informal Archive

Teach it or Lose it

Steve Blank, startup guru and author of Four Steps to an Epiphany, writes about an anecdotal experience that speaks to the importance of informal learning and mentoring that very few people seem to take advantage of. I love this lesson learned: If you don’t teach it or write it down, the...
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70:20:10

Charles Jennings, global head of learning for Reuters (known to most as the knowledge driven organization paragon), employs a useful 70:20:10 rule about organizational learning. Read all about it here. Too many learning professionals and managers are obsessed with transferring information into employees' heads, even though they know that the...
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Formal vs informal education, by Joi

I keep meaning to hat-tip to startup hero, Joi for this wonderful post on Formal vs Informal education but I kept forgetting until I looked through my recent bookmarks today. The good parts: Despite my completely dysfunctional relationship with formal learning, I've been able to learn enough to run companies, give talks...
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Pilot participant in GS Troop 21812: “Can we use this for school stuff too?”

Yesterday, we started a new group of pilot participants on using BettrAt. We had several girls trained on how to use BettrAt for their informal interests. We were excited to see how enthusiastic they all were with using the site for the things they cared about. People...
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MacA Spotlight on Museums and BettrAt

We came across this, Selling Museums to a Tough Audience: Teens, from the MacArthur Spotlight on Digital Media and Learning and it quite intrigued us, because we've been tossing around these issues as well for the past year now. How can museums and other informal learning institutions create compelling experiences that...
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Dr. James Paul Gee, Prof. @ Arizona State

This excellent video came across our radar by James Paul Gee, Professor at Arizona State University. We concur with his arguments here. The clip is entitled "hands on learning with video games," but it discusses a lot more that needs to happen in education besides video games. It's hard to...
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Group flow

It's been an interesting few weeks for us here at BettrAt. I (Ash) spent the weekend in Ann Arbor, visiting with some professors in the psychology and school of education departments trying to understand and develop a more refined model of group learning and also thinking about attentional research. I've...
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Foundations for a new science of [informal] learning

You know... I don't think it's heretical to think that we're building an app that has some serious mass appeal, while we think that our initial/early adopters will be highschool through Gen Y. Last week, Vince sent us this great study that validates our research about interest nets. There are...
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