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The separation of work and home: When you're carrying an email-equipped computer in your pocket, it's not just your friends who can find you -- so can your boss. For kids born this year, the wall between office and home will be blurry indeed.

Books, magazines, and newspapers: Like video tape, words written on dead trees are on their way out. Sure, there may be books -- but for those born today, stores that exist solely to sell them will be as numerous as record stores are now.

Fax machines: Can you say "scan," ".pdf" and "email?"

1. Just-in-time learning. Videogames give you just enough information that you can usefully apply. You are not given information you'll need for level 8 at level 1, which can often be the case with schools that download files of information that are never applied. Videogames provide doable challenges that are constantly pushing the edge of a player's competence. This is similar to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development. Lev Vygotsky 2. Critical thinking. When you play videogames you're entering a virtual world with only the vaguest idea of what you are supposed to do. As a result, you need to explore the physics of the game and generate a hypothesis of how to navigate it. And then test it. Because games are complex, you are continually reformulating and retesting your hypothesis -- the hallmark of critical thinking. 3. Increased memory retention. Cognitive science has recently discovered that memory is a residue of thought. So what you think about is what you remember. As videogames make you think, they also hold the potential to increase memory retention. 4. Emotional interest. Videogames are emotionally engaging. Brain research has revealed that emotional interest helps humans learn. Basically, we don't pay attention to boring things. The amygdala is the emotional center of the brain and also the gateway to learning. 5. We learn best through images. Vision is our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain's resources. The more visual input, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled. Videogames meet this learning principle in spades as interactive visual simulations.

"Not only are people better than computers at detecting the subtleties that differentiate galaxies, they can do things computers can't do, like spot things that just look interesting,"

And the Zooniverse team has proven that the Zooites' classifications are as good as those by professional astronomers. "Their contributions are extremely important," says Lintott. "They're helping us learn how galaxies form and evolve. And they take their work seriously." But that doesn't prevent them from bringing a sense of adventure and just sheer fun to the research.

These days, however, I will admit that I find it more challenging than ever to teach BYOD students to be focussed learners, able to block out some of the distractions their devices present.

Considering BYOD in any school without contemplating how social media will be leveraged is like buying your kid a car and expecting them not to go anywhere unexpected.

The world of social media for youth is, at times, the antithesis of school culture.