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It is important to note that some students may be quietly sitting in the corner engrossed in an old fashioned text.

Daily and total access to computers allows students to realize that technology is not something they “do” when they go to the lab or when the teacher has checked out the laptop cart, but rather technology is something they can use everyday in class to help themselves learn.

In this new classroom, students will begin to understand that their computer is not simply a novelty to take notes with, but it is their binder, their planner, their dictionary, their journal, their photo album, their music archive, their address book.

tudents will begin to understand that their computer is not simply a novel

In Shirky's terms, teams that embrace social bookmarking decrease the "cost" of  group transactions.  No longer do members resist sharing because it's too time consuming or difficult to be valuable. Instead, with a little bit of thought and careful planning, groups can make sharing resources---a key process that all learning teams have to learn to manage---remarkably easy and instant.

Imagine the collective power of an army of readers engaged in ongoing conversation about provocative ideas, challenging one another's thought, publicly debating, and polishing personal beliefs.  Imagine the cultural understandings that could develop between readers from opposite sides of the earth sharing thought together.  Imagine the potential for brainstorming global solutions, for holding government agencies accountable, or for gathering feedback from disparate stakeholder groups when reading moves from a "fundamentally private activity" to a "community event."

Understanding that there are times when users want their shared reading experiences to be more focused, however, Diigo makes it possible to keep highlights and annotations private or available to members of predetermined and self-selected groups.  For professional learning teams exploring instructional practices or for student research groups exploring content for classroom projects, this provides a measure of targeted exploration between likeminded thinkers.

Diigo takes the idea of collective exploration of content one step further by providing groups with the opportunity to create shared discussion forums

Many of today's teachers make a critical mistake when introducing digital tools by assuming that armed with a username and a password, students will automatically find meaningful ways to learn together.  The results can be disastrous.  Motivation wanes when groups using new services fail to meet reasonable standards of performance.  "Why did I bother to plug my students in for this project?" teachers wonder.  "They could have done better work with a piece of paper and a pencil!"

With shared annotation services like Diigo, powerful learning depends on much more than understanding the technical details behind adding highlights and comments for other members of a group to see.  Instead, powerful learning depends on the quality of the conversation that develops around the content being studied together.  That means teachers must systematically introduce students to a set of collaborative dialogue behaviors that can be easily implemented online.

I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer

Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."

Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?

The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.

The breadth of knowledge, its ability to be linked to other knowledge, its cost (free), its up-to-dateness, and its preservation of editorial discussions (it records not only the article but the discussion which produced said article) makes it far more useful. And that doesn’t even begin to address things like how much easier Wikipedia is to use for mash-ups and data extraction, repurposing the information for other reference works.

Instead lets talk to students about how appropriately to use secondary sources, how to understand how encyclopedias function, how all encyclopedias are biased, all knowledge is discursive, and focus on teaching students how to judge credibility and accuracy instead of outsourcing it to people at Britannica.

Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.

Print media does much of society's heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren't newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to district attorneys to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole.

In craigslist's gradual shift from 'interesting if minor' to 'essential and transformative', there is one possible answer to the question "If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?" The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.

Second, they will stay focused on producing the best digital news products for their audience, products that take full advantage of the Internet's unique properties — its ability to combine immediacy and depth, its ability to offer highly personalized experiences, its ability to offer instant access to useful information from obscure public records to mundane event listings, and its ability to form networks so that users may form communities that mirror and extend the ones that exist in the physical world. They will learn how to engage their users to create and contribute content to enrich the experience of reading online, and not overwhelm their readers with a cacophony of undifferentiated noise.