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What do people who succeed against all odds have in common?

11/8/2015

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Quartz
Vincent Tinto is a professor at Syracuse University. He’s well known for his theories on students’ persistence through higher education. His research produced what’s known as the “Model of Institutional Departure.”
Tinto’s model informs us that, above all else, college is a transition from one community to another. Our success in college depends on how well we integrate ourselves into that new community.

What happens if we go home every weekend to visit high-school friends and sweethearts instead of making friends in our new community? We don’t integrate. We don’t get help from new friends going through the same issues or receive academic advice from new mentors. Instead, we tend to drop out.
Tinto’s model has proven incredibly useful in improving how we educate not just undergraduates but people enrolled in remote learning programs and continuing-education classes. And it can be extended far past education to help us understand how people persist.

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If you want to help people learn confuse them

11/8/2015

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Notre Dame psychologist and computer scientist D’Mello, whose research areas include artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and the learning sciences, together with Art Graesser of the University of Memphis, collaborated on the study, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.
They found that by strategically inducing confusion in a learning session on difficult conceptual topics, people actually learned more effectively and were able to apply their knowledge to new problems.

Scientific American

The subjects watched an animated tutor and student discuss possible flaws in a scientific study. The researchers had the animated tutor and student disagree with each other on specific flaws.  But to set up a really confusing situation for one group of subjects they also had the pretend tutor and student make incorrect or contradictory statements about the study. Then the subjects had to decide which of the two opinions had more scientific merit.
Subjects who were forced to deal with the incorrect and contradictory statements did significantly better on later tests where they had to spot flaws in studies, as opposed to those subjects who only faced the disagreements between the animated tutor and student. The study will be published in the journal Learning and Instruction.
Researchers note that confusion motivates us to work harder to understand, and so we gain a deeper and more comprehensive knowledge of a subject.


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Failing forward

11/8/2015

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Quartz
Students who are presented with unfamiliar concepts, asked to work through them, and then taught the solution significantly outperform those who are taught through formal instruction and problem-solving. The approach is both utterly intuitive—we learn from mistakes—and completely counter-intuitive: letting kids flail around with unfamiliar math concepts seems both inefficient and potentially damaging to their confidence.
Kapur believes that struggle activates parts of the brain that trigger deeper learning. Students have to figure out three critical things: what they know, the limits of what they know, and exactly what they do not know. Floundering first elevates the learning from knowing a formula to understanding it, and applying it in unfamiliar contexts.
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Creativity is learned as long as you are willing to make mistakes

10/18/2015

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Quartz
Creative thinking requires our brains to make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. Is this a skill that we are born with or one that we develop through practice? Let’s look at the research to uncover an answer.

In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land conducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds. Ninety-eight percent of the children scored in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject at five year increments. When the same children were 10 years old, only 30% scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12% by age 15 and just 2% by age 25. As the children grew into adults they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr. Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”

Similar trends have been discovered by other researchers. For example, one study of 272,599 students found that although IQ scores have risen since 1990, creative thinking scores have decreased.

​This is not to say that creativity is 100% learned. Genetics do play a role. According to psychology professor Barbara Kerr, “approximately 22% of the variance [in creativity] is due to the influence of genes.” This discovery was made by studying the differences in creative thinking between sets of twins.
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Algorithms predict human behaviour better than humans

10/18/2015

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Quartz
For example, when one competition asked teams to predict whether a student would drop out during the next ten days, based on student interactions with resources on an online course, there were many possible factors to consider. Teams might have looked at how late students turned in their problem sets, or whether they spent any time looking at lecture notes. But instead, MIT News reports, the two most important indicators turned out to be how far ahead of a deadline the student began working on their problem set, and how much time the student spent on the course website. These statistics weren’t directly collected by MIT’s online learning platform, but they could be inferred from data available.
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The Power of the Mind- Intuition

11/14/2012

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Trust your gut. Science says so.
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U2, Risk Taking and Janusian Thinking

11/1/2011

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In September, ‘From The Sky Down’, a U2 documentary about the making of ‘Achtung Baby’, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF).   The film is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who directed the Oscar winning documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, about climate change. Named the “Band of the Eighties”by Rolling Stone Magazine, U2 nearly broke up as the decade was coming to a close. Band members were burned out and going through the motions at their shows. Bono told the audience of a New Year’s Eve Party in Dublin, in 1989, that “they were going away to dream it all up again”. 
 
By the end of the 80s they had reached the pinnacle of success. In 1987, U2 released their fifth studio album ‘The Joshua Tree’ to commercial and critical success, and, as a result, became the most popular “underground” band in the world. Many bands struggle with their live performances to achieve the bar set by their producer in the studio. In contrast, U2’s signature ethereal neo-psychedelic sound and poetic, melancholy lyrics connected with audiences all over the world. To their fans, flocking to U2’s sold out stadium concerts represented a secular pilgrimage to receive musical communion at a modern day tent revival.  U2’s authenticity stood out for those of us coming of age in the cynical, foppish eighties; a buoy, floating in a sea of otherwise plastic entertainment consisting of new romantic and metal hair bands.

When asked why he made the documentary about ‘Achtung Baby’ the director responded:
“What I was drawn to was how they felt about that moment in their life. Each of them had a very different perspective, but it was definitely a tumultuous time for them. It was a time when they either had to reinvent themselves or perish. They reinvented themselves in an incredible way, but it was touch and go!”
,
The band’s need to renew itself, even at the risk of breaking up, is something we all pass through at various stages of our lives. They chose Berlin, right after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The band recorded at Hansa Studios, known as “Hall by the Wall” because it is adjacent to the Berlin Wall. Other successful artists like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Depeche Mode had recorded music at Hansa. 

Bono was interested in dance music and the Edge had become interested in industrial music and both were determined to take the band in a different direction. Larry and Adam wanted a more traditional U2 record.

The choice of pushing themselves to either death or rebirth, the choice to radically change their style despite being at the top, to use a Berlin studio at the start of reunification were examples of Janusian thinking.

How much was U2 really risking? That is hard to define, but many of the most influential bands in Rock n Roll: The Beatles, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Police, to name a few, couldn’t survive their success. 

Those people who take more, but not excessive risks have been shown to be the happiest. 

They fought. They yelled. They contemplated breaking up. Nothing was working out. The director describes the breakthrough moment:

 “And then this song (“Mysterious Ways”) happens. And I go,“Well, this is the moment. Let’s go after it.” We went into the archive and the original recordings from those sessions were there. They were playing “Mysterious Ways” and these chords arrived for “One,” and then the next moment when they pull those chords out to start another song, and wow! It’s like you’re an archaeologist and you’re digging through the dirt and the rubble and  you find this stone that holds the key to this mystery.”

From “Absolute Soul Destroying Failure” to “Mysterious Ways”to  “One”.

This, my friends, is the mystery of life. 
This, my friends, is grace. 
I have had it happen multiple times in my life.
May we all find it.
I am looking for it again, right now, in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
From The Sky Down
Namaste U2. 
  


 
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