Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Bonus words, wait list and more upgrades

We're constantly working behind the scenes to improve LTW. Many of these things you'll notice as improved speed or better data for the words, but here a few noteworthy recent upgrades:

When you study via Vocabulary Tutor, you have the option to find a word based on definition/image/sample sentence before clicking the audio button. If you succeed, you are issued a bonus point, which is worth a nugget and also counts towards your diploma. With the latest upgrade, the word is no longer added to the practice list if you enter it incorrectly, since many times there are multiple right answers for a certain definition. Failed bonus word attempts are simply added to your preferred word list to be re-tested again in one of the future sessions.

If you are spending coins on your reward page, it will now prompt you to confirm that you want a particular item, since in the past sometimes members clicked at multiple items not aware that it would deduct coins for each activity. If you choose to get learning credits as your reward, you can see how many learning credits you have in your student portal now, even if you're a member.

And because members tend to take quizzes more frequently now that they are rewarded for it, we implemented a 6-hour wait list feature that prevents that words are moving through the practice cycle too quickly. LTW is based on the principle of spaced repetition, so we provide a few quick exposures in the first quiz, and future reviews should happen stretched over a time period that ensures the word is pulled from long-term memory, not short-term.

New feature: If quizzes are restarted in short sequence, practice words that have been presented before will not be shown again until six hours have passed since the last review. Words affected are listed in a 6-hour wait list table in your practice word page.

Our goal for LTW is perfection and our to-do list long... if you have feedback or ideas about what we could be doing better, please let us know!

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Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Find us @ Google Apps Marketplace

A big step towards making LearnThatWord an easy, one-click choice for schools:
We are now available in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Schools using the free Google Apps for Education program can now make
LearnThatWord available for teachers and students with a click.
Google Apps provides sophisticated email features with calendar, tasks, and
document tools that can be used privately or shared by your constituents in a free
and ad-free environment.

Since our program is offered through the no-worry, affordable and 100% measured
Pay-Per-Result concept--without any per-person licensing fees--it’s easy to get
everybody started through the Google Apps Marketplace. You don’t even have to
decide who to include or exclude, since you can do that later on by granting or
removing sponsorship as needed.

Students receive 5 free learning credits each, schools 100 additional credits. This
allows for a few weeks of trial time, on average.

In addition, all third graders study free with our Vocabulary Junction campaign.
Your annual expense is capped to protect your budget, making it the easiest,
most accountable and most affordable tutoring solution available to remediate
vocabulary and spelling.

Click here to add it to your Google Apps for Education account now:

Click here if you don’t yet have a free Google Apps for Education account and would
like to get started.

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Sunday, November 21, 2010

Making practice less onerous

I live in a great place. Little Sebastopol in Sonoma County, home to a lot of conscientious and smart people, and among them the good folks at O'Reillys.
Today, I came a across a discussion on the value of practice, which culminated in the following lines that I would like to share:

My point this morning was in large part that repetition and drill matter, and that once you've figured out that they're actually helping you, they 'suck' a lot less.
It's not just a matter of Calvinist ethics (sorry, Kurt) - it's an opportunity for learners to move forward by doing things a lot, shifting ahead a bit at a time. The great leaps are fun as well, but build on smaller steps.
My concern with this is that while letting kids figure out what works for them is a good idea and that different kids will figure out different things, actually becoming good at things is about a lot more than discovering them or creating them.
Reading sheet music is one thing - learning to play an instrument is another. And I figured out what integration and differentiation were about long before I got to calculus, but I probably should have flunked my second semester of calculus because I just couldn't wrap my head around how to actually make it work. (Which shocked me, because math up to then had just flowed naturally for me.)
Ideally I'd love to have discovery and creativity motivate learners' actions - but they still need to motivate learners into a tremendous amount of repetition to get there.
Kurt said 'Computers and the internet can be used to scale the learning by discovery paradigm.' Yes, and they can also be used to manage, moderate, and fine-tune repetition. Hopefully we can combine all of that into something that gives people instruction at a pace they can maintain, thrilled by their progress, but also in a way that sticks with them."

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Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Learning has it's own rewards, BUT...

... we're excited to announce the launch of our new rewards program!

