Seven Tips and Some Great Apps for Mastering Knowledge: Technology-enhanced learning

Some students and professors are heading “back to school”. With Covid, learning with technology has become more important than ever. So today, Smile published an original article of mine: Technology-Enhanced Learning: 6 Ways to Master New Info. Here, I summarize and extend that article.

https://twitter.com/HookProductvT/status/1299418000622333953

The tips are:

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An integrative design-oriented research approach to autonomous agents

updated 2021-03-22: I’ve finally added the video for this talk, above.

Here are some notes about a guest lecture I will give in Dr. Angelica Lim’s course on Affective Computing (Dpt of Computer Science) at SFU on 2020-07-16. (Twitter handle)

I aim to inspire students about the importance, enjoyability and challenges of trying to understand entire minds of autonomous agents, using an integrative design-oriented approach. I will present several interesting problems and functions that call for such an understanding, and focus mainly on mental perturbance.
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Homage to Aaron Sloman, Winner of the 2020 APA K. Jon Barwise Prize

Last month, Professor Aaron Sloman was awarded the 2020 K. Jon Barwise Prize which recognizes “significant and sustained contributions to areas relevant to philosophy and computing by an APA member. The prize will serve to credit those within our profession for their life long efforts in this field.”

Aaron Sloman university Birmingham
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Augmenting Your Use of LaunchBar and Alfred (Launcher Apps) with Hook’s Contextual Retrieval

The LaunchBar and Alfred launcher apps are super helpful. Amongst other things, they allow you to search for information with minimal typing. Hook is also an information retrieval app. However, Hook is designed for contextual information retrieval, i.e., to instantly retrieve information that is connected to the document or object you are working with in the current app of your choice, whether the item is on the web or on your Mac. Hence Hook’s slogan, “find without searching”.

On the Hook website, I’ve recently produced a blogged about how launchers can be used with Hook, and produced a screencast on the topic:

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A Q & A Brain Game on Brain Games and Self Improvement

Luc P. Beaudoin on Global TV re Brain Games

Global TV’s caption could have been more precise and labeled me an Adjunct Professor. I am not tenured faculty at SFU (nor is that on my bucket list 😉 ).


I was interviewed on Global TV BC last week as part of their “Health Series: Improving brain fitness”. Some of the discussion was to revolve around software for improving cognition and cognitive productivity.

What I hadn’t noticed in the various communications leading up to the interview was its scheduled duration: just 4 minutes! That includes the time the interviewer takes to ask her questions… So, I was playing their “brain game” that morning: trying to funnel my thoughts on these subjects into very succinct, helpful answers. Not an easy game.

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