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LM: Everything that Maud said. I wrote a piece about enhanced fiction e-books for Salon a couple of weeks ago, and I have one on nonfiction coming up any day now. I have been thinking about the whole narrative issue. I think there is a huge difference between fiction and nonfiction

MN: The pleasure of surrender, in fiction, is the exact opposite of interactivity. It’s this sinking in to the pleasure of the story

LM: I wrote a piece years before the iPad ever existed, actually, on hypertext fiction for the New York Times Book Review.

There’s an app called Once Magazine that’s mostly photograph-based. It is an iPad-specific magazine that reports on various happenings around the world. It’s a very interesting product, and I’ve been really impressed with all the issues so far.

MN: I’ve been playing around this app called Meanwhile, which is based on a graphic novel by Jason Shiga produced in 2009 as a really complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, evidently. I became aware of it through my friend Chris Baker, who’s an editor at WIRED. I’ve been playing around with that and enjoying it. The cartoonist is also a mathematician, so there are a lot of complex and frustrating story loops that you can get caught in.

I do think this speaks to what Laura was saying about the tension between trying to solve something and trying to experience it.

And, the thing about Chopsticks is that some of it is inherent to the iPad’s touchscreen technology, but it could have been a website or something. A lot of things you see on the iPad are different kinds of web art that’s been ported into this new format. And you absorb it in a different way because you’re holding it in your hand, and you’re touching it.

And then I became really interested in the size of some of these devices. Somebody in the London Review of Books made the observation that the old cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians and other ancient cultures used were actually about the same size as the iPhone. [Peter Campbell, “At the British Museum.”] So I’m interested in this different way of experiencing story and technology.

We’re both a little odd in that we don’t necessarily fetishize the object. I read so voraciously and indiscriminately as a child that my mother was constantly buying books at yard sales and the goodwill, and whatever. And a lot of times they were falling apart — literally. I would just hope the spine wouldn’t completely come off by the end of it. So I have a somewhat utilitarian approach to the object itself, even though I appreciate a beautiful book — and I can of course be swayed to pick up a book because of the way it looks. But I don’t really care what it looks like, once I’m reading it, if I like it.

You want to reach the stars.  But you look around, and you know you can get to the moon; that’s a reasonable goal, and you can see the route to get there. And so you plan for it.  But in your planning process, you realize you can’t just get to the moon; to get there with the resources you have available to you, you have to build with a really ugly rocket. And you hate that rocket. But you need that rocket. It’s what will get you to the moon.So love your rocket. Give it a cool name. Ignore how ugly it is. Always remember that it’s what will get you to the moon, and that getting to the moon is important.

There’s great strength in seeing a barrier for what it is, knowing when to stop hitting it, knowing when to ask for help, and knowing when to turn left and go around. Fear of failure, and our tolerance for it, are powerful motivators. If someone is strongly rooted in theirs, you may not be strong enough to move them aside. But you can always move yourself. And one way to start is to ask why someone is blocking you. Ask yourself what you can do about it, aif it’s worth doing, and if you can do it.

I hope everyone will consider what you’re giving up if you can’t embody your passion. You’re making a choice, and a sacrifice, if you don’t have room to act on your goals and dreams. You are the only one who can know if that’s the right decision for you, but make the decision consciously.

When I put their semester's work into a data hopper, even I was shocked to find out that they were averaging around 1000 words per week,

I argue that the open architecture of the Web is built on the principle of diversity and maximum participation--feedback and editing

Students learn to evaluate one another's thinking and challenge one another--and, far more important, they learn from one another and correct themselves.  I cannot think of a better skill to take out into the world.

I respond more too.  Like my students, I feel like I'm not spending as many hours reading and grading term papers, but, I know, from the end-of-term data crunching again, that, in fact, I have spent more time responding to their writing than I used to. 

the tipping point in these classes is when someone the student doesn't know, an anonymous stranger, responds to their work.  When it is substantive, the student is elated and surprised that their words were taken seriously.   When it is rude or trollish, the student is offended.  Both responses are good.  The Internet needs more people committed to its improvement, to serious discourse.

As I often do with classes, I did a diagnostic, found that many of my students were woefully lacking in basic writing skills.  I asked them what they most wanted from a writing class, and quickly transformed the class into a "writing as if your life depended upon it" workshop.

