Self-education with Coursera

One more weekend has passed and again I was singing the praises of Self-Education and Coursera to my friends. I'm guessing many of them are fed up with me talking about it. Sorry everyone... just too excited... :-)

If you're not familiar with it, Coursera is one of the leading providers of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), basically a platform for universities to offer free access to some of their coursework online, to anyone with an Internet connection and a desire to learn.

Take a look at one of the founders' TED presentation.

For me, with my never-ending quest (obsession?) of self-development, this is an absolutely AMAZING opportunity. There's currently nearly 200 courses available on a variety of subjects, just waiting for the eager student. They currently have students from all over the place...







So, what do I find so nice about it?

• In my opinion, it offers a great balance of self-education with a little bit of structure. Each course is divided into lectures which themselves are broken down into segments. Watch each lecture, answer quizzes or do assignments, participate in forums, ... and you're on your way...

• At the same time, it is 'freeform' enough that you can speed through content you already know or watch it on your own schedule.

• The number of course options is enormous. Coursera has close to 200 courses from approximately 30 universities, covering 18 different areas. From Music to Biology, from Economics to Circuit Design, there's bound to be something that interests you...

• The format is great, the selection is ample and the quality is top notch too. Content is well-designed for the delivery format, teachers are articulate and engaging, plus the exercises are relevant.

I've now had experience with 6 courses in Economics, Statistics, Finance and Investing and I'm enrolled in a few more. History, Cryptography and more Econ/Stats/Finance are on my horizon.

So, how do I find the time to study for this?
First of all, I study in the evenings, after wife and kids go to bed. 2-3 hours a night and that's easily 15 productive hours to learn something or refresh old content.
To get those 2-3 hours, I've severely limited my TV time as well as cut back on social networking (fewer Facebook discussions! :-) ) and other distractions. Each one is different, but this is what worked for me.

Improvements
As with everything, there's a couple of things about Coursera courses that I wish could be improved upon:

• First, for now, all courses have a scheduled date, often many months in the future. I understand this is done to match the academic schedule, but perhaps over time Coursera might offer a more 'on-demand' model.
• There is minimal interaction with the teaching staff. This is understandable, as some courses can have 100,000 people or more registered. In many cases, the best option you have is hope the teacher or one of the teaching assistants participate in the discussion forums that exist (which they often do, but not the same as asking question in class...)

"So, I get to be a <insert university name> student for free?"
One key point is that courses offer minimal, if any, official status. What this means is that attending a course taught by Stanford faculty, for example, does not make one a Stanford alumni or imply any other relationship. The reality is that each course is free to issue whatever type of status they want. Some offer nothing whatsoever, others may offer an electronic statement that you completed the requirements for the course, while others may even consider issuing 'credits' towards their existing programs.
I have seen people add to their Facebook profiles that they were 'alumni' of those institutions. They're NOT. Don't make the same mistake.
In my case, what I've done is that I have added Coursera courses to my LinkedIn profile, but under the heading of 'Independent Coursework'. This still shows that I'm pro-active in my self-learning but that I also recognize the limits of the MOOC system.

As you consider Coursera, I leave you with two parting thoughts.

One, that Coursera is but one of many offerings in this space. Other notable options include Udacity (mostly computer technology related material), EdX (an upcoming partnership between Harvard, MIT and Berkley) and Khan Academy (more focused on, but not limited to, high-school level across several subjects). Good link for these and other options here.
I still think Coursera towers above them in terms of breadth and thought leadership.

Finally, Isaac Asimov's popular quote: "Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” Not much else to say, is there?

Syncing Multiple Google Calendars to iOS devices

With the complexity of home life increasing - our son grows up and has multiple activities, we all have doctor's appointments, fitness, travel plans, etc... - we have been using shared Google Calendars for a long time. What works well for us is:

• Mom's and Dad's work calendars get uploaded via GoogleCalendarSync
• We use shared Calendars for each child (daughter still too young for one), plus one for the family as a whole and one for 'Home Maintenance' things.
• We also have a calendar for friends/family birthdays (the actual date, not any celebrations, which go into the 'family' calendar)

For some reason, one of the things left out of the configuration efforts when we both started using iPads was syncing those multiple calendars. We easily synced our main calendar and that was it... Life moves fast and sometimes 'good enough' is good enough.

Well, complexity caught up with us and now I needed to find a way to look at these alternative calendars without the hassle of opening the Google Calendar page (via Safari or a HomePage link)... I wanted to see them on the native iOS Calendar app.

It was VERY, VERY easy to do (easier than I thought), but took a little searching.

Short version is: starting from a setup that already has the main Google Calendar synced to the iOS device, just go to https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect and choose the other calendars you wish to see. Next time you iOS calendar app syncs, either they should appear automatically or just refresh the calendar list from the 'Edit' section on the app.

I got this from Google's Help section at CalDAV Calendar Sync - Google Mobile Help. While it talks about setting up the account as CalDAV explicitly, it just worked with the 'regular' GMail account.

This is likely old news for many people, but I was pleasantly surprised. :-)

Instapaper or Read it Later? Both!

As I battle to keep up to date with everything that happens in my industry (IT, specifically security/networking), one of the best tools I use is a 'to read later' application: basic premise is that if you come across something that you think might be interesting but you just don't have the time (or resources) to check it out now, you can mark it for later. Then, when you have moment (yeah, right...), you just go back through your unread list to check them out.

