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only 2 percent of students said they bought an e-textbook this past fall semester.

The City University of New York, for instance, is looking closely at encouraging e-textbooks as part of an effort to lower student costs. "At end of the day, it's how do you drive savings for our students, who are feeling a great economic impact," said Brian Cohen, CUNY's chief information officer.

If students do buy them and begin to carry them around campus, they could be a more powerful educational tool than laptop computers.

Jim Groom, an instructional technologist at the University of Mary Washington, expressed weariness with all the hype around the Apple announcement. He said he is concerned about Apple's policies of requiring all applications to be approved by the company before being allowed in its store, just as it does with the iPhone. And he said that Apple's strategy is to make the Web more commercial, rather than an open frontier. "It offers a real threat to the Web," he said.

He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said. Now that Apple's long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.

There is no longer such thing as scarcity.

There are only misallocated resources.

It happened right under our noses

strengths “come naturally.”

If you have any connection with your strengths

My strength is the ability to see patterns. It’s what enabled me to write this post. People call me “insightful.” I have the ability to see stuff that other people don’t see, even when it’s staring them right in the face. (I’ve been calling this process “metathinking,”

I started writing about the patterns I was seeing. Explaining trends I was seeing in simple language, distilling down big concepts into words that people could “get.

they’ve provided you with a free resource. They’re publicly exposing you to their network.

What I did was go to Listorious.com. I looked at all the Top Lists that were interesting to me, and started following every single person who I thought I could learn from. That means I looked through their tweetstream to see if it was filled with potentially useful links to info, and I also clicked through to their personal website.

This takes effort and time. It’s work. And it’s unpaid. So why on Earth would you waste your time doing this? Because something interesting happens when you start sending people links to information that they can turn around and apply in the real world,

It builds trust. This was literally a revelation for m

As I started interacting more with these real life humans in an online space, I couldn’t understand why people were being so nice to me and sharing information with me and providing me with resources.

Do you know how this makes me feel? Empowered.

All of this free giving and sharing actually does something tremendously valuable. It enables us.

It’s networks. The answer is networks. Networks solve the problem of complexity

It turns out, life is EXACTLY like a game. If you can access the right resources, you can win. Now here’s the kicker. Everyone can win.

complex system can only function with independently acting agents who collaborate.

a globally cooperative society, as we’ve assumed. She showed, in practice, that this could actually work.

This whole online thing is essentially a simulation – it mimics the actual world

Turns out, we’re all actually in this together, all trying to figure out a way that we can all utilize our strengths, connect, collaborate, and survive. If helping each other and building trust is the way to make it work, let’s make it work.

Networks self-organize.

The point is that we want to build trust

What happens when your entire organization of people, as a unit, is a network in itself, but each person also has their personal networks of relationships to draw on, which extend beyond the organization?

The world will keep moving. It’s accelerating at an accelerating rate. The ONLY WAY to deal with it is not to cling to the old hierarchies and silos and pride and egos. We have to understand that we can only deal with this as a fully connected system. And the really crazy part is: we already have everything we need to make this happen. It’s already in place.

All that needs to change is the mindset.

We’ll be flexible, adaptive, and intelligent, because we’ll be able to quickly and freely allocate resources where they’re needed in order to make change.

If you think so too, pass it on.

I thought that made this an idea worth spreading.

It’s an option that seems not only possible, but preferable, and comes with a plan that’s implementable immediately.

A missing element, in my view, is a simple way for participants to tangibly contribute to the growth of the network. I would love to see a curated version of Pledgebank.org woven into blogs like EBD, where ideas for enhancing the network could be proposed. These crowdfunding/crowdsourcing elements might spark donations of funds and time to enrich the commons and help the network to grow.

Systems – biological, social and economic – are driven by avoiding risk and moving forward. Moving forward is life – no choice. Avoiding risk is the constraints and dangers of the environment – no choice. But life does make a choice.

that the transparency provided by social media, especially in its revealing the structure of networks, drives the growth of trust.

But as the number of friends begins to increase—particularly over that magic Dunbar number of 150—the spell begins to wear off. At this scale, we simply can’t easily keep track of it all. When our number of connections rises above 150 everything becomes simply comments, as real conversations tax our already limited ability to interface with the network.

That mythical thing, social connection, doesn’t flow over these networks; information flows over these networks. The only reason the network ever felt meaningful was because, at small scale, the network operated like a community. But that breaks apart at large scale.

The thing about all these is that they’re not a shared experience—they are my experiences, which I am sharing with you, but you probably cannot experience with me—my thoughts or fascination with the article I just posted, the feeling of getting on that plane, or the thrill of watching the Sharks tie the game. Perhaps you can compare your notes of your own experience of these things; that’s what most Twitter conversation seems to be, to me, but the experiences are not shared. This differs from a discussion in a community, such as the type that occurs on SB Nation game day threads. The conversation does not center around any one individual’s experience, but rather the collective condition of the community. The conversation is the experience. Each comment is driven with the purpose of evoking and expressing the emotions that the community experiences, and particularly the ones they hold in common.

there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again

“We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”

$46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.

If we know something works

it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training

The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.

Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.

“Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”

“It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”

“There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”

“They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”

The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.

term” that can slide past critical analysis.

engagement is a “fluffy

rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.

that computers can distract and not instruct.

guide on the side.

Professor Cuban at Stanford

But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint

creating an impetus to rethink education entirely

Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.

This is big business.

“Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”