Visualization, memory, reading and research skills
Memory champion Wang Feng uses a very simple and efficient chunking method. Wang Feng is arguably the fastest mnemonist alive, so his method works. The simplicity of this method is only superficial, and you need a lot of practicing to master it – more than other methods we teach. Influenced by the structure of his …
This great post by Dilbert creator argues that speed is the new intelligence. Is that really true? The intelligence discussed by Scott Adams has to do with common sense and big numbers. Technology facilitate access to people, ability to generate and test ideas, access to supporting information and knowledge. Simply by using information technology properly …
One of the things that limit our reading speed is the speed of creating markers. If we were required to create a marker per detail within a text, we would end up with a choice between 250wpm at 80% retention and 1000wpm at 20% retention. In fact, one of the reasons that other speedreading courses …
Once in a while we write about doodling (or freestyle annotation) and its benefits. Students drawing in their papers where mistreated by generations of teachers. They were asked to focus, to stop fooling around and to listen to the teachers. However, the human spirit is stronger than education fashions, and student persistently doodled in school …
Continue reading “Doodling at school and at work will boost your productivity”
A very small percentage of people (~2%) is born with extremely good autobiographic memory: they remember every student in their class and every event of their life. Yesterday I met some classmates whom I have not seen for 26 years. Some things remained the same, but one thing that changes was my perception of childhood. …
Continue reading “Building timeline and visualizing history”
We teach our students to preread, read and reread without stating where we learnt it ourselves. To fix this injustice I introduce so called SQ3R system that is commonly used in US schools. Survey. We also call this prereading. Usually we skim or scan the content before we read it to prepare our mind for …
Continue reading “Active reading: SQ3R system and preread-read-analyze cycle.”
Big data of all sorts is a good skill to have. There are many related skills: relational databases, nosql databases, data mining, natural language processing… Healthy control of each of this skills means good salary and many job openings. Personally I worked with several methodologies rather briefly, and while I have some skills and practice …
I promised myself to write a post about creating marker-ready stories. Instead I am writing an article on storytelling. Storytelling is a great skill I want to master one day. The skill is important from various perspectives as following: All stories teach compassion and self-compassion. Bad things happen all the time. Each of us has …
So far I have referenced Tony Buzan books for mindmapping. I am realizing that I need to give my students a short and useful explanation of how to use mindmapping and why. This post is intended to be useful, so I will not go into historical, classical and programmable aspects of mindmapping, but focus on …
Very often I ask students to understand the meaning of what they are trying to learn and use very accurate markers. I want to demonstrate it on etymology. Take for example this real conversation: EY: I can create images to the words in the dictionary (some easier than others), but my main problem is that …
Continue reading “Superlearning for languages and definitions: etymology method”
Learn new tactics for speed reading and memory and get access to free apps to practice and develop your new skills