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t’s a signal that the kinds of learning experiences that are gained through making can be recognized and valued in education, as they should be. It also serves as a reminder that the kind of informal learning that happens outside of school is important, and should be considered alongside achievements in formal education.

“We love it when students pursue their passions outside of class,” said Dr. Wendell, “and making is a fantastic example of that.”

T]he essence of what colleges want is for students to be engaged in whatever they are doing. We don’t want students who do things because they have to, or because they think it will look good on their résumé. We want students to do things because they find true enjoyment and personal growth from them. That’s the way that young people — and, for that matter, old people and middle-aged people — thrive.

There will be more innovation—but it will not change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustion engines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is more willing to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are no more low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.

But Pierre Azoulay of MIT and Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University find that, though there are more people in research, they are doing less good. T

One factor in this may be the “burden of knowledge”: as ideas accumulate it takes ever longer for new thinkers to catch up with the frontier of their scientific or technical speciality. Mr Jones says that, from 1985 to 1997 alone, the typical “age at first innovation” rose by about one year.

This new revolution started in the 20th century with sound recording and film, moved next to television and radio and today takes the form of the internet.  He points out that there is a common theme when people consider these changes – that they are not simply something new but also the end of something old. 

The primary impact on the mediated context of content during the parenthetical period is containment.  Look at a printed work, Pettitt suggested, and you will see strict regimentation.  Words are forced into lines, surrounded by margins, placed on pages that are sewn into a binding, contained by a jacket and placed on a shelf where they can be contained and controlled.  The words have been "imprisoned" and have lost much of their pre-parenthetical fluidity.  This confinement of cultural production has obviously not been limited to the written work: plays move to stages and music to concert halls during the parenthesis.

He said that human consciousness in the digital age, which de-emphasizes the kinds of categorization that marked the age of print, makes us think in a way that is reminiscent of a "medieval peasant."

1) focus on project based learning 2) focus on play 3) focus on student-centric learning & passion (applied in both kindergarden and graduate school) 4) focus on practical problem solving 5) focus on the spirit of kindergarden 6) some outside the classroom learning 7) support activities & support structures for facilitating student passions 8] Everyone likes the physical world & experience (not just kids) 9) Can do media & virtual words too, in conjunction with physical world (particularly for modeling of complex systems) 10) Challenge to integrate individual/personal passion into group projects & collaboration (connect similar interests or complementary skills in an “organic way”) 11) There is a distinction between emergent collaboration and the order of “you 3 work together” 12) Scratch can change education–mirroring the use of Logo before it. Also, scratch mirrors snapping Legos together to create “media rich projects and share in an online community” Its programming for novices. Its accessible & tinkerable. Its about meaningful projects (not just generating list of prime #s). Resnick also points to the interesting program of Alice at Carnegie Mellon which is 3-D, but it unfortunately isn’t as meaningful & personal & social as Scratch. They’ve had 1 million projects in 3 years from kids around the world