult as it is when you are a child or an adolescent.""

"Mindfulness should no longer be considered a "nice-to-have" for executives. It's a "must-have":  a way to keep our brains healthy, to support self-regulation and effective decision-making capabilities, and to protect ourselves from toxic stress. It can be integrated into one's religious or spiritual life, or practiced as a form of secular mental training.  When we take a seat, take a breath, and commit to being mindful, particularly when we gather with others who are doing the same, we have the potential to be changed."

"Blogger Tim Urban explains his process of extreme procrastination in which his brain wages war between instant gratification and the moment of pure panic just before a deadline."

"If you want to make something go viral on Facebook or Twitter, in other words, the TPJ is where you want to hit - because it lights up like a Christmas tree before we even know we're going to share something. The more activated it is, the more persuasive the share. And it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what we think is cool ourselves."

Imagine that psychologists are scanning a patients' brain, for some basic research purpose. As they do so, they stumble across a fleeting thought that their equipment is able to decode: The patient has committed a murder, or is thinking of committing one soon. What would the researchers be obliged to do with that information?

"I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

"With deep learning, computer scientists build software models that simulate-to a certain extent-the learning model of the human brain. These models can then be trained on a mountain of new data, tweaked and eventually applied to brand new types of jobs. An image recognition model build for Google Image Search, for example, might also help out the Google Maps team. A text analysis model might help Google's search engine, but it might be useful for Google+ too."

Games and Learning

"Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty - by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity."

A person's PLN is an organizational system that absorbs multitudinous sources to aggregate content to aid facility and expedience. Yet, considering the PLN as a container for diverse information modules makes me think of the compartmentalization requisite for the human brain to process new learning. Might this be why PLNs have proven themselves to be so useful and seemingly congruent with our learning styles?

This is for all of #udsnf, but definitely for Meg.

"The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence provides world-class professional development for public and private school teachers.  Participants are teachers and administrators who are eager to develop classrooms centered on critical and creative thinking, collaboration, and brain-based research. The Institute provides on-site seminars, workshops and conferences; a teacher residency program; and funding for off-site professional development, especially at the Harvard Graduate School of Education."

With Plug, your devices work as a group. They all contain exactly the same files. Just like if they were one single, unique device. Play with exactly the same content at all times, no matter which device you're using. Put thousands of movies on your iPad, even if you bought a small one. Watch family pictures on your connected TV, without having to transfer them. Share confidential folders with your colleagues without sending them to the Cloud companies. Send documents instantaneously.

"Technology is evolving us, says Amber Case, as we become a screen-staring, button-clicking new version of homo sapiens. We now rely on "external brains" (cell phones and computers) to communicate, remember, even live out secondary lives. But will these machines ultimately connect or conquer us? Case offers surprising insight into our cyborg selves."

"Content curation is the process of shifting through the vast abundance of content on the Internet to select the best, most relevant resource, on a specific topic or theme,  so that we can organize, manage and collate the content for ourselves and share with others. Content curation is about working smarter and not harder.  Content curation is also a reflective process; as you curate resources you reflect on their value.  Reflection makes new information stick in your brain."

Intellectually rigorous work lives, thrives, and teems proudly outside conventional notions of academic rigor. Although institutions of higher education only recognize rigor when it mimics mastery of content, when it creates a hierarchy of expertise, when it maps clearly to pre-determined outcomes, there are works of exception - multimodal, collaborative, and playful - that push the boundaries of disciplinary allegiances, and don't always wear their brains on their sleeves, so to speak.

"Self-determined learning or heutagogy is fast gaining interest from educators around the world interested in an evidence-based approach to learning. Grounded as it is on brain research and extensive research into how people learn self-determined learning is particularly popular among those interested in innovative approaches to learning. This edited book is the perfect primer on self-determined learning or heutagogy. It consists of an introductory chapter explaining the main concepts and principles of this exciting approach to educational practice. This is followed by 16 chapters describing the experience of practitioners in using the approach. These experiences come from a wide variety of interests including school education, higher education, workplace learning, consulting, lifelong learning, training, and community education. Full of links to resources, curated sites,and discussion forums, this is a valuable 'how to' book for the interested practitioner and theoretician alike."

"She had, she concluded, 'changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration.' She had lost the 'cognitive patience' that once sustained her in reading such books. She blamed the internet.""