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Learning is more than earning an A says Cathy N. Davidson, the professor, who recently returned to teach English and interdisciplinary studies after eight years in administration. But students don't always see it that way. Vying for an A by trying to figure out what a professor wants or through the least amount of work has made the traditional grading scale superficial, she says.

"Do all the work, you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem. You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there's your grade. Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system," Ms. Davidson wrote Sunday in a blog post detailing her strategy on hastac.org (pronounced "haystack"), the acronym for  "humanities, arts, science, and technology-advanced collaboration.," which she co-founded.

It's important to teach students how to be responsible contributors to evaluations and assessment. Students are contributing and assessing each other on the Internet anyway, so why not make that a part of learning?"

When I started, largely out of exasperation, to investigate the educational research literature for myself, I was pleasantly surprised to find there was some genuinely useful and scholarly work out there, which recognised the demands of different subjects and even admitted that university lecturers aren't all workshy and stupid... It's a shame that this better stuff doesn't seem to have fed through into the generic courses that most institutions offer. My personal advice to anyone starting out as a university teacher: find a few colleagues who take their teaching seriously (there are almost certain to be some in the department) and ask them for advice; sit in on their classes if possible; remember you'll never teach perfectly but you can always teach better; and close your ears to well-meaning interference from anybody who's never actually spent time at the chalkface!

Magueijo's could acknowledge that some people teaching these courses are genuinely concerned about improving teaching, and they need academics' help in designing better courses that do so. Sotto's side should acknowldge that however much they talk about how important teaching is (as if they discovered this, and academics did not know), they are not listening to the people attending their courses if those people feel utterly patronised and frustrated at the waste of their time. If academics treated their students like educationalists treat their student academics they'd be appalling teachers. A simple course allowing us to learn from a video of our own lectures would be immensely useful. Instead whole empires of education have developed that need to justify themselves and grow, so they subject us to educational jargon and make us write essays on the educationalist's pet theory.

I would have preferred that David Pritchard had written it; his comments above are perfect.

Record numbers of young people are not in school, college or work in England, official figures show.

The ranks of 18-24-year-olds considered to be "Neets" - not in education, employment or training - has risen by more than 100,000 in the past year.

The statistics show that in total, 835,000 18 to 24-year-olds are now Neets, up from 730,000 for the same quarter last year.

Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet. Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. "It is really impressive and significant," he wrote. "In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.