Skill Acquisition

by: Michael Merchant

Why go to University?

To get job skills!

Learn Skills to....

 

Build cool things

 

Many courses are disengaging!

 

ADD Rates are going up dramatically!

20% increase in ADD in the last 10 years

How can we make learning skills fun again?

 

How do you acquire skills?

 

Select a skill!

 

Find a Master!

 

Find a Tutorial

 

Practice Practice Practice

 

Share your success!

 

The Skill Acquisition Process

 

Skill Trees

 

StackOverFlow.com

 

Beeminder.com

 

 

 

Plan with the Experts

 

The Community

 

Competition

 

Guilds!

 

Old School Guilds

 

My Advisor - Judy OlsonJudith Olson is the Bren Professor of Information and Computer Sciences in theInformatics Department at the UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments in the School of Social Ecology and the Merage School of Business.

She has researched teams whose members are not collocated for over 20 years, summaries of which are found in her most cited paper, “Distance Matters,” (Olson & Olson, 2000), and in her key theoretical contribution in the book Scientific Collaboration on the Internet (Olson, Zimerman, and Bos, Eds., 2008).

Her current work focuses on ways to verify the theory's components while at the same time helping new scientific collaborations succeed. She has studied distributed teams both in the field and in the laboratory, the latter focusing on the communication hurdles distributed teams have and the consequent underutilization of remote team members skills and the reduction in trust.

Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and with her husband and colleague, Gary Olson, holds the Lifetime Achievement award from the Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction.