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M.I.T.’s bloggers, who are paid $10 an hour for up to four hours a week, offer thoughts on anything that might interest a prospective student.

“High school students read the blogs, and they come in and say ‘I can’t believe Haverford students get to do such interesting things with their summers,’ ” he said. “There’s no better way for students to learn about a college than from other students.”

“We saw very quickly that prospective students were engaging with each other and building their own community,”

"Students in a global community, whether they are from Central America, Europe, Africa, Asia, or the United States, will face similar challenges; however the historical and social context surrounding solutions to such challenges necessarily differ," Laubichler says. "Our students will increasingly have the means to talk directly with each other in real time, and through such interactive forums, develop the intellectual tools to understand and address the complexity before them, in every human endeavor"

The view that experimentation is bad; that mistakes are a pox to be ashamed of, rather than opportunities for learning and re-evaluation; that unique approaches are a thing to be scoffed at – these are all shortsighted views that need to be cut out from the root.

Subverting the dominant paradigm should be job one for educators anyway.

boundaries are inserted where the brain experiences what Zacks calls “prediction error” — when things break a pattern of repetition and thus signal to the brain a boundary that is used to construct the temporal model for the event — its typical sequence. 

the response of the audience — comprised mainly of educational experts — and of Zacks himself is that one practical lesson from his research is that creators of narrative content, such as film, should make an effort to provide more obvious segmentation in their products.  Clearly, if this is how the brain works, we should work this way too. I think this is a major fallacy that pervades the reception of brain science research.  People tend to assume that if the brain works a certain way, then so should we.

the lesson is to get good at perceiving and creating event boundaries, which requires not pre-segmented media, but the opposite — hard to grasp art, stuff that violates expectations and rewards the perciever with a different perspective.   In fact, giving students media with well defined boundaries may cause their capacity to construct boundaries to atrophy, much as caffeine causes our adrenal glands to shrink. (I know, it’s a good reason to stop drinking coffee.)