The "final" in the class was for each student--with lots of readings by me and the rest of the class--to apply for three or four summer jobs and internships.  That year, every student landed a position. 

More recently, I asked graduate students why they often left their term papers until the end and, with sadness, they confessed it was often because the whole exercise of writing a research paper is so debilitating and terrifying they often developed writer's block or writer's anxiety and needed the deadline to motivate them to write.

And if I think the article is something I might want to use later, I select a representative quotation from it and then bookmark it, with an appropriate tag, in Pinboard -- which is just as wonderful as Instapaper. Incidentally, I also pay $25 a year to have Pinboard generate a (searchable!) archive of all the pages I have bookmarked, which insures me against link rot.

And one more thing: I think filtering strategies need to be taught -- starting in high school, at the latest, and in a very thorough way in colleges. But this is rarely and haphazardly done. Drinking from the firehose is too hard, too disorienting; and yet that's what we allow young people to do. This is a serious mistake. The filtering tools are out there, and they're either free or ridiculously cheap. Let's use them, and teach others to use them.

Reviewing the test of conceptual understanding, Mazur twice tried to explain one of its questions to the class, but the students remained obstinately confused. “Then I did something I had never done in my teaching career,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t you discuss it with each other?’” Immediately, the lecture hall was abuzz as 150 students started talking to each other in one-on-one conversations about the puzzling question. “It was complete chaos,” says Mazur. “But within three minutes, they had figured it out. That was very surprising to me—I had just spent 10 minutes trying to explain this. But the class said, ‘OK, We’ve got it, let’s move on.’

This innovative style of learning grew into “peer instruction” or “interactive learning,”

Interactive learning triples students’ gains in knowledge as measured by the kinds of conceptual tests that had once deflated Mazur’s spirits, and by many other assessments as well.

Peer-instructed students who’ve actively argued for and explained their understanding of scientific concepts hold onto their knowledge longer.

Interactive pedagogy, for example, turns passive, note-taking students into active, de facto teachers who explain their ideas to each other and contend for their points of view.

“Now, think of how you became good at it,” he says next. Audience members, supplied with wireless clickers, can choose from several alternatives: trial and error, apprenticeship, lectures, family and friends, practicing. Data from thousands of subjects make “two things stand out,” Mazur says. “The first is that there is a huge spike at practicing—around 60 percent of the people select ‘practicing.’” The other thing is that for many audiences, which often number in the hundreds, “there is absolutely zero percent for lectures. Nobody cites lectures.”

The active-learning approach challenges lecturers to re-evaluate what they can accomplish during class that offers the greatest value for students. Mazur cites a quip to the effect that lectures are a way of transferring the instructor’s lecture notes to students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either.

So I began to ask my students to read my lecture notes before class, and then tell me what questions they have [ordinarily, using the course’s website], and when we meet, we discuss those questions.”

Students find a neighbor with a different answer and make a case for their own response. Each tries to convince the other. During the ensuing chaos, Mazur circulates through the room, eavesdropping on the conversations. He listens especially to incorrect reasoning, so “I can re-sensitize myself to the difficulties beginning learners face.” After two or three minutes, the students vote again, and typically the percentage of correct answers dramatically improves. Then the cycle repeats.

‘We’ve never done a problem of this kind.’ I tell them, ‘If you had done a problem of this kind, then by definition, this would not be a problem.’ We have to train people to tackle situations they have not encountered before.

“It’s not easy. You get a lot of student resistance,” he continues. “You should see some of the vitriolic e-mails I get. The generic complaint is that they have to do all the learning themselves. Rather than lecturing, I’m making them prepare themselves for class—and in class, rather than telling them things, I’m asking them questions. They’d much rather sit there and listen and take notes.

In addition to student resistance, there is architectural resistance. “Most classrooms—more like 99.9 percent—on campus are auditoriums,”

By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.

After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them? The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.

Another is that overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can’t focus.

The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.

Wise managers who understand this will a) avoid requiring overtime crunches, because they’re acutely aware of the serious longer-term productivity hit that inevitably follows; b) keep the crunches as short as possible when they are necessary; and c) give their teams a few days off — one to two comp days per overtime week worked is about right — at the end of a hard sprint. This downtime enables them recuperate more quickly and completely. It’s much more productive to have them gone for the next week — and then back on the job, rested and ready to work — than have them at their workstations but too fried to get anything useful done for the next month.

The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”

And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.

