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e difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says.

"It's indisputable that the Internet has made us smarter.... The range of things you can explore in a day is just fantastic compared to 20 years ago," says David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "There's no question that we feel the Internet has made us better researchers, better thinkers, better writers."

Books "are not the shape of knowledge," he says. "They're a limitation on knowledge." The idea of a single author presenting her ideas "was born of the limitations of paper publishing. It's not necessarily the only way or the best way to think and to write."

“How is the Kashmir conflict more than just a religious battle?”Instead of raising their hands to respond, the students quietly began typing their answers into their smartphones, laptops and tablet computers arrayed on their desks. Almost immediately, their words appeared on an interactive whiteboard at the front of the class.

So, what did Facebook announce this morning? Several things that will greatly appeal to its user base:

Even when students paid attention and took copious notes on their laptops, they still didn’t learn as well. In fact, the copiousness of their notes may be part of the problem, the study found. Laptop users are inclined to use long verbatim quotes, which they type somewhat mindlessly. The handwriters are more selective. They “wrote significantly fewer words than those who typed.” It may be, the researchers reported, “that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study” more efficiently.