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Blogging is relatively new

How do other people deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all? Do they have some secret? Perhaps. We are asking various friends and colleagues who seem well-informed to describe their media diets.

"Simply putting traditional courses online could have negative consequences, especially for lower-performing and language minority students."

"Until further studies on the effectiveness of online learning versus in-class learning are necessary, universities would be wise to recognize that all Internet courses are not created equally,"

I've frequently run into the same problem.  When I use a font like Georgia with a size of 18, the bottom of some of the letters run into the top of the letters on the line below.   It looks ugly.I looked up the standard HTML & CSS code:  the command line-height: xxx% is available.The HTML source for my page had a section that read:<div style="text-align: left;"><font style="font-family: times new roman,serif;" size="5">House UpFront takes the wonderful accents and accessories from Shops <br>I modified it to include:<div style="text-align: left; line-height: 200%;"><font style="font-family: times new roman,serif;" size="5">House UpFront takes the wonderful accents and accessories from Shops <br>This corrected the vertical spacing problem.  Sorry I could not find a more elegant solution.  But at least this corrects the problem.Barry

We see the embedded philosophy bloom when students assemble papers as mash-ups from online snippets instead of thinking and composing on a blank piece of screen. What is wrong with this is not that students are any lazier now or learning less. (It is probably even true, I admit reluctantly, that in the presence of the ambient Internet, maybe it is not so important anymore to hold an archive of certain kinds of academic trivia in your head.)

Roughly speaking, there are two ways to use computers in the classroom. You can have them measure and represent the students and the teachers, or you can have the class build a virtual spaceship. Right now the first way is ubiquitous, but the virtual spaceships are being built only by tenacious oddballs in unusual circumstances. More spaceships, please.

There are some college experiences that don't fit this mold. Many seminars and advanced courses are based on hands-on projects and small-scale discussions with professors. Those are undoubtedly valuable. But core classes tend not to be taught that way. The very classes that should establish a student's base understanding of a subject are taught like assembly lines—lecture, problem set, exam—with no quality control. Sure, the product's quality is graded, but nothing is done about defective understanding as the student is pushed down the line.

Students don't retain anything because they didn't intuitively understand it to begin with.

Why aren't we using the 300-person gathering at 10 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday as an opportunity for active peer-to-peer instruction rather than a passive, one-size-fits-all lecture?

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it.

Customers' orders are endlessly different yet strangely all the same. No matter what the subject, clients want to be assured that their assignment is in capable hands. It would be terrible to think that your Ivy League graduate thesis was riding on the work ethic and perspicacity of a public-university slacker. So part of my job is to be whatever my clients want me to be. I say yes when I am asked if I have a Ph.D. in sociology. I say yes when I am asked if I have professional training in industrial/organizational psychology. I say yes when asked if I have ever designed a perpetual-motion-powered time machine and documented my efforts in a peer-reviewed journal.

On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.

It was not always this way. As a child, Vishal had a tendency to procrastinate, but nothing like this. Something changed him.