Topic
education
- Comfort with Contradiction
From my latest issue of Res Extensa: One of the most important things we can teach our children as they're coming of age is to cultivate a comfort with contradiction. Sometimes good things come at the expense of other…
- Teaching Iteration
Jason Fried has an idea for improving education that I couldn't agree with more — teaching kids how to iterate: Making anything better is iteration. When you put something out there, it’ll often land right back in you…
- Weekend Reading: American-Dream-as-a-Service, Content Marketing, the Fifth Column Reading List, and More
👨‍🎓 The American-Dream-as-a-Service Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austen Allred, founder of Lambda School. Lambda charges no tuition and builds its program on the ISA (income sharing agreement), in which you on…
- What Universities Do
Last week I linked to Mike Munger's interview on EconTalk where he and Russ Roberts discussed the roles universities play (above and beyond the educational) and the likelihood that these components could be unbundled…
- Weekend Reading: A New Web, Future of Higher Ed, and a Ford Concept Car
🔗 A Clean Start for the Web Tom MacWright with some ideas for cleaning up ever-creeping morass of web technology: I think this combination would bring speed back, in a huge way. You could get a page on the screen in…
- Effortless Output in Roam
Today Nat Eliason launched version 2 of his Effortless Output course for learning Roam. This time around he's doing an interesting thing with live courses and students selecting a capstone project. Adding something th…
- Weekend Reading: Timeful Texts, Sumo Startups, and Canva Backlinks
🕰 Timeful Texts A new piece from Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen (beautifully illustrated by Maggie Appleton). Can we make reading a more engaging and interactive learning experience? This builds on previous ideas…
- Progress Studies for Young Scholars
Jason Crawford on Roots of Progress's new program for high school students: Progress Studies for Young Scholars launches in June as a summer program, with daily online learning activities for 6 weeks. We’ll be coverin…
- Weekend Reading: Optionality, Pangaea, and Regulatory Disappointment
⚖️ The Trouble with Optionality A 2017 commencement address from Mihir Desai, critiquing the phenomenon of infinite optionality and lack of commitment pushed by modern universities: I’ve lost count of the number of st…
- Things That Will Change
This is a weird time. The COVID-19 pandemic is the biggest global event that's happened in my lifetime. It hasn't impacted me personally that much (yet), but the financial and public health implications are clearly al…
- Weekend Reading: Brain MRI, Flash Cards, and Movie Maps
🧠7 Tesla MRI of a Human Brain This is one of the highest resolution scans ever performed on a human brain, at 100 micrometer resolution. Scroll down to see some awesome images. 👨🏻‍🏫 Anki Anki is an open source fr…
- Weekend Reading: Summer Solstice, Zoom Learnings, and TeachOSM
📺 5 Learnings from Zoom Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this — not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better t…
- Weekend Reading: Human Leverage, Alan Kay, and Mapping the NBA
🏋🏽‍♀️ Finding the Point of Human Leverage Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifyin…
- Rethinking the American High School
It's not a shocker that American schools don't produce the level of output we expect. I've written here before about this topic, and one of the largest failings I see (even dating back to when I myself was in high sch…
- Flexible Education
This is part 2 of a series on learning, education, and what we might do to improve. Read part 1. In my introduction to this series a couple weeks ago, I posited a few ways we could rethink education. The first idea wa…
- A Series on Learning
This is part 1 of a series on learning, education, and what we can do to improve our systems. Read part 2 here. The most effective learning relies on curiosity, a required characteristic to grow emotionally and intell…
- Weekend Reading: Mastery Learning, Burundi’s Capital, and SRTM
🎓 Mastery Learning and Creative Tasks Khan Academy’s Andy Matuschak on tasks that require “depth of knowledge” versus those that have higher “transfer demand.” Both can be considered “difficult” in a sense, but teach…
- Weekend Reading: Ubiquitous Computing, Versioning SQL, and Video Game Maps
🎙 Computing is Everywhere A great interview with Bret Victor on the Track Changes podcast. His work has always been an inspiration for how to think about both creating things and teaching people. 📊 Git Your SQL Toge…
- OpenStreetMap and TeachOSM
I’ve hosted many OSM mapathons in the past, and today’s event with AGS and the Geo2050 conference was a huge success. It’s hard to create an engaging, productive environment that’s conducive to new mappers learning ab…
- Promoting GIS at Hunter College
As premier sponsors of the American Geographical Society, we try to do our part in promoting geographic literacy, education, and the future of geo sciences. {% include image-partial.html file="hunter-college.jpg" desc…
- Weekend Reading: Forecasting, Raster CV, Free University Courses
🔮 Forecasting at Uber The scale of the prediction problem Uber has is wild. This is an intro to a series on methods they use for forecasting demand for their marketplace. 🛰 raster-vision A neat project from the Azav…
- Teaching OpenStreetMap
We’re heading up next month to the American Geographical Society’s Geography2050 again this year, which will be my 4th one, and the 5th annual overall. It’s always a great event — a diverse crowd in attendance and a c…
- Building Complex Reasoning Skills Online Through Open-Ended Activities
The Khan Academy's Long-term Research group studies new strategies for teaching and learning. This paper presents a method for freeform response and feedback on open-ended The dynamism and interactivity of these tools…
- How the Economic Machine Works
Learn the foundations of how an economy works, in only 30 minutes. This piece from Ray Dalio (hedge fund manager and author of Principles and hedge fund manager) breaks down an entire Econ 101 class in a concise, grap…
- Recent Links: Playing with Numbers, Logistics Networks, Vancouver Island
🎓 Numbers at Play: Dynamic Toys Make the Invisible Visible Great tools keep up with their users. They operate at the speed of thought, ever shrinking the feedback loop between conceiving of an idea and exploring its…
- A Quick Guide for New Developers
This entire post comes with a caveat: I am not a software engineer. I do build a software product, and work with a bunch of people way smarter than me, though. I’m experienced enough to have an opinion on the topic. I…
- GPS and Commercial Uses
I spoke with a graduate class at the University of South Florida about Spatial Networks, the apps we build, and the consulting work we do in geo technology, mapping, and human geography.
- Creating New Contributors to OpenStreetMap
I wrote a blog post last week about the first few months of usage of Pushpin, the mobile app we built for editing OpenStreetMap data. As I mentioned in the post, I'm fascinated and excited by how many brand new OpenSt…