LearnThatWord users now earn coins for completing quizzes! These coins buy anything from La Linea cartoons to games to free learning credits, etc. After all, the biggest challenge about learning is keeping the momentum going and to stay motivated!

Rewards, whether they're diplomas or prizes, are given for effort and quality, not existing achievement.
Come check it out, and let me know what you think!

Posted via email from LearnThat's Blog

Friday, November 5, 2010

Cognitive Misers

The following excerpt is a text sent to me yesterday by the delanceyplace.com snippet collector, one of the few emails I enjoy reading whenever I find the time to:

"We tend to be cognitive misers. When approaching a problem, we can choose from any of several cognitive mechanisms. Some mechanisms have great computational power, letting us solve many problems with great accuracy, but they are slow, require much concentration and can interfere with other cognitive tasks. Others are comparatively low in computational power, but they are fast, require little concentration and do not interfere with other ongoing cognition. Humans are cognitive misers because our basic tendency is to default to the processing mechanisms that require less computational effort, even if they are less accurate. Are you a cognitive miser? Consider the following problem, taken from the work of Hector Levesque, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto. Try to answer it yourself before reading the solution. 

Problem: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married, but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? 

A) Yes
B) No
C) Cannot be determined

"More than 80 percent of people choose C. But the correct answer is A. Here is how to think it through logically: Anne is the only person whose marital status is unknown. You need to consider both possibilities, either married or unmarried, to determine whether you have enough information to draw a conclusion. If Anne is married, the answer is A: she would be the married person who is looking at an unmarried person (George). If Anne is not married, the answer is still A: in this case, Jack is the married person, and he is looking at Anne, the unmarried person. This thought process is called fully disjunctive reasoning - reasoning that considers all possibilities. The fact that the problem does not reveal whether Anne is or is not married suggests to people that they do not have enough information, and they make the easiest inference (C) without thinking through all the possibilities. Most people can carry out fully disjunctive reasoning when they are explicitly told that it is necessary (as when there is no option like 'cannot be determined' available). But most do not automatically do so, and the tendency to do so is only weakly correlated with intelligence.

"Here is another test of cognitive miserliness, as described by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Shane Frederick. 

"A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

"Many people give the first response that comes to mind - 10 cents. But if they thought a little harder, they would realize that this cannot be right: the bat would then have to cost $1.10, for a total of $1.20. IQ is no guarantee against this error. Kahneman and Frederick found that large numbers of highly select university students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton and Harvard were cognitive misers, just like the rest of us, when given this and similar problems."

Author: Keith E. Stanovich
Title: "Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss" 
Publisher: Scientific American
Date: November/December 2009
Pages: 35-36

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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Myths Behind the Things We Do

Here a few lines by Benedict Carey, "Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits," The New York Times, September 6, 2010... 

 " 'We have known these principles [for improved study] for some time, and it's intriguing that schools don't pick them up, or that people don't learn them by trial and error,' said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. 'Instead, we walk around with all sorts of unexamined beliefs about what works that are mistaken.' (...) 
 
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are 'visual learners' and others are auditory; some are "left-brain" students, others "right-brain." In a recent review of the relevant research, published in the journalPsychological Science in the Public Interest, a team of psychologists found almost zero support for such ideas. (...)
 
Cognitive scientists do not deny that honest-to-goodness cramming can lead to a better grade on a given exam. But hurriedly jam-packing a brain is akin to speed-packing a cheap suitcase, as most students quickly learn - it holds its new load for a while, then most everything falls out. ...  [In contrast] an hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now - so-called spacing - improves later recall without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found."

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Sunday, September 12, 2010

Read through a pile of novels or go to jail?

Just stumbled across this program... inspiring!
http://cltl.umassd.edu/home-flash.cfm

Convicts in MA may participate in a literacy program as an alternative to being sentenced. They are required to read and discuss a range of novels... leading to a deeper and more effective awareness gain, it seems:

The numbers show that participant go back to criminal behavior at a drastically reduced rate.

Posted via email from LearnThat's Blog

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Google's contribution to nonprofits

Many people may not know yet that Google has an extremely effective and generous grants program that helps nonprofits connect with their audience. Our Vocabulary Junction campaign, for example, has been made possible by their grant and it had a dramatic effect on our website.

