We just raised a million dollars from these guys to help the world learn!
We’re delighted to announce today that we have raised a million dollars from a wonderful set of investors to pursue our mission to make learning joyful. Now, not unreasonably, our dear community may not be that interested in how we keep the ship afloat, but in fact the character of the people who back a...
Happy Valentine’s Day, Memrisers!
Since language is the true food of love, and also because today is Valentine’s day, we decided to tee you up for all current and future romantic endeavours with a comprehensive guide to saying “I love you” in a hundred different languages. It’s difficult to understate the importance of this life-skill, so get to it! Never...
Cool new Memrise stuff to learn, accompanying today’s Observer
I’m pleased to be able to say that today’s Observer included a long supplement on memory written by yours truly – it’ll come onto the Guardian website tomorrow. It’s quite a fun piece, with lots of exercises to test and grow your memory, and a few inventive games exploring the re-discovery of neglected memories and...
Mems, as explained by William James
Memrise enthusiast and French child-psychologist Juliette Danjon brought this marvellous quote by William James to our attention today: “The art of remembering is the art of thinking; … when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and...
Sunday Summary- Week 2 (a short history of Memrise)
This week, the Memrise team has splintered to the four corners of the globe. I therefore thought it might be a good moment, not least since we have been oddly silent on this blog about some of the bizarre locations from which we have operated, to give a brief history of our roaming existence- it...
Week 1: Sunday Summary
A few of our community have been wondering on the forums what we’re up to, so here’s a first instalment of what we’ll call the Sunday Summary- an end-of-week overview of what we’re working on, the state of our morale, our plans for the future and any anecdotes from the week’s work. First thing to...
Why childhood memories are dangerous
Childhood memory can be something of a treasure-trove for thinking about the mind. So much deep conceptual change happens in early childhood, and so little in adulthood, that childhood memories can be uniquely helpful in understanding what it is to have a truly different perspective, and so what is going on with the normal perspectives...
Ed teaching BBC man the periodic table in an afternoon
I’m appearing tonight on BBC1 at 7.30 p.m. in an episode of ”Bang Goes the Theory”, which has devoted tonight’s episode to memory. They wanted me to teach presenter Dallas Campbell the periodic table, so he knew it by heart. I was to have no more than a few hours with him. The periodic table...
The Memory Garden
Learning is one of the great pleasures of life, yet the most common emotion in learning is fear. A common object of that fear is the time and effort it will take to come to know something; relatedly, we sometimes think that to learn a little is not something to be proud of. Fear that...
Ed Cooke on NPR explaining how to use your memory
Our very own man of memory, Ed Cooke, just appeared on NPR radio’s “How to do Everything” series. The topic was memory, naturally enough, and the podcast is well worth a watch, not least because Justin Witte illustrated it in very entertaining fashion. In the video you can listen to Ed interviewed by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag as...
What celebrities can teach us about memory
A while ago, a New Zealand judge called Robert Murfitt ruled that a girl who’d been named ‘Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii‘ should be placed in his court’s guardianship until ‘appropriately’ renamed. He felt that the name ‘makes a fool of the girl and sets her up with a clear social disability and handicap’....
Apps for the oppressed?
In “Pedagogy of the Oppressed“ Paulo Freire‘s blunt assessment of the world of formal education is that it actively undermines human development, and that it is therefore an instrument of oppression. Teaching, he says, is inevitably narrative-making (a point Stephen Heppell explored at the LWF conference on Tuesday). To teach, we tell stories, whether they be about chemicals, humans, French...
