"Brain Rules" and pastels

Yesterday when I was looking for more glass paint, I instead found a cheap set of pastels. Remembering how much fun I had with them when I was a kid, I bought them, along with a big sketchbook. I am now slowly dying my keyboard all kinds of colors with the pastel colors that are still all over my fingers. It was still a lot of fun, but I have no more drawing skill than I did when I was a kid! I'll hope that I can acquire some with practice. Tomorrow I'll try to post some links for where I learned a few of the basics and maybe scan some of my lovely first attempts. With any luck, in a few months I can look back and see progress!

I finished the Brain Rules book by John Medina last night. I started this book for work, to try to gain some understand of the way people learn. I'm hoping to move my work into developing online courses (from writing manuals where I currently am) and I'm doing my best to understand how to make some incredibly boring procedures interesting enough for people to remember.

Brain Rules was a book that I saw recommended when browsing through Instructional Design blogs (such as this one or this one). It was advertised as an easy introduction to some important rules of how people learn, and it certainly seemed to be for me. While I'm sure this book was presented for a general audience and leaves a lot of information out (at least, if you're a psychologist or someone with a lot of knowledge in this area!) it really is a great, well-written and friendly introduction to the way people learn. He presents the material broken up into chapters of each "rule" (e.g., "People don't pay attention to boring things" or "Stressed brains learn differently") and takes into account every one of his rules throughout the book. It is filled with interesting anecdotes, spaced well to peak your interest after a more technical section, is easy to read and is continually related to the concerns of most readers. The book is also supplemented with a DVD and a website. He strongly encourages everyone to take advantage of all three media types, since the repetition and the variety will help people learn--but being the bookwork I am, I have yet to move past the book.

If you're interested in a quick, light introduction to human learning, this is a great book. It is easy to read and has a lot of practical knowledge that people should be able to enter into their own lives, whether to help their own learning or to help teach others. The tone is comfortably conversational, without the overly technical voice or the feeling of being talked down to that too many scientific books fall prey to. And for anyone interested in how the human brain works (yours or anyone elses!) it's a great, interesting read.