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Five years ago, the United Nations published the Arab Human Development Report on Building a Knowledge Society. That widely read – and highly controversial – report found a "knowledge deficit" that threatens human development, economic growth, and the future potential of Arab societies. This week the Brookings Institution published a new study, in Arabic, that evaluates what has and has not changed since 2003.

Access to education has expanded markedly over the past five years

Arabs are embracing new technologies, such as the Internet and mobile phones.

Does this jettisoning of time-honored titles mean that the paperless classroom is also lacking a creator, controller and grader?  Is the paperless classroom also a teacherless paradigm?  The answer is in some regards, yes.  I have removed myself from center stage.  I have relinquished the need to control every class.  I have stopped seeing work as stagnant…completed and submitted by students and then graded by me.  I have let go of my need to pre-plan months at a time, in favor of following the path that unfolds as we learn together.  My classes are not, however, teacherless, just less about the teaching and more about the learning.  The students know that I am ready and willing to be student to their insights, that they can teach, create, control and even evaluate their own learning.

In the absence of my control, the students have many choices to make

Teachers often say that modern students are lazy.  I have long felt that as the shifting winds of technology began to gain force, we teachers were the ones who were unwilling to do the work of rethinking our roles and meeting the students were they were learning already.  Rethinking paper as the primary tool of class is a step in the right direction because it forces a rethinking of the how and why of teaching and learning.

The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK’s education system. And that’s not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.

Traditional education in areas like phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic remain but modern media and web-based skills and environmental education now feature.

The skills that let kids use Internet technologies effectively also work in the real world: being able to evaluate resources critically, communicating well, being careful with strangers and your personal information, conducting yourself in a manner appropriate to your environment. Those things are, and should be, taught in schools. It’s also a good idea to teach kids how to use computers, including web browsers etc, and how those real-world skills translate online.

ten conclusions that might guide a country's development of a culturally appropriate Internet policy

Do not spend vast sums of money to buy machinery that you are going to set down on top of existing dysfunctional institutions. The Internet, for example, will not fix your schools. Perhaps the Internet can be part of a much larger and more complicated plan for fixing your schools, but simply installing an Internet connection will almost surely be a waste of money.

Learning how to use the Internet is primarily a matter of institutional arrangements, not technical skills

“Dear Iranian nation, your children have placed the first indigenous satellite into orbit,” Reuters quoted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying in a televised message.“With God’s help and the desire for justice and peace, the official presence of the Islamic Republic was registered in space,” he said.

new technology that is revolutionizing the way Arabic-speaking people use the Internet

Abdullah says that of her 500 Egyptian students, 78 percent have never typed in Arabic online, a fact that greatly disturbed Habib Haddad, a Boston-based software engineer originally from Lebanon. "I mean imagine [if] 78 percent of French people don't type French," Haddad says. "Imagine how destructive that is online."

"The idea is, if you don't have an Arabic keyboard, you can type Arabic by spelling your words out phonetically," Jureidini says. "For example ... when you're writing the word 'falafel,' Yamli will convert that to Arabic in your Web browser. We will go and search not only the Arabic script version of that search query, but also for all the Western variations of that keyword."

The Azerbaijani government denies that the bloggers' arrest was politically motivated. "People are not arrested in Azerbaijan because of political activity," said Ali Hasnov, a senior adviser to President Ilham Aliyev, in a statement.

The Iranian government, more than almost any other, censors what citizens can read online, using elaborate technology to block millions of Web sites

The Internet is no longer just an essential channel for commerce, entertainment and information. It has also become a stage for state control — and rebellion against it. Computers are becoming more crucial in global conflicts, not only in spying and military action, but also in determining what information reaches people around the globe.

Once you start rickrolling people, and more importantly get a reputation for it, you're heading towards being the Zimbabwean dollar in the link economy: it doesn't matter how many you offer, people just aren't going to buy them.

If your Facebook page's principal URL said "click here for more about me!" and then linked to a Rick Astley video, what would people think of you? That you liked a practical joke, perhaps. This could be useful for them to know. But they wouldn't have learnt anything about you, apart from that fact. As we become simultaneously more promiscuous in making our online personalities visible, and therefore more likely to come across people without any other context than their own representation of themselves, there's less and less time to make an impression.

Without links, the web doesn't really work. You can't go anywhere. And if your fear is that the next link someone offers on will take you essentially nowhere — they get marked. On services where you can't see the full link — most URLs passed on Twitter are shortened via link-shortening services, to fit them into its 140-character limit — or where the link doesn't tell you much (as with any YouTube URL), it's all about trust. The pound or dollar in your pocket is a form of trust: you trust whoever you trade with to redeem a pound's worth of value from it. Same with links.