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these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

these dangers--like the potentials--can only really be understood when we study not individuals alone, but the contexts and systems of which they are a part.

let me say another word or two about our friend, the student who thinks he can read Romeo and Juliet in 10 minutes. It seems to me that he has a lot in common with educational policy makers who think that the experience of reading the book can be reduced to a small number of items on a standardized test. Both have an instrumental understanding of reading and learning which sees learning as a product and has not respect for the process of really engaging deeply with the literary experience. In many ways, the student's attitude is a byproduct of the current structure of education as much as it is a byproduct of the instant gratification promised by digital culture. As someone who has been involved in the last year with a project which seeks to model ways we can teach Moby-Dick in contemporary schools, I can tell you the resistance we've gotten from some teachers comes at both levels. Yes, some teachers don't think their students have the attention span to deal with a novel of this length and complexity but many more simply say that they don't think they have time to teach a novel of such richness if they are going to stay on track and review all of the content they are supposed to cover under the new national standards. Both push back against a depth of experience and the student may simply trying to act efficiently to give the teachers what they want on the test. As someone who loves literature, both sides of this equation break my heart.

what the gamers are doing in the Korean Bong is better described as intense concentration, entering a state of flow, rather than multitasking per se. A growing body of work has stressed the kinds of active problem solving which surrounds the play of certain kinds of games, the collaboration which occurs through certain forms of participatory culture, etc. as other ways of engaging with the online world. To me, there's something reductive about continuing to return to issues of multitasking when depicting Katie Salen's game school for example. Katie's approach is not about turning students lose on the computer; it is about teaching them to look at the world as a complex system and developing skills as designers. In my White Paper for MacArthur, I identify multitasking as a skill -- but I don't mean by this what young people think they are doing when they talk about multitasking. I mean the ability to manage attention -- sometimes concentrating on a single text or problem, sometimes scanning the environment to form a hazier understanding of the bigger picture, much as a driver needs to keep their eyes on the road in front of them but also needs to scan the rear view mirror. I think schools have a role to play in helping young people sharpen their understanding of which mode of engagement is appropriate for different tasks and contexts.

The goal shouldn't be to decide if computers are good or bad. Our goal should be to identify what a more constructive relationship to this technology might look like and to insure that those skills and practices get transmitted to a broader segment of the population.

My experience in creating podcasts came through much nobler endeavors. It began with a research project in the working-class neighborhoods of North Belfast and a frustrated conversation over pints in a pub. I was on a research high after an interview with two women of very different political backgrounds. They were friends, brought together by the work of a local nonprofit, and their mutual admiration shone from the lightning-fast banter that they tossed back and forth throughout the interview. It was clear to me that they were a perfect example of a friendship from different sides of the political divide. But my friend at the pub just couldn't get it. He suggested that their friendship might be contrived, a mere show for my benefit, or that if real, it didn't mean as much as I thought. Exasperated, I pulled out my recorder and played the conversation back to him. As their Belfast accents filled up our corner booth, I could see his posture slacken and the battle turn my way. In that moment, I decided that only a podcast could finish telling my story. Over the next months, armed with just an MP3 player and some freeware suggested by a friend, I worked to piece together the story of North Belfast through interviews, conversations, and the sounds of the streets. The result was crude, elementary, and slightly difficult to listen to. But I was hooked.

Student Use (and Misuse) of Podcast Technology

In fact, the iPod topped the list of the most "in" things on campus in 2006, according to Student Monitor's Lifestyle & Media Study.

Net Gen students are facile at multitasking

Workers anticipated having a single profession for the duration of their working lives. Education was based on a factory-like, "one size fits all" model. Talent was developed by weeding out those who could not do well in a monochromatic learning environment.

Knowing now means using a well-organized set of facts to find new information and to solve novel problems. In 1900, learning consisted largely of memorization; today it relies chiefly on understanding.

the Obama administration's educational policy under the leadership of Arne Duncan lacks a democratic vision and sense of moral direction

Almost all of Duncan's polices are indebted to the codes of a market-driven business culture, legitimated through discourses of measurement, efficiency and utility. This is a discourse that values hedge fund managers over teachers, privatization over the public good, management over leadership and training over education. Duncan's fervent support of neoliberal values are well-known and are evident in his support for high-stakes testing, charter schools, school-business alliances, merit pay, linking teacher pay to higher test scores, offering students monetary rewards for higher grades, CEO-type management, abolishing tenure, defining the purpose of schooling as largely job training, the weakening of teacher unions and blaming teachers exclusively for the failure of public schooling.[4]

Duncan has expanded the reach of his educational reform policies and is now attempting to rewrite curricular mandates. Emphasizing the practical and experiential, he seeks to gut the critical nature of theory, pedagogy and knowledge taught in colleges of education. This is an important issue to more than just teachers who are denied a voice in curricular development; it also affects whole generations of youth. Such a bold initiative reveals in very clear terms the political project that drives his reforms and what he fears about both public schooling and the teachers who labor in classrooms every day.

the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry. • The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. • These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.

The scholarship of teaching, in particular, has been overlooked for too long.

They serve as conservators and promulgators of our cultural memories

The value of what happens on a campus is hard to quantify, but it can be life-changing. That's true for most of us who have chosen to work in higher education, as it is for many former students who pursued work in "the real world."

Mr. Somade told me recently that "the general idea is that if I don't have to come to class, I don't want to come to class—and technology is giving students more and more reason not to come."

In an era when students can easily grab material online, including lectures by gifted speakers in every field, a learning environment that avoids courses completely—or seriously reshapes them—might produce a very effective new form of college.

much of what students rate as the most valuable part of their learning experience at college these days takes place outside the traditional classroom, citing data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, an annual study based at Indiana University at Bloomington. Four of the eight "high-impact" learning activities identified by survey participants required no classroom time at all: internships, study-abroad programs, senior thesis or other "capstone" projects, or the mundane-sounding "undergraduate research," meaning working with faculty members on original research, much as graduate students do.

We promote educational opportunity and social justice by providing high-quality university education to all who wish to realise their ambitions and fulfil their potential.

Nearly all of our undergraduate courses have no formal entry requirements, either prior qualifications or experience.

We believe that it is the qualifications with which our students leave, rather than those with which they enter, that count.

Thrun, a German-born and largely self-taught expert in robotics, is famous for leading the team that built Google’s self-driving car. He is offering his “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” course online and free of charge. His remote students will get the same lectures as students paying $50,000 a year, the same assignments, the same exams and, if they pass, a “statement of accomplishment” (though not Stanford credit). When The Times wrote about this last month, 58,000 students had signed up for the course. After the article, enrollment leapt to 130,000, from across the globe.

Thrun’s ultimate mission is a virtual university in which the best professors broadcast their lectures to tens of thousands of students. Testing, peer interaction and grading would happen online; a cadre of teaching assistants would provide some human supervision; and the price would be within reach of almost anyone. “Literally, we can probably get the same quality of education I teach in class for about 1 to 2 percent of the cost,” Thrun told me.

Thrun believes there are technological answers to all of these questions, some of them being worked out already by other online frontiersmen.