There's a few of these apps out there - Apple actually included the functionality in the latest Safari with iOS 5.0 - but the ones I'm more familiar with are Read it Later and Instapaper. They both have support for tags, multi-platform support and free/paid versions (though Instapaper offers virtually all functionality for free so 'paid' really means donation, which I find totally worth it).

One of the more interesting thing about both of these apps is that they have a stable API so other applications can hook into them. This has led to a variety of applications supporting direct "one-click" integration, allowing things like sending a link to the 'to read later' queue while browsing your Twitter feed or Facebook news, for example.

That - sending off to 'to read' list while browsing Twitter - is primarily how I use this functionality. My preferred Twitter client is 'Oosfora HD' (paid) on the iPad and I'll happily bookmark links for reading later from within that app.

But which one do I use? The answer (as per the title of this entry) is both! Wait, what? Why both? Heresy!
<sarcasm>
As with every other 'battle' in IT (Windows or Mac? Chrome or Firefox? iOS or Android?) there *must* be one choice. Your entire self-worth as an individual is tied to choosing the ONE app that is clearly BETTER.
</sarcasm>

Well,no. One of the benefits of using BOTH apps at the same time is that you can easily curate your collection so that you end up with two distinct 'flavours' of bookmarks to check out and can then review them according to your mood, resources at hand, etc...

As an example, I use 'Instapaper' for industry-related links that I either have to be in the right mindset to review or that I want to take notes into my Personal Knowledge Management system (future blog post...). I use 'Read it Later' for more 'generic' links that I want to check out but not necessarily 'study'.

Why not use one and just tag things instead? Simple answer: the process of tagging something is not well integrated into the other apps I use and frankly just slows down the process. It is a lot easier to just select 'Read it Later' or 'Instapaper' from a pop-up than actually type a tag.

Anyway, I hope this helps others who face similar situations.

Dashboards and my Weekly Planners

I mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of mindmaps for personal organization. My tool of choice is MindJet's Mindmanager, which I bought out of pocket for back in 2001 and never looked back.

One of the things I've done recently is to finally set up a couple of dashboard mindmaps - for me, maps that summarize what I have to worry about as it relates to a particular topic and jump-off points to other locations, from other maps to Web sites out there. The benefit of dashboard mindmaps is that I can quickly glance at them and take in all the relevant information about something.

My first dashboard is business-specific (sorry, not meant for publication): as a Sales/System Engineer (see my LinkedIn profile here), I need to keep track of business contacts and current business opportunities. A couple of maps - one for the business contacts, with linkages to account-specific maps, and one for the opportunities themselves - let me have a great summary of my territory. Some of the benefits I get from it are:
- Quickly identify key people I need to get in touch with.
- Have an at-a-glance summary of opportunities I need to focus on in the short term.

My second dashboard is 'personal', meaning it tracks everything in four main categories: work, personal, career and home (family, kids, etc...). I use it as a scratch pad for things on my radar (in addition to my detailed task list in MyLifeOrganized). See my earlier posts for some description of how I work.

Here's a high-level view of my personal dashboard:

Well, one thing I added to my personal dashboard is a weekly planner. This is simple but very useful. In a nutshell, I now have an easy to view/edit location where I consolidate information from many sources:
- My personal and business calendars (Gmail and Outlook, respectively)
- Key tasks I want to achieve on that date (manually, but taken from MLO)
- Additional tidbits not available elsewhere that I think are relevant.

Here's a redacted example:

The nice thing is that I also have not only similar views for upcoming weeks (as you can see in the image) but also a 'weekly template' (not shown) that I can just copy over to a new week.


Like I said, this is simple stuff - maybe old news to more experienced mindmappers - but still something that helped me organize my affairs better. Hope it helps others too.

Until next time!

My Personal (Dis)Organization System - 1 of 2

I'm always curious about how people organize themselves in this day and age - e-mail, tasks, contacts, etc... - so I can continue to fine tune how I do things myself. I once heard the term 'productivity pr0n'. I don't think it applies to me, but almost... :-)

I decided to break down this post in two:
- a high-level overview of key concepts.
- a description of tools I use to implement my system.

I have read - and heartily recommend - David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). Some people treat it as gospel - it does have a cult-like following - but I took some things from it and that was that. More than anything, I liked the concepts of:
- Recognizing one's "Inboxes".
- Breaking tasks down to actionable items (define what the "next action" is)
- Having a specific method of handling incoming things: Do now, Delete it, Delegate it, Store it for Reference, Treat it as a Project, move to a "Someday" area of your system.
- Doing periodic reviews.

I also embraced the concept of 'Inbox Zero'. This is extremely liberating - I know that anything not in my Inbox is properly captured elsewhere in my system and I can clearly see what is new.

Finally, I need somewhere to keep the information I accumulate. I would like to build something like a Personal MemEx, but my system is far simpler.

So, to end this post, the key concepts I use are:
- I have multiple (but clearly defined) Inboxes: personal and work email, social media (FB,Twitter,RSS), personal and work voicemail, my own ideas, etc...
- For everything that comes in I process it the same way, deciding what I need to do with it.
- I keep track of things on a somewhat coherent personal knowledgebase.

More stuff on the next post.