Get a free college education online

Technophilia: Get a free college education online – Lifehacker

Digging way back in my “Review someday” bookmark list for this one: Lots of links to education all over the web. MIT? Check. Yale? You bet.

You can even use almighty Google to find courses:

Using the right keywords, find course syllabi (insert your own subject), lectures, tutorials, notes, podcasts, and various sorts of online books using Google.

The Lifehacker article doesn’t include a link to the Personal MBA, which is one of my favorites, but great stuff to be found out there nonetheless.

In praise of less praise

Laid-Off Dad refers to this interesting New York Magazine article on How Not to Talk to Your Kids, and sums it up nicely:

If you praise a kid’s intelligence, the article says, he’s likely to think you’re condescending to someone who you think has reached his peak. Whereas if you hold off on the flattery and instead urge him to keep trying, he’ll assume you respect his abilities and will stay motivated.

The article itself goes into more depth (five pages!), and sums it up in the middle:

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control,” she explains. “They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.

I was talking with my wife about this subject last night about our son — sometimes it seems that he just throws in the towel on things or has trouble going to the next activity. We usually just tell him “you’re smart, you can handle this” — and I’m going to try to break the old habit of just going for the “easy praise” and moving to encouraging the effort vs. the talent in his successes.

I mainly want my son to know that it’s okay — or even expected — that he work hard, and as the article’s author says, “the brain is a muscle that gets bigger when it has to think about something hard.” Work can be its own reward — I’d like to make sure he has fun trying instead of thinking he’s too smart to try (or worse, afraid to try lest he actually fail at something he’s not good at right away.

Web Design Workflow – Complete Overview

Tutorialaday.com – Design and Online Business Articles » Blog Archive » Web Design Workflow – Complete Overview
“I get asked a lot by friends and family (people that are not designer savvy), how I design my sites. I’ve never really sat down and explained each step to them, but I think it will help some of you guys”

Brilliant.

Internet marketing videos from Tubetorial

Internet marketing videos from Tubetorial

Looks like this will be a great resource on learning some of the finer bits of Web design and other tips/tricks — video is probably one of the fastest ways I’ve found to learn online.

Freelance Tipster – My Hourly Rate Calculator

Freelance Tipster – My Hourly Rate Calculator

Yikes. I filled this in, and in order to cover my home and business expenses and match my benefits and salary at the day job, I’d need to bill out at $240 an hour.

I’d been looking for something like this to help me quantify the value of the day job… much happier now

25 of the Best Books About Money

Building a Personal Finance Library: 25 of the Best Books About Money ∞ Get Rich Slowly

Lots of great books here, about a half-dozen of which I’ve read. I’m really interested in some of the “Success” themed books… as an aside, I’m leading a book club on GTD right now.

Keyboard shortcuts for OS X

Lots of handy OSX shortcuts via Rixstep.

Lots of stuf I hadn’t realized you could do here. The application Management and Menu items are the most interesting to me. I use keyboard shortcuts a lot — and from this there are a ton I didn’t know about.

Nagless Reminders

Nagless Reminders — Get the Recipient to Respond On Time and Cut Through their Email Overload « Email Overloaded

Nice quick trick to keep on top of things. Just need to find a way to set a reminder automatically — wonder if Entourage can do this?

Buffet on Habit

From a video posted to PersonalMBA.com -

“The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they’re too heavy to be broken.”