As I’ve previously mentioned many times, TED is my favorite website. You’ll never feel you’ve wasted a moment of your time by viewing any of the short speeches the site hosts by a wide range of fascinating and interesting people. Incredibly educational. The nice folks running TED have been kind enough to group together their […]

In a previous post I talked about the need to keep informal learning in the workplace truly informal. Another, and even more important, component to successful self education in the workplace is building a learning culture. What do I mean by a learning culture? Companies and organizations, particularly very large ones, tend to get mired […]

In a previous post I visited the question of what education is. However, as I’ve been writing a lot about self-education on this blog, today I again had to pause and think about exactly how I define what an education is. Is it a set of skills and knowledge that prepares us for employment? Is […]

I find random learning a lot of fun. I love it when I’m presented with something to learn that I might not have otherwise sought out on my own. If you don’t engage in any conscious random learning, I encourage you to do so. There are a few ways I engage in random learning on […]

Yesterday I overheard someone at my local coffee shop talking about his education. He began to rattle off the schools he attended and the degree and certifications he holds. Never did he actually mention what he knew, what skills he possessed or what experience he had with any particular domain of knowledge. No, he made […]

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. Here’s a cartoon lifted from the I Acknowledge Class Warfare Exists Facebook page. I’m not even going to comment except to say that it is a humorous explanation of one of the reasons why standardized testing so often fails to contribute to the goal of effective education.

A study (here is a nice Learning Solutions Magazine article about it) by Jeffrey D. Karpicke and Janell R. Blunt suggests that what is often referred to as retrieval practice may be one of the superior ways to retain what you learn. This validates a technique my father taught me at a very young age when I […]

This TED talk about self-teaching illustrates the power of self-education and how its proper deployment can change the way we educate our children for the better. At the same time, the findings of the research discussed in this talk have application to adult learning as well. We must move away from the concept that only […]

In Daniel H. Pink’s book, Drive, one of the main points he emphasizes is that true motivation comes from an individual feeling they have three elements present during their efforts: Autonomy – the ability to control their destiny to the greatest extent possible. Mastery – the opportunity to truly master one or more domains of […]