For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care. The popular stereotype of the geek was born in some real truths about the specific kinds of people who were drawn to tech in those early years.

Companies broadened their working hours, so programmers who came in at noon and worked through till midnight could make their own schedules. Dress codes were loosened; personal eccentricities were celebrated. HP famously brought in breakfast every morning so its engineers would remember to eat.

There were two problems with this. The first is that this “passion” ideal didn’t recognize that the vast majority of people have legitimate physical, emotional and psychological needs — things like sleep, exercise, relaxation and the maintenance of strong family and social support bonds — that these engineers didn’t have to nearly the same degree. The second was that most managers, lacking windows into their workers’ souls, decided to cut corners and measure passion with one easy-to-chart metric: “willingness to spend your entire life at the office.”

The unions — for 150 years, the guardians of the 40-hour week — were falling under a conservative onslaught; and in their place, the new cult of the entrepreneur was ascendant.

“working 90 hours a week and loving it!” (an actual T-shirt worn with pride by the original Macintosh team. (Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead.)

Within 15 years, everything America’s managers used to know about sustaining worker productivity was forgotten. Now, 30 years and a few economic meltdowns on, the cafeterias and child-care centers and gyms are mostly gone, along with the stock options and bonuses that were once held out as the potential reward for the long hours. All that remains of those heady, optimistic days is the mandatory 60-hour work-week. And, unless you’re an hourly worker — still entitled to time and a half by law — the only inducement employers currently offer in exchange for submitting yourself to this abuse is that you get to keep your job.

There are now whole industries and entire branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress, but the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help. The original short-work movement in 19th-century Britain demanded “eight for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works.

Here’s why. By the eighth hour of the day, people’s best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they’re only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.

But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done.

I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet: 1. The ability to turn a topic into a search strategy 2. The ability to search in library databases 3. The ability to look at a citation and determine whether it is a scholarly journal or not (or maybe they’ve just checked a box in a database which means that they never need to learn this important skill) 4. The ability to read an abstract and determine whether the article is relevant to their topic 5. The ability to read a scholarly journal article and synthesize information from it 6. The ability to integrate evidence from the scholarly literature into their paper 7. The ability to write effectively

Another thing that the focus on requiring students to only find peer-reviewed sources does is that it distances them from research and information literacy.

But when the focus is on telling students that the only quality stuff comes from the peer-reviewed literature, we are distancing what students learn in school about information literacy from what they will do in the real world.

I also love the idea of giving all students in a class peer-reviewed articles from different disciplines and have them analyze them together. It can not only help them to understand and dissect peer-reviewed literature, but it can also show them the differences in scholarly communication in different disciplines.

And because the M.I.T.x platform will be available free to people around the world, M.I.T. officials said they expected that other universities would also use it to offer their own free online courses. Mr. Reif said that M.I.T. was investing millions of dollars in the project, and that it expected to raise money from foundations and others.

Khan Academy is equally well known, and an Inside Higher Ed news report shares some of the founder’s views about how his open learning website could provide competency-based credentialing as opposed to traditional accreditation.

Then there are some new entries into the open course market, such as Udacity, Coursera, Good Semester and Udemy.  These newer competitors are starting off with just a few courses, mostly free, but they give the impression that as many different providers become available a strikingly different model of higher education – alt-HE – could emerge.

An unbundled system of higher education might require academic librarians to think more entrepreneurially about how they operate.

The growing popularity of unbundled higher education also demonstrates there is a huge global audience for these courses; citizens around the world are seeking higher education that is unavailable or too costly in their own community. The forward-thinking traditional universities are looking at how they can capitalize on that market.

Wolfram Alpha can come up with a random password and estimate how long it will take to crack. You can even tweak the rules used to generate the password.

Have you been drinking? Wolfram Alpha can estimate whether you can legally drive home. Ask it if you’re drunk and you’ll get a form asking for more information.

Enter a name and you can see how common it is, complete with a graph showing you how popular the name has been over time. Enter multiple names and Wolfram will compare how common they are.

Type body mass index and Wolfram will present you with another form. After you provide your weight and height, Wolfram Alpha will calculate your BMI and tell you whether you’re within the normal range.

Want to find words that begin with a certain letter, end with a certain combination of letters — or both? Just ask Wolfram Alpha in plain English.

In my next post, I will go into more detail about NPR’s approach to content modularity and why our approach is more than just data normalization.