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An hour of study tonight, an hour on the weekend, another session a week from now: such so-called spacing improves later recall, without requiring students to put in more overall study effort or pay more attention, dozens of studies have found.

“The idea is that forgetting is the friend of learning,” said Dr. Kornell. “When you forget something, it allows you to relearn, and do so effectively, the next time you see it.”

cognitive scientists see testing itself — or practice tests and quizzes — as a powerful tool of learning, rather than merely assessment. The process of retrieving an idea is not like pulling a book from a shelf; it seems to fundamentally alter the way the information is subsequently stored, making it far more accessible in the future.

“Testing not only measures knowledge but changes it,” he says — and, happily, in the direction of more certainty, not less.

“Testing has such bad connotation; people think of standardized testing or teaching to the test,” Dr. Roediger said. “Maybe we need to call it something else, but this is one of the most powerful learning tools we have.”

The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget. This effect, which researchers call “desirable difficulty,”

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a "consumer," what William Gibson memorably described as "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

Buying an iPad for your kids isn't a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it's a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Apple's customers can't take their "iContent" with them to competing devices, and Apple developers can't sell on their own terms.

I don't want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don't want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.

Rupert Murdoch can rattle his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I say do it, Rupert. We'll miss your fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the Web so little that we'll hardly notice it, and we'll have no trouble finding material to fill the void.

the walled gardens that best return shareholder value

The real issue isn't the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

existing efforts "focus on the interpretive responsibilities of the individual,"

"if bad actors intentionally dump disinformation online with an aim to distract and overwhelm, is it possible to safeguard against media manipulation?"

A 2012 meta-analysis by academic researchers found that media literacy efforts could help boost students' critical awareness of messaging, bias, and representation in the media they consumed. There have been small studies suggesting that media-literacy efforts can change students' behaviors—for example, by making them less likely to seek out violent media for their own consumption. And more recently, a pair of researchers found that media-literacy training was more important than prior political knowledge when it comes to adopting a critical stance to partisan media content.

the roles of institutions, technology companies, and governments

DLA is explic­itly res­i­den­tial and dia­log­i­cal

Not so much a replace­ment as a sup­ple­ment to dig­i­tal human­i­ties, DLA broad­ens the scope and relo­cates the cen­ter of grav­ity of what I have referred to as the dig­i­tal human­i­ties sit­u­a­tion, the recur­ring, play­ful encounter of human­ists with tech­nol­ogy.  Instead of focus­ing on what may bet­ter be described as the com­pu­ta­tional human­i­ties (a use­ful term recently pro­posed by Lev Manovich), the dig­i­tal lib­eral arts seeks to locate dig­i­tal media squarely within the frame of the lib­eral arts, broadly con­ceived as a cur­ricu­lum, not a dis­ci­pline or even set of dis­ci­plines, and as a dis­tinc­tive mode of edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence, not a set of received the­o­ret­i­cal con­cerns. It is a fram­ing par­tic­u­larly suited to lib­eral arts col­leges — America’s great con­tri­bu­tion to higher learn­ing — but also to uni­ver­si­ties, such as UVa, whose souls are in the lib­eral arts as well.

the idea of Coursera-style MOOCs being part of the DLA is a non-starter, although dis­trib­uted and medi­ated forms of edu­ca­tion can, and I think must, become part of the lib­eral arts experience

DLA is as con­cerned with ped­a­gogy as it is with research

focus­ing on the real use of dig­i­tal col­lec­tions (for exam­ple) as much as on their cre­ation and publication

We need to be the antidote for blind adoption

annual “Meet the Bloggers” session at Campus Preview Weekend.

“The annual blogger selection is like the admissions office’s own running of the bulls,”

Ms. Kim once wrote about how the resident advising system was making it impossible for her to move out of her housing — expressing enough irritation that the housing office requested that the admissions office take her post down. Officials refused, instead having the housing office post a rebuttal of her accusations; eventually, the system was changed.