Ph.D. students I meet for the first time are sometimes taken aback when I ask them with a smile “What’s your problem?” I then clarify, “What problem are you addressing in your research?” Even then, they are often still bemused. That’s because many research students think that their task is to research a “topic”. Later, they conclude that their job is to “answer a question”.
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Category: CogZest
Benefits of Learning in Depth for Kids and Adults
It is often said that “there are no quick fixes in Education”. Yes and no. There are no panaceas, quick or not. However, for many complex problems in many domains, there are some relatively simple but potent partial solutions. Vaccination is one example.
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The Tenacity of Paper
Since 2001, I have been specifying the problems we face in learning with technology. I have been developing products—knowledge, software and services—to the cognitive-productivity challenges we face. The first draft of my first book on the subject is written. I am not giving up…
This video, however, provides an original view of the tenacity of paper. It suggests that people will not ditch paper. However, I believe it also demonstrates that people will ditch paper after they have put it to good use.
Collaborative Productive Practice for Professional and Personal Development
At the Simon Fraser University (Education) Learning Together Conference May 17-18, 2013, I will present some of the ideas from my upcoming book on developing professionally and personally from knowledge resources using cognitive science and technology. By “knowledge resource”, I mean documents, podcasts, audiobooks, presentations and other learning materials. In keeping with the social theme of this conference, in my session, we will explore collaborative aspects of productive practice. The title of my talk is “Collaborative productive practice for professional and personal development: Socializing a new deliberate-practice framework.”
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Why So Quiet?
You might have noticed that the CogZest blog has been very quiet lately.
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Why Use Several OpenMeta Applications?
The main point of this blog post is that if you’re going to use the OpenMeta tagging framework for OS X, you should consider purchasing more than one OpenMeta app. They are not expensive. But first, I describe some of the benefits of tagging. Then I present and respond to criticisms of OpenMeta.
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Why Managing One’s Reading is Challenging
Managing one’s reading today is more challenging than ever. In order to capitalize on knowledge, we need to understand and resolve these challenges to our cognitive productivity. Here are some of them.
An Evening to Celebrate Camaraderie with the Zest of Brel
This evening, we are resurrecting the spirit of friendship of the Grand Jaques Brel, one day before his 83rd birthday anniversary (April 8, which falls on Easter Sunday this year). I am hosting an intimate Celebration of Camaraderie with the “Zest of Brel”.
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How About a Round of Applause?
My ‘diversion’ today was to help a distant relative who yesterday, in order to resolve an issue with her Mac, followed my suggestion to click the “Repair Disk” button in Disk Utility. When she phoned me today, it was to exclaim in horror “All my files have disappeared!” She confessed to disregarding my request, “Call me back when it’s done repairing the disk and we’ll determine what to do next”. After the repair she had impatiently proceeded to click some nearby buttons until she had … reinstalled her iMac’s operating system. More precisely (and less conveniently), she had installed a previous version of the OS (the extinct Tiger).
How Dictation Benefits Cognitive Productivity
Whereas, in the past, the fruits of your ambulant mind dangled precariously on the dendritic branches of your memory organ, they can now be digitally harvested and processed. You can dictate while taking a stroll, running errands, jogging, working out, commuting, waiting for an event, or meditatively pacing in and around your home office. You can digitally capture your voice using a special-purpose recorder, a smartphone, or a computer. Nuance’s Dragon Dictate™ (Mac) and Dragon NaturallySpeaking™ (Windows) both do a great job of converting speech to text.
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