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20 slides at 20 seconds per slide, a Pecha Kucha is, as Jason writes, necessarily “SHORT, INFORMAL, and CREATIVE.”

In addition to the time constraint of the Pecha Kucha, your presentation must also follow the 1/1/5 rule. That is, you must have at least one image per slide, you can use each exact image only once, and you should add no more than five words per slide. The formal constraints of this rigid format call for discipline, focus, practice, and paradoxically, creativity.

1. "The book is dead." Wrong: More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published.

2. "We have entered the information age." This announcement is usually intoned solemnly, as if information did not exist in other ages. But every age is an age of information, each in its own way and according to the media available at the time.

3. "All information is now available online." The absurdity of this claim is obvious to anyone who has ever done research in archives. Only a tiny fraction of archival material has ever been read, much less digitized. Most judicial decisions and legislation, both state and federal, have never appeared on the Web. The vast output of regulations and reports by public bodies remains largely inaccessible to the citizens it affects. Google estimates that 129,864,880 different books exist in the world, and it claims to have digitized 15 million of them—or about 12 percent.

people speaking with one another in public have not yet made a similar evolution online

Scientists and science writers need to realize the power they have to control their online environments

Where we put our attention is not only how we decide what we will learn, it is how we show what we value.

Distraction is contagious.

he myth of the moment is that multitasking is a good idea.

Sharing student work on a course blog is an example of what Randall Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, of Georgetown University, call "social pedagogies." They define these as "design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an 'authentic audience' (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course."

External audiences certainly motivate students to do their best work. But students can also serve as their own authentic audience when asked to create meaningful work to share with one another.

Students most likely won't find this difficult. After all, you're asking them to surf the Web and tag pages they like. That's something they do via Facebook every day. By having them share course-related content with their peers in the class, however, you'll tap into their desires to be part of your course's learning community. And you might be surprised by the resources they find and share.

“With the greater focus on distance learning, colleges’ expectations are increasing,” says Christine P. Mullins, executive director of the Instructional Technology Council. “They’re realizing that student services, like library services, student orientation, tutoring, and counseling are needed to provide a well-rounded education.”

Sixty four percent of colleges require faculty to take distance-education training programs, and among those that offer training, 59 percent require more than eight hours of it.

79 percent of colleges are creating their own online course content, which requires staff members with experience and knowledge of instructional design. Nineteen percent use content created by textbook publishers, and 2 percent contract or license materials from some other content provider.

The work of coding, I discovered, was an endless round of failure, failure, failure before eventual success. Computer-science students are used to failing. They do it all the time. It's built into the process, and they take it in stride.

Humanities students are not used to failure. They want to get it right the first time.

Perhaps of all the humanities, the creative arts come closest to valuing failure. Poets and painters don't expect to get it right the first time. That's the idea of workshopping as a pedagogy, right? Still, there's a real difference. I'd be willing to bet that most creative writers bring a piece of work into a workshop secretly hoping it's a success. Sure, they know they need help on aspects of their story or poem, but that's not the same as failing. A computer program that doesn't run is a failure. A program that produces no usable data about the text it was set up to analyze is a failure. Why don't those failures devastate the developers? Because each time their efforts fail, the developers learn something they can use to get closer to success the next time.