Capturing the spirit of the times, one prominent advocate styled the three-year degree as the "higher ed equivalent of a fuel-efficient car" compared to the "gas guzzling four-year course." A metaphor from the food industry might be more apt. Slow education, as in slow cooking, is enthusiastically replaced by Fast Ed or McEd, with comparable results. Higher education is certainly in need of efficiency. Our current business model, which has yielded steadily increasing costs, needs change and, perhaps, radically so. Let us not be fooled by adapting across the system solutions that appear corrective but may be destructive of the virtue and distinction of American higher education and its ambition -- education for the workforce and for participation and leadership in a democracy.

For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs. Panksepp says that humans can get just as excited about abstract rewards as tangible ones. He says that when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.

Our internal sense of time is believed to be controlled by the dopamine system. People with hyperactivity disorder have a shortage of dopamine in their brains, which a recent study suggests may be at the root of the problem. For them even small stretches of time seem to drag.

When we get the object of our desire (be it a Twinkie or a sexual partner), we engage in consummatory acts that Panksepp says reduce arousal in the brain and temporarily, at least, inhibit our urge to seek.

Dubbed "The Great Flu", the game is based on the threat that the emergence of a new flu virus and its rapid spread across the globe would pose to humanity. "The game is based on the need to increase public awareness to the threat posed by a pandemic and the measures in place to contain it," said Albert Osterhaus, head of virology at the Erasmus Medical Centre and one of the experts involved in creating the game.

the idea that separating more personal services like Facebook from business-oriented services like LinkedIn makes little sense in the Internet age.

All you have to do is enter your LinkedIn login information

“The revolution is that, all of a sudden, the Internet can be a network of intelligent agents, doing work for their users, rather than a place where big commercial interests aim to gather as many users on their platform as possible,”

Twitter’s audience is now 55 percent international.

Stories Matter will have a second phase wherein independent academics, teachers, and other interested communities will be able to download the software and apply it to their own collections, or interact with already clipped interviews posted by the Life Stories CURA project. The goal is to make Stories Matter an accessible tool for oral historians from all walks of life, and to provide people with an alternative to transcription that will ensure researchers continue interacting with and learning from the interviews they conduct once the interview is completed.

Download the software The application runs with Adobe AIR 1.5.1, on either the Windows, Mac or Linux platform.

The idea is that we  should challenge thinking, inspire creativity, and stir up discussion with a Powerpoint presentation – not present a series of dry facts. 

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to discourage professors from using PowerPoint, because they often lean on the slide-display program as a crutch rather using it as a creative tool. Class time should be reserved for discussion, he contends, especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web.

Davidson and Goldberg call on us to examine potential new models of digital learning and rethink our virtually enabled and enhanced learning institutions.

available in a free digital edition

Now in ARTstor: Photographs from ancient sites in Dura-Europos, Syria and Gerasa, Jordan

neuroplasticity, meaning that the brain can still learn new concepts after various ages, and that every student can be taught many different ways. In a sense, the brain can be rewired.

the best research is tied to classroom practice.

"Education is an applied field, like engineering," said Atherton. "If there's no connection to practice, then that research is best left to basic researchers in the cognitive neurosciences."

the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate.

Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products. The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.