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Lovatt says his own experience proves dance can provide confidence that spills into other areas of life. Suffering from profound reading difficulties at school, he left with no qualifications, and was unable to read until he was 23. "I taught myself to read while working as a dancer in theatres," he says. "I was surrounded by talent and thought it was ridiculous that I couldn't read, so I just sat down and, very slowly, learned."Next, Lovatt studied A-levels, then a degree in psychology and English at Roehampton Institute, ultimately gaining a PhD and taking a senior researcher post at Cambridge University. Now, he combines dancing "nearly every day" with dance research at Hertfordshire University, where he teaches the psychology of performing arts.

the best way to attract a compatible mate is to relax and just move naturally to the rhythm

"Dance lessons are a bit like plastic surgery," says Lovatt. "They mask the true expression of your genes."

This story really sums up what it is to be a student right now in this century. I am actually a student of Professor LaMarre's and in this very class. My generation really does not know what it is like to be outside of this instant communication with friends and other people which has really deteriorated the true relationships people used to and were forced to build with one another. The ability to escape from everyone is impossible. I went to Mexico for 3 weeks over winter break to study and was not able to escape my parents need for me to be in contact through email or text... interesting to think about what it has done to parent/child relationships and especially our interpersonal relationships with significant others.

I moved to U.S. 2 decades ago. I came from a 3rd world country (it was at that time). But I had learned how to use the abacus, and do simple mulitiplication in my head. I'm sorry to say this but Americans are FAR behind on REAL education. While you guys play party games in schools and pass that as education. It is quite pathetic what America pass as an education in the public system. By the time I had caught up with English in my 2nd year in American school, I had realized how stupid American pubilc schools are and how inept they are. By 1st and 2nd grade I was memorizing simple mulitplication and division in my third world country. In U.S. kids don't even know what division is until 3rd grade. We didn't have Stadiums, auditoriums, computer labs, track and field track, swimming pool. We didn't even have central heat or air! We got our excercise out on a dirt field with some swings, bats and balls. What's the next generation going to do for a learning experience? "Walking to the mailbox" ??? Because in a few decades, America will be so fat and obese that it will be a revelation to all the fat americans, what it was like to actually walk to the mailbox.

He talked about wide hallways where students could gather. He talked about attendance policies which allowed students to sign into classes from elsewhere in the building if that made them more comfortable. He talked about multiple projection screens in every classroom to break "single focus learning." He talked about dropping text books for authentic materials and the acceptance of multiple - and student chosen - ways of demonstrating knowledge. He even talked about having big windows in classrooms both to the outside and the school corridors - "We're not hiding from the world or hiding the world from our students" he told us.

And then we listened to teachers and students, we wandered the building, and we saw. In newly built additions classroom doors were centered on one wall, projectors, aimed from the middle of the ceiling, pointed to two corners. Window walls opened outside, big windows allowed views to/from the halls. In most rooms the two projectors were in use, showing different things. In most rooms, students gathered in clusters, often passing tablet boards around.

All in all what I saw was a 1:1 initiative that had been shaped by a commitment to rethinking school, and centering the form of school on what students need now - collaboration, access to and effective use of global information, trust in students, belief in leveraging the world of today rather than avoiding it, and universal design.

There is no tiptoeing around this thing. Those who truly desire a transformation of educational system will have to endure many of the same trials and tribulations as those who fought and fight for change in other domains. While educational change agents may not endure the physical pain that so many activists experience; it should come as no surprise that some will be intimidated, or refused tenure, or shunned by colleagues.

So, what will it take to transform teaching and learning? What will it take to shut down the pleasant hum of the machine that is so good at turning out 20th century students even though we’re entering the second decade of the 21st century? Leaders with Courage and Commitment!

Collaboration is another major hallmark of the Net Generation. However, Tapscott said, we have a tendency to squander or prohibit this strength in schools and workplaces.

"What do we do with this collaboration-geared generation? We stick them in a cubicle, supervise them like they're Dilbert, and take away their tools (i.e., blocking sites like Facebook and Youtube)." Tapscott calls this creating a generational firewall. "It says, 'We don't get you, we don't understand your tools, and we don't trust you to use them.'"

We can’t just throw technology in a classroom and expect good things," notes Tapscott. We need to move away from an outdated, broadcast-style of pedagogy (i.e., lecture and drilling) toward student-focused, multimodal learning, where "the teacher's no longer in the transmission of data business; she's in the customizing-learning-experiences-for-students business."

Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.

Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister’s, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister’s lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn’t want the show’s producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ,” Ms. Liu said. Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University, said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.

motivation and control. One seems to need the other, apparently. Keep the students motivated and you are a great teacher in control of the learning process. But we miss the point. Motivation has a short-term effect. New things will be old again. If we equal motivation with learning we will cling too much to it and direct our best efforts (and school budget) to gaining back control. A useless cycle that can lead us to consider extremely double-edged ideas like paying students to keep them learning.

We need autonomous, self-motivated students in love with the process of how humanity has learnt.

There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies?