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At Reed College, having all the texts available in a political-science class on the iPad meant it was easier to refer to readings and pull in outside material for discussion, says Martin Ringle, the college's chief technology officer.

Course readings were converted to PDF's at Reed, which allowed students to mark them up using an application called iAnnotate, but Mr. Ringle acknowledges that this wouldn't work for all classes, because many texts can't easily be converted to PDF's, and many electronic textbooks don't allow annotation.

While Apple has promoted the iPad's ability to change learning, Ms. Simon says that as far as she knows, the company isn't working with leaders in the learning process: professors themselves.

but consumer decisions rather than educational ones will probably determine which tablets students purchase—and which ones colleges will support, he says.

No one has created a better mechanism for discovery, memory, and mentoring than the one devised by innovative American academics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Undergraduate students who prepare for face-to-face classes via online lectures, problem sets, and discussion boards can take Socratic discovery to levels like those of the best graduate business and law schools.

Online degrees are steadily getting better, and the cost of providing them is a small fraction of what traditional institutions spend per graduate. Faced with an either-or choice, many young college students will follow the lead of adult learners: They'll take the affordable online option over the socially preferable but financially inaccessible traditional college experience.

In addition to adopting online learning as what we call a sustaining innovation, avoiding disruption will require incumbent institutions to effectively change their DNA. Most will need to become more focused on undergraduate students, cutting back on graduate programs that serve relatively few students while consuming much faculty time and generating little of the prestige hoped for when they were created. Programmatic offerings need to be more focused: Some majors should be dropped, and many should be shortened, making it more feasible for students to complete a degree in four years. The number of departments and centers at most institutions needs strategic shrinking.

To Orange, I will show an actual example of a map in my next full post and explain more about the parameters that are given and what the students fill in themselves. You raise a much more important question though, about the necessity of simplifying in order for the simulation to work. This aspect of the simulation almost led me to abandon the whole thing as I started to think it through and plan for it. Instead I found two ways to deal with it: 1. I challenge my students to tell me where the simulation is oversimplified and make their own case for how the simulation should change for the next time it is performed. This way they are not simply accepting our imaginary world “as is” and are instead actively thinking about how the real world works and how we may have misrepresented it in our simulation. (Even if the simulation fails miserably, it has succeeded in getting students to think about how the world works!) 2. I encourage the students to use the simplification as a canvas on which they can build and/or interpret complexity. In a lecture format I only have so much time to cover the effects of colonization – perhaps 50 minutes – not enough to really explore all of the different facets. In the World Simulation I can encourage each student to think about how colonization would affect their culture in multiple ways and at multiple levels (e.g. infrastructure, social structure, superstructure). Sometimes this is to complex to be incorporated into the simulation, but they are asked to do a reflection paper immediately following the simulation in which they write their own “cultural history.” This written format allows them to explore some complexities they might not have had the time or means to express in the simulation.

However, as with annotations in paper books, sometimes the value of an annotation goes beyond its content. Marshall (1998) suggests that the very act of evaluating a handwritten annotation's relevance creates a level of critical engagement that would not happen while reading a clean copy of a book. Marshall studied university students' annotations in textbooks, and found that students preferred books that had been marked by previous readers, as long as the marks were intelligible.

Similarly, Sherman (2008) studied marginalia in English Renaissance texts and found that students of the time were routinely taught that simply reading a book was insufficient. In order to have a "fruitful interaction" (p. 4) with a text, marking it up with one's thoughts and reactions was considered essential. Marginalia and other signs of engagement and use – even such apparently content-neutral additions as food stains – Sherman sees as valuable evidence of reader reaction, and the place of the physical information object in people's lives.

In a study of flickr.com, Ames and Naaman (2007) created a taxonomy of motivations for annotation along two dimensions: sociality and function. The latter dimension echoes people's motivation to annotate printed textbooks: the function of making important or interesting passages more easily findable for later review. The sociality dimension is a component of the Web infrastructure – making photographs findable for others, and creating shared tagsets for people with similar interests, so they might collaborate more easily. In this sense, photographs are boundary objects (Star and Griesemer 1989), around which diverse individuals can interact and communities can build (Gal, Yoo and Boland 2006). Digital collection items can also be boundary objects, even if those conversations take place asynchronously.

This summer, UC Berkeley is asking new students to submit a less controversial part of themselves: Their voices and accents

One result will be an analysis of California accents, as researchers try to get beyond such stereotypes as the Surfer Dude, Valley Girl and Central Valley Farmer to study participants' vowel sounds, along with their locations, ethnicity and socioeconomic backgrounds.

After two years and perhaps again after four, students will be asked to make new recordings to determine whether being at UC homogenized their accents or pushed them into distinctive speech subgroups, Johnson said. (For example, he said, because of his Oklahoma upbringing, he pronounced "Don" and "dawn" identically in one of the experiment's exercises.)

Among those embracing the project was Chloe Hunt, 18, a freshman from Santa Barbara who said the voice map made her even more curious to meet students from many cultural backgrounds. "It made me think about who I'm going to be sitting next to in class," said Hunt, who learned Farsi from Iranian relatives.

Leah Grant, 41, who is transferring to UC Berkeley from Long Beach City College, said listening to the voice samples made her feel like part of the university already. The varying approaches also were amusing, she said.

The level of perceived challenge The type of rewards or recognition available The context or content used for practicing and assessing skills The tools used for information gathering or production The color, design, or graphics of layouts, etc. The sequence or timing for completion of subcomponents of tasks

it is important to build in periodic or persistent “reminders” of both the goal and its value in order for them to sustain effort and concentration in the face of distracters.

Prompt or require learners to explicitly formulate or restate goal Display the goal in multiple ways Encourage division of long-term goals into short-term objectives Demonstrate the use of hand-held or computer-based scheduling tools Use prompts or scaffolds for visualizing desired outcome  Engage learners in assessment discussions of what constitutes excellence and generate relevant examples that connect to their cultural background and interests 

Mastery-oriented feedback is the type of feedback that guides learners toward mastery rather than a fixed notion of performance or compliance.

Provide feedback that is frequent, timely, and specific Provide feedback that is substantive and informative rather than comparative or competitive