Yesterday and today I participated at the Google grants workshop at headquarters in Mountain View.
I'm impressed and humbled by the generosity and support extended to the philanthropic community, and delighted to meet the dynamic and enthusiastic team that provides support to over 7,000 nonprofits.

It is fun and inspiring to learn directly from the bright and fun Google volunteers who blew my mind with making the complex simple.
Also, I'm really impressed by Google's internal culture:
The communication within the team, the beauty of the campus and of course, the cafeteria. 

Everybody seems to have a wonderful and wonderfully productive time. 

Posted via email from LearnThat's Blog

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Thank you, thank you, Google!

We recently got a grant expansion that allows us to dare and undertake a campaign I've been dreaming of for a long time.
This will be the first year for Vocabulary Junction, giving free tutoring to third graders in the U.S. and Canada.

Posted via email from LearnThat's Blog

New site is live...

We switched the flip... flipped the switch... we're LIVE!
Really enjoying our new site and getting lots of great responses... and of course questions for the new Pay-Per-Result.
It takes people a while to understand that WE MEAN IT... on our site you only pay if we teach you something you didn't know before...

We had trouble with our recording equipment so still working feverishly to finalize the introductory videos... more to come soon.

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Monday, August 23, 2010

New site about to launch...

We're so excited... just making final changes to the new site.Scheduled to go live tomorrow!!
Anyone who wants to peek and share feedback: beta.learnthat.org/vocabulary

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Thursday, July 8, 2010

From 0 to 296 in three days... amazing!

Yupp, I can't believe this myself! We're on rank 296 right now, over 500 votes in three days or so, and having a rank of 200 or higher on 7/12/2010 means a $20,000 grant!
Please, if you read this and haven't voted, or know of people who would vote for our vocabulary tutoring campaign, this is the link:
http://bit.ly/learnthatword
It just takes a few seconds!

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Vote! Share with your friends! We can do this!

Wow, we are impressed by how many responded to our email call for help. We're at close to 300 votes, but will need about three times as much to win a grant.
If you haven't voted yet, please click on http://bit.ly/learnthatword and give us a click... if you did vote, please considering sending the link to your friends and family, or repost on Facebook!

By the way: We hear from a lot of people who click the "like" button and then are confused about what to do next. When you click that, often a "verification required" link pops up that you need to click next and enter the captcha. That's the last step before voting... Thank you!!

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Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Word Cup... last rounds!

The last round of the Word Cup tryouts are upon us.
Please check out the schedule at www.wordcupcafe.org and try out!
If you qualified for the semifinals, please make sure the take the quiz before August 1st, or your invitation will expire.
Good luck!

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The race is on... please vote for us @ Chase Community Giving

Our nonprofit has entered the race to win a Chase Community grant, and we need your help! The grants are given to the top 200 nonprofits based on votes.

We heard about this just recently, and still need about 800 votes before 7/12 to make it, we've done great so far... but we need to get many more votes.
Can you help us out by voting for our Vocabulary Junction campaign, making free tutoring available to third graders nationwide? Please also repost this on facebook, via email, in forums/networks, etc.
As a thank you for taking time to vote, we will credit 10 learning credits to you.
In the near future, when www.LearnThatWord.org replaces www.eSpindle.org, users will only pay for measured learning results, and 10 credits represent about a month of free tutoring!


Here's how it works:

1 - Click on this link: http://bit.ly/learnthatword. (You have to be logged into your Facebook account)

2 - Click on the get started link:

3 - On the next screen, approve that Chase can connect with you and get access to your public Facebook info (they will list your name and profile images after you vote).

4 - On the following screen, click "like" by clicking on the highlighted button (you can "unlike" Chase at any time). Click on the verification required link and fill in the captcha.


4 - Click "vote for this charity"... Thank you!! Send an email to support@eSpindle.org with your Facebook name and your eSpindle username, and we'll credit your account.

5 - Please share this info with your friends and everyone who cares about education: Facebook, emails, forums, networks. http://bit.ly/learnthatword... this is urgent!!

Let's start closing the Vocabulary Divide that causes so many elementary students to struggle. We still need about 800 votes before 7/12... just a little miracle that should be well possible with a little help of our friends!

Thank you for your support!!

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