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Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.

Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.

A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher.

Faculty members at many campuses have been debating whether they should ban laptops in class. At Cornell University, students are trying to change the discussion. The Student Assembly there adopted a resolution last month pushing for “greater freedom of student laptop usage” in certain classes.

But realistically, he said, faculty members can't develop a single, catch-all policy for laptop usage -- there is simply too much variation in class sizes, teaching styles, course levels and subject matter to expect the same policy to apply to every instructor.

Katherine Fahey, director of Student Disability Services, supports technology use in the classroom -- if not as a full-on policy, then at least in the sense that all students feel comfortable asking for an exception.   “In courses in which the instructor believes that learning is enhanced by students not using laptops, there should be an opportunity for any student to request an exception based on individual learning style, the impact of one’s disability or other factors,” Fahey said in an email. But even asking to overrule a professor’s classroom technology policy can be uncomfortable for many students, especially at the beginning of the semester when there is no established relationship.

I’ve sometimes wondered if the visual similarity between kudus and kudos contributed to a belief that a kudo was a shy and retiring noun best observed in the plural.

The Future of Thinking reports on innovative, virtual institutions. It also uses the idea of a virtual institution both as part of its subject matter and as part of its process: the first draft was hosted on a Web site for collaborative feedback and writing.