One of the side effects of big conferences like
OSCON is the accidental visibility that some people get (of course some people get some well-deserved non-accidental visibility).
I actually did not get to attend this one. However, I heard a lot of about Kathy Sierra's presentation about "Creating Passionate Users." At the moment,
SpikeSource, Intel and CMU-West had just launched our
BRR initiative, an open project to create a standard software assessment framework. Being the moderator of the forum, I felt that I need all the help that I can get from all the maestro (or maestra) in community building. Naturally I was intrigued by the presentation that I did not attend, so I googled it, and found this
http://headrush.typepad.com . Only then I realized that she is the co-creator of the O'Reilly's "
Head First" series, technical books with a sense of humor and huge head pictures as covers.
Since then I have became really fond of the blog site. It is scattered with gems about how people learn and how we can utilize the knowledge in whatever we are doing. Learning is a topic that has intrigued me since childhood. It was the reason that I focused on Artificial Intelligence during my formal CS training, and the reason why I took Neuropsychology class as a CS student.
Not only that I liked the topic of the blog, I love the fact that they actually eat their medicines. They mold their information according to the wisdoms that they preach. Information is presented in bite-size (not 8 bit, mind you!!), you always hear from both sides of the story, etc. It would have been detestable to learn about learning from a learning website where everything is intractable.
One topic that I haven't found in their site is actually the simplest learning methodology, that is learning through positive enforcement. Usually this is called the
Hebbian learning, in reference of
Donald Olding Hebb , a neurologist who first proposed the concept. This is the believed concept of how neuron connections in mammal brains are enforced, i.e. mammal's learning process. Hebbian learning has also become a method to train neural network.
Anyway, enough about this for now. I am sure the "Head First" team are experts of Hebbian learning concept. I am sure they will get to it when the time is right. Similarly, I will write more about it sometime, again when the time is right.