The Educator's Notebook

A New Look At Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills
Harold Jarche - 6/29/17

"I would now suggest that hard skills are really temporary skills. They come and go according to the economy and the state of technology. Today, we need very few people who know how to shoe a horse. Soft skills are permanent ones.”
Designer Of “Oregon Trail” Describes The Origin Of The Game
Medium - 6/28/17

"I felt that the best way to build an innovative but successful design was to start with an ambitious set of new ideas, and then to gradually build and test these ideas through successive refinement — first by creating a simple prototype, and then by building up the real product one aspect at a time. At each step of the process we should evaluate where we are, compared to where we want to be, and then prioritize what to do next. Some of our cherished ideas would have to be shed along the way, but by constantly prioritizing and improving, we would achieve a successful result in the end.”

Cognitive Principles For Presentation Design
Fast Company - 7/7/17

"We have both a “ventral” visual system that processes information such as shape and color and a “dorsal” spatial system that processes things like location and distance. When these two systems are prompted to work in concert—as the animated features of Prezi prompt them to do—it enhances our memory and comprehension.”
How Forgetting Helps You Learn
New York Times - 6/30/17
How Our Senses Influence Decision Making (Via Marketing)
Fast Company - 6/29/17

"The study found that ads highlighting more distal sensory experiences like sight and sound lead people to delay purchasing, while those that emphasize more proximal sensory experiences like touch or taste lead to earlier purchases.”

11 Tough Truths About Creativity
The Next Web - 6/21/17
Wallace Stevens: The Artist, Reality, And The Need For Imagination
Brain Pickings - 6/12/17

"[The artist] must be able to abstract himself and also to abstract reality, which he does by placing it in his imagination… It is imperative for him to make a choice, to come to a decision regarding the imagination and reality; and he will find that it is not a choice of one over the other and not a decision that divides them, but something subtler, a recognition that here, too, as between these poles, the universal interdependence exists, and hence his choice and his decision must be that they are equal and inseparable.”

Greenblatt, The Merchant Of Venice, And Fighting Xenophobia
New Yorker - 7/10/17
Greater Ethnic Diversity Benefits Well Being Of All Students
Pacific Standard - 7/3/17

"As the ethnic diversity of middle school increased, African-American, Latino, Asian, and white youth all reported feeling safer in school, less lonely, and less likely to be victimized.”

A MOOC-Based Framework For Learning How To Learn
University of Melbourne - 6/26/17

"I’ve analysed the data from over 100,000 learners on the University of Melbourne’s various MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) - every click, tap, swipe they make, every document they consult, and every word they write in chat forums and exercises.”
Student Describes Experience With Good And Bad History Classes
The High Flyer - 6/22/17

“Summer Reading For Your Woke Kid”
NPR - 7/6/17
More College Summer Reading Lists
New York Times - 7/1/17

"Ohio State, the football-mad university of more than 60,000 students, could hardly be more different from Williams College, the prestigious liberal arts school in the Berkshires… But this summer, all of their incoming students received the same reading assignment”
TED Makes A Summer Reading List From TED Speakers
TED - 6/21/17
Even Entrepreneurship Magazines Make Summer Reading Lists
Inc. - 12/7/16