Coursera - Learning How To Learn

• What is Chunking?
• The process of grouping several items that you need to remember into a larger whole. An example of this is mnemonics. A more general example is the act of putting on a jacket. If we take that process and break it down, there are a lot of things that we'd have to explain, but we store all those movements into a Chunk.
• Illusions of Competence
• While learning, we should not be focusing on the problems that we already know how to solve, we should instead move on to the more difficult problems. This struck me because when I was in college, I would set aside large chunks of time for going over the stuff I'd already learned and it was very time consuming. This practice would often take the time that I'd allocated for learning new concepts -- causing great panic when it was time to be tested. Physics and Calculus problems sometimes took an entire page of work to complete. Giving into this illusion cost me a great amount of time. 

Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential

• No Need for Genius Envy
• There are people who have natural gifts for some things, but that does not mean that the average person couldn't get to the same level of knowledge over time. Being smarter or more intelligent often equates to having a larger working memory (the average person's working memory is 4 slots). But having the average working memory could give the average person an advantage. Once an average person commits a particular chunk to memory, it is known inside out as a result of the way that it was stored (using many of the techniques in this course). The average person has to be creative in forming Chunks, this creativity results in a richer knowledge. The people possessing a natural gift did not have to go through the same process. Therefore, the creative process, along with any external connections, is absent. 
• Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life
• I kind of already follow this mantra. The quote "Whether you think you can do it or not, you're right" is something I didn't realize was true until my late 20's. When I was a 25 year old room service waiter, I would work with college students that were only there so they could pay for their books or tuition, but they never planned on working there for more than a couple of years. Back then, it was so hard for me to imagine myself being enrolled in college or ever working outside of the food and beverage industry. I thought that higher education was something that I was unable to do. I was really beat up from my experience in high school. One day, I started thinking that none of it was really unapproachable and that failing would only make succeeding more desirable. I enrolled in community college, graduated with honors, then enrolled in University and got a Computer Science degree (graduating again with honors) -- all the while, never failing a course. The mind is a powerful thing.