The Personal MBA site has been relaunched and looks fantastic!

Their slogan is "mastering business through self-education."

Quoted: "You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for a buck fifty in late charges at the public library." - Will Hunting, "Good Will Hunting"

What they must have done is hand out the survey to ask the students if they were bored. For every survey that did not come back, the answer was "yes."

Morningstar has created an Investing Classroom which teaches people the core concpets of investing in stocks, funds, and bonds, as well as portfolio theory. They look free and Morningstar generally has high-quality material. All inall, looks like it might be a great resource.

Did you know that there are several online classes you can take through UW for free? Once I get moved, I might try out one of these...

Quoted: Free courses from the University of Washington Online Learning program.

I can't wait for professors to start handing out Blue Dot homework assignments. This Digg assignment sounds pretty interesting.... Students were assigned a task of submitting three articles and commenting on at least 10. This guaranteed a C. Best grades were ahnded to students with the most Digg votes.

An absolutely wonderful article from the September 2006 issue of "Seed" on "How We Know." The basic concept is that people elarn from doing - always. Extrapolating from there and showing concret examples from education, business, and the arts - there is something useful in here for everyone.

Quoted: According to Ericsson, this is how elite performers always practice. It is the secret trick of their talent, the way they become the best. Instead of treating practice as separate from the learning process--doing is what you do when you are done learning--they constantly find ways to integrate learning into their doing process, and the payoff is immense. The brain is designed to learn in a very particular way, consistently favoring the concrete over the abstract, the practical over the theoretical. If something can't be done, then we probably aren't interested in learning about it. The individuals and organizations that take advantage of this psychological principle are the ones that excel, getting the most out of themselves and their charges. If people can learn the right way--algebra on the subway, practice sessions and factory floors transformed into experiences that broaden the mind--neuroscience indicates there is little the mind can't accomplish. But if we remain ignorant of Dewey and the Labor-atory School, of Rizzolatti and his monkeys, of Bob Moses and newly-accelerated math students, of the winners of musical competitions and major golf championships, we will plod along in mediocrity, and fail algebra.

Quoted: Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

I am interested in taking this orienteering class. It's only 3 hours on a single day but I need to freshen up on my compass skills. It's been a while since I've had to use them. GPS made me lazy...

April 23rd. 2-5PM. 25 bucks.

People oftentimes ask me who they should use for guided ascents of Mt. Rainier. While not a big fan of guiding outfits - I would prefer people learn to climb with friends and work up to bigger mountains with their climbing partners over the course of years - The American Alpine Institute is my guide-service of choice. I heard good reports from clients of Jeff and my mountaineering shop for years prior to taking an Alpine Ice climbing course with them myself a few years ago. They may not be the cheapest (but why would you want that when you're entrusting your lives to the guides) but they are competitive and I have never heard of unhappy clients.

These guys make sure that you get educated every second you're on the mountain. In my climbing course with them, we were up before dawn (for four days) every day and practicing ice climbing technique until dark. The final two days were a summit climb on Mt. Baker.