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Marcel Oudejans
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- 3 months on
Marcel's shared items in Google Reader - Teach Your Child to Read
This book really works! My daughter could read at age three, and has now really discovered the joy of reading at a young age. There are so many skills that kids can learn for themselves once they master reading. This is truly one of the fundamentals that is worth the effort to instill as early as possible.
-- James HomTeach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons
Sierfried Engelmann, Phyllis Haddox, Elaine Bruner
1986, 395 pages
$15Available from Amazon
Sample Excerpts:
The following are the four most important points about an effective sequence for teaching reading:
1. The beginning exercises are simple and do not resemble later exercises (just as beginning piano exercises do not look much like advanced ones).
2. The program provides teaching for every single skill that the child is expected to use when performing even the simplest reading exercises.
3. The exercises change form slowly, and the changes are relatively small, so that the exercises are always relatively easy for the child.
4. At every step, the program provides for very clear and unambiguous communications with the child.
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To decode the sentence Ruf unter glop splee, you simply say the words. This illustration points out that you may be able to decode without understanding what the sentence means. Traditional reading programs typically confuse the beginning reader about whether the teacher is trying to teach decoding or understanding. These programs typically begin with the teacher discussing the details of a picture. If the pitcure shows a girl named Jan, the teacher talks about Jan—what she is wearing, the color or her hair....It might seem that this communication is effective because it promotes interest and gives the children the motivation for both reading and understanding the written message. However, this communication may prompt the child to formulate a serious misconception about how to read. If the teacher always talks about the picture before reading the word, and if the word is always predictable by referring to the picture, the child may reasonably assume that:
- You read words by referring to a picture.
- You must understand the word that is to be decoded before you can read it.*
English, clearly, is not a regularly spelled language. It is an amalgam of contributions from Latin, Greek, and French. But there are ways to simplify it for the beginning reader.
Distar solves the problem by introducing an altered orthography. This orthography does two things. It presents variations of some symbols so that we can create a larger number of words that are spelled regularly (each symbol only having a single sound function). At the same time, the orthography permits us to spell words the way they are spelled in traditional orthography. Here is the Distar alphabet:
4 months on
Marcel's shared items in Google Reader - Giving away a magician's secrets
Steve Cohen makes more than a million dollars a year doing magic tricks.
I will now tell you the secrets of this magic:
- He sells to a very specific group of people, people who are both willing to hear what he has to say and able to pay what he wants to charge them.
- He tells a story to this group, a story that matches their worldview. He doesn't try to teach non-customers a lesson or persuade them that they are wrong or don't know enough about his art. Instead, he makes it easy for his happy customers to bring his art to others.
- He intentionally creates an experience that is remarkable and likely to spread. "What did you do last night?" is a great question when it's asked of someone you entertained the night before, particularly if you can give the audience an answer they can give. That's how the word spreads.
- He's extremely generous in who he works with, how promiscuous he is about sharing and in his attitude.
- He's very good at his craft. Don't overlook this one.
I guess it comes down to this: if you're having trouble persuading people to buy what you sell, perhaps you should sell something else. Failing that, perhaps you could talk about what you sell in a different way.
Important clarification: I'm not telling you to sell out or to pander or to dumb down your art. Great marketers lead people, stretching the boundaries and bringing new messages to people who want to hear them. The core of my argument is that someone's worldview, how they feel about risk or other factors, is beyond your ability to change in the short run. Sell people something they're interesting in buying. If you can't leverage the worldview they already have, you are essentially invisible. Which is a whole other sort of magic, one that's not so profitable.
4 months on
Marcel's shared items in Google Reader - The Levy flight
Clay Shirky taught me this very cool mathematical concept that shows up in nature, and now in marketing and social media.
An animal that forages will hang out in a small area, looking for nuts or berries, then will realize it has used up all the likely sources in this spot. It will then head off in a random direction, walk many paces, and start foraging again. When you plot the Levy flight, it looks like this:
Someone discovers your site. They poke and prod and join and return and return again. Then they feel as though there's no more benefit and they move on, surfing until they find another place to forage.
Someone finds your restaurant. They love it. They return with friends. They hang out and become regulars for a while. Then they get bored and start browsing again.
Adding the Levy flight to your understanding is a much more nuanced representation of consumer behavior than solely thinking about the ideas of brand loyalty or random web surfing.
5 months on
Marcel's shared items in Google Reader - The Levy flight
Clay Shirky taught me this very cool mathematical concept that shows up in nature, and now in marketing and social media.
Someone discovers your site. They poke and prod and join and return and return again. Then they feel as though there's no more benefit and they move on, surfing until they find another place to forage.
Someone finds your restaurant. They love it. They return with friends. They hang out and become regulars for a while. Then they get bored and start browsing again.
Adding the Levy flight to your understanding is a much more nuanced representation of consumer behavior than solely thinking about the ideas of brand loyalty or random web surfing.
5 months on
Marcel's shared items in Google Reader
