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  Learning Is More Important Than Knowing

Although DuckDuckGo's success is based more on ideology than technology, you'd have to be a pretty arrogant technologist to not appreciate and be impressed with what this small team (for a long time, 1 person) has accomplished. And while DuckDuckGo teaches us a number of valuable lessons (about business, and privacy), to me, the most important, is that good programmers should be measured by what they can learn, not what they already know.Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo's creator, has been wonderfully transparent about his love-child. One theme which has come up a few times is his lack of experien...

3,051 0       GOOGLE LEARNING KNOWING DUCKDUCKGO


  Are college students learning?

In his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Obama proposed several measures to lower college tuition. University leaders responded cautiously, warning that cost-cutting reforms might also cut into instructional quality.But here's the big open secret in American higher education: Most institutions have no meaningful way to measure the quality of their instruction. And the president didn't ask us to develop one, either. ...

2,508 0       LEARNING SURVEY COLLEGE STUDENTS


  Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning Is Wrong

Taking notes during class? Topic-focused study? A consistent learning environment? All are exactly opposite the best strategies for learning. Really, I recently had the good fortune to interview Robert Bjork, director of the UCLA Learning and Forgetting Lab, distinguished professor of psychology, and massively renowned expert on packing things in your brain in a way that keeps them from leaking out. And it turns out that everything I thought I knew about learning is wrong.Here’s what he said.First, think about how you attack a pile of study material. “People tend to try to learn i...

2,153 0       LEARNING THOUGHT BEFORE WRONG


  Learning Go

This year I'm going to try a new programming language - Go. I had this notion that compiled, type based languages are overly complex and reduces developer efficiency. However, after doing some reading about Go, it appeared to take a different path from the rest and felt like something worth trying.Acquainting a programming language is a journey. First few steps you take with it will define your perception about it. These first few steps went well for me with Go and it felt like a good fit for my repertoire. I thought of sharing my learning experience, hoping it will help others who w...

2,244 0       GOOGLE LEARNING GO RESOURCE


  Could coding be the next mass profession?

Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value.Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get any advanced degree. In the past, students who missed out on a higher education learned vocational skil...

2,711 0       CODER LEARNING TRAINING PROFESSION


  JavaScript as a First Language

At Khan Academy we've been investigating teaching Computer Science to students in some new and interesting ways. The most interesting aspect of which is that we're likely going to be teaching them JavaScript as their first language.We're in a very unique position as we're primarily aiming to teach students who've been through our previous math and science-centric curriculum. Because of this we can create some rather compelling exercises and projects that never would've been feasible otherwise.The prospect of teaching the JavaScript language as a first language is actually really exciting. Teac...

5,784 0       PROTOTYPE JAVASCRIPT LEARNING FIRST LANGUAGE INHERITENCE


  5 things my 4-year-old taught me about technology

One of the great things about being a parent is that you get to see how kids use technology. I have a 4 year-old daughter who loves to mess around with my phone, watch videos on YouTube and play Angry Birds.It’s fun to watch her interact with these things, not only because she’s already better at some of the games than me. The really interesting stuff happens when stuff doesn’t work the way she expects it to, or when she finds ways to use tech that I hadn’t thought of. That’s when I get to learn how tech should work, and why some of my assumptions about it ar...

2,189 0       LEARNING SIRI CHILDREN VOICE TECH COURSE


  ARE YOU LIKE ME? OR DO YOU HAVE DISCIPLINE?

If you are anything like me, you've started more things than you have finished. We're innately curious about the things around us and inspired when we come across people who have mastered their trade. We see people create cool and beautiful things and think, "Man, that looks easy, if I put in a little time I can do that in no time." What follows is a few days or weeks of focused and dedicated learning. During this time we make some progress, but not much. In fact, the progress that we do make only gets us to a point where we can truly begin to understand the complexities of the task we ar...

2,544 0       WORK COMPLEXITY LEARNING EFFORT DETAIL