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"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."

You can learn a lot about the world from Wikipedia, sometimes without reading the articles. Kalev Leetaru, a researcher at the University of Illinois, has been looking at the capacious volunteer-written encyclopedia as a Big Data resource, concentrating on the connections between cities around the globe over time. To understand these connections, he focuses on the type of language used to talk about a particular place, to see whether the writers have a generally positive or negative sentiment toward the place at that time.

Is the discourse about multitasking falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle? Could it be that instead of a stark choice between the frantic pursuit of getting more done in less time at one extreme or demonizing multitasking at the other end of the spectrum that there is an as-yet undocumented literacy in the relatively unexplored middle, a partially mental and partially technical skill at deploying the appropriate attentional style with the appropriate media at the appropriate time?

Humanities scholars are often perceived in very traditional terms: spending a lot of time working on their own and collaborating only informally through highly-dispersed networks. Unlike most scientists, they have no long tradition of working in formal, close-knit and collaborative research groups. Humanities scholars have also sometimes been presented as "depth" rather than "breadth" researchers, preferring to spend significant amounts of time with a few items, rather than working across a broader frame. In terms of information sources, text and images held in archives and libraries tend to dominate, with less of an association with new web-based technologies (although this is changing with the increasing visibility of digital humanities).

"The UK's first massive open online course platform will focus on promoting student discussion and debate in an effort to stand out from the Mooc crowd, according to Simon Nelson, its chief executive. FutureLearn will offer "something fresh, something different", he told Times Higher Education, including being optimised for use on smartphones."

"If compared to the majority of businesses out there, universities and colleges have an advantage when it comes to social media: the student community. For the majority of students, the years spent at university is usually one of the most important and remarkable times. This makes it a good start point for colleges in social media - when you have a happy community of consumers who like what you have to offer, things are much easier."

CAMBRIDGE, ENGLAND - This past year has been a time of signs and wonders for the open educational resources movement, which pushes for the free public access to educational materials.

"While students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology pay thousands of dollars for courses, the university will announce a new program on Monday allowing anyone anywhere to take M.I.T. courses online free of charge - and for the first time earn official certificates for demonstrating mastery of the subjects taught. "

"What is a "flipped classroom"? It's an "inverted" teaching structure in which instructional content is delivered outside class, and engagement with the content - skill development and practice, projects and the like - is done in class, under teacher guidance and in collaboration with peers."

"Some study techniques accelerate learning, whereas others are just a waste of time-but which ones are which? An unprecedented review maps out the best pathways to knowledge"

>> Web conferencing engages multiple senses. >> Web conferencing affords trainers flexibility in content delivery. >> Live training content often requires significantly less preparation and production time than on-demand elearning. Reality is that Web conferencing is opening up new possibilities as well.

Ideally, you'll find some time over the next few weeks to curl up with a good story. Or hey, at least that's what I look forward to on vacation. If you are looking for some books on entrepreneurship to read, or even to gift, here are some recommended books from 2010. There were a number of great business books published this year, many of which we reviewed here as part of ReadWriteWeb's "Weekend Reading" series. But here are a few of the standouts, startup books we've chosen specifically because they are such great stories

It's time to review the new set of skills people of all ages require to succeed.

Over the past decade or so, the Internet has become a huge source of information and education, especially for those who might be short on time, money or other resources. And it's not just crowdsourced data collections like Wikipedia or single-topic blogs that encourage individual learning; huge corporations and nonprofits are making online education and virtual classrooms a very formal affair these days.

I love the flip. I do. And I realize by saying this I'm making a controversial statement. I believe if used judiciously, in the right context, the flip can free up valuable class time and provide the background knowledge that is fundamental for students to then go forward and wrestle with higher order thinking.

At a recent meeting of the 23-year-old MIT Entrepreneurs Club, one recent graduate of the Sloan School of Management described his plans for a business - one based on his solution to a little-recognized problem that currently costs airlines $10 billion a year. Another alumnus, an engineer who recently retired after a career in the telecom business, talked about his patented approach to fighting wildfires in remote locations. A new MIT graduate student, who just earned his undergraduate degree from the Institute this spring, spoke of three different startup businesses he's currently cultivating in his spare time - one of which he co-founded during his freshman year at the Institute.

"Computers, electronic whiteboards and other interactive technologies are fundamentally changing American education . That's the view of the experts whom The Times spoke with about what the classroom will look like ten years from now. Listen to excerpts from their predictions below, and share your own thoughts in the comments section. "

In January, a time when many scientists concentrate on grant proposals, Jennifer D. Calkins and Jennifer M. Gee, both biologists, were busy designing quail T-shirts and trading cards. The T-shirts went for $12 each and the trading cards for $15 in a fund-raising effort resembling an online bake sale. The $4,873 they raised, mostly from small donations, will pay their travel, food, lab and equipment expenses to study the elegant quail this fall in Mexico.

"So.cl (pronounced "social") is an experimental research project, developed by Microsoft's FUSE Labs, focused on exploring the possibilities of social search for the purpose of learning. So.cl combines social networking and search, to help people find and share interesting web pages in the way students do when they work together. So.cl helps you create rich posts, by assembling montages of visual web content. To encourage interaction and collaboration, So.cl provides rich media sharing, and real time sharing of videos via "video parties.""

We live in a busy world. Whether you're looking around online or off, there's "stuff" going on all around us. Some of us are trying to keep up and some of us aren't. Either way, both parties are inevitably going to miss out on some of this "stuff" I'm alluding to. And that's because we all need to look at not only why we're missing out, but how we can avoid missing out on as much as we do. This is when levels of personal productivity come into play.