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Steven B. Johnson writes in Where Good Ideas Come From about the revolutionary power of social media such as Twitter to advance ideas and innovation in a myriad of fields, and it has been fascinating to see this concept in action in the swift spread over the past six months of the practice of flipping classrooms,  which is also known as reverse instruction or learning, and is closely related to (or often synonymous with) teacher vodcasting.

  At the same time, what is now an opportunity is also becoming an urgency: if students don’t need to come to class to get informational content delivery, if they can get it easily on their own, we need to transform how we use our classroom time such that it continues to be relevant and valuable.

I decided to use [reverse instruction] to teach my students the basic concepts of neurons.  For homework, I posted to our wiki a Khan Academy video, as well as, a couple of TED talks from leading neurologists to explain some of the purposes neurons have and cutting edge research that’s being done in the field.  In total, maybe about 25 minutes of work.

Lectures at night, “homework” during the day. Call it the Fisch Flip. “When you do a standard lecture in class, and then the students go home to do the problems, some of them are lost. They spend a whole lot of time being frustrated and, even worse, doing it wrong,” Fisch told me.

Why not, Godin has proposed, put out the cheaper paperback – or even an e-book – first? Readers are more likely to gamble on an unknown author when they can risk £8 rather than £25.