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If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose?  Why do we, in the status quo,  replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help? Increasingly,  education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming:  so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen.   We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone– let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms.   Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.

Q: What are some of the ways that you've applied ideas and research about attention and learning in your own classroom? A: I rarely lecture anymore. I structure my classes now with each unit led by two students, who are responsible for researching and assigning texts and writing assignments and who then are charged with grading those assignments. The next week, two other students become our peer leaders. Students learn the fine art of giving and receiving feedback and learning from one another. I structure midterms as collaborative “innovation challenges,” an incredibly difficult exercise which is also the best way of intellectually reviewing the course material I’ve ever come up with. In other words, more and more I insist on students’ taking responsibility for their learning and communicating their ideas to the general public using social media.

If you want to learn more, you can find syllabuses and blogs on both the HASTAC and the DMLCentral site. I posted about “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” and “Twenty-First Century Literacies.” I also led a forum on interactive pedagogy in large lecture classes.

Advanced capture technology has become almost ubiquitous in higher education: If your institution doesn't have it, chances are that you're trailing the competition. Students want it. Tech-savvy teachers like it. And blended learning environments practically demand it.

Interestingly, faculty at many institutions now see lecture capture as a way to help transform those large classes into the kind of interactive learning experience that Laster describes.

Laster feels that lecture capture really comes into its own in those courses that teach the fundamentals to large classes. "Lecture capture as a replacement for the 400-student experience in the lecture hall can make a lot of sense," he explains. "But where you have a more interactive classroom style, it doesn't make sense."

Instead of the traditional schedule of eight 45-minute classes each day, with courses broken into two semesters, high school students at Calhoun intensively study three to five subjects in each of five terms, or modules, that are 32 to 36 days long. Classes are in blocks of 65 or 130 minutes each day. Every day, students have 45 minutes of “community time,” an intentionally unstructured period for the students to hang out.

What started five years ago as an effort to accommodate maddeningly complex schedules in a relatively small space quickly became a sort of evangelical mission to make progressive education more, well, progressive: embracing depth over breadth, allowing for more experiential learning in Central Park and at nearby museums, and, administrators said they hoped, reducing stress. Steven J. Nelson, Calhoun’s head of school, said the new schedule fostered teaching in the ways children learn best.

According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, it’s high time we redesigned American education.

What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.

Sprint officials reasoned that colleges would flock to the free version of the software, Mobile Learn. And because only Sprint customers could use the software with Android, BlackBerry and Palm phones, college students would have a powerful incentive to sign up with Sprint.

Sprint asked a judge to bar Blackboard from allowing its free iPhone and iPad versions to use wireless networks.

The exact amount is unclear, but Sprint will eventually owe more than $50-million that it has not already paid, Blackboard said in a court document. Sprint must pay Blackboard $2 per month for every student who has downloaded Mobile Learn for Sprint, in addition to millions in other fees, the document says.

One founder of the site, David Adewumi, said the idea was spurred by the features Penn State’s current ANGEL course management system lacks. “Everyone knows ANGEL is terrible for students,” Adewumi (senior-Spanish) said. “It’s about managing courses for faculty and staff. We’re making a solution that is perfect for what students need to do group things.”

What they're fighting about: The educational video publishers claim that UCLA is violating copyright and breaching its contract by copying DVD's of Shakespeare plays acquired from Ambrose and streaming them online for faculty and students to use in courses. They say UCLA had the right only to lend copies to teachers for in-class use or to show the DVD's in the library itself.

The university did not "secure the right to stream our programs from a library server to any class and any student whenever it chooses," said Allen Dohra, president of the trade group, in a written statement. UCLA says copyright law permits streaming.

Much is also at stake for publishers, who say UCLA's practice could be catastrophic for the educational-video business. They fear it will cut off new markets for distributors like Ambrose, which sells its own streaming service.

At Penn State University, Director of Education Technology Services Allan Gyorke said the former student staple is now rarely spotted in dorm rooms. "The desktop PC is dead," Gyorke said, estimating that 95 percent of students now bring a laptop or tablet media device to campus instead of using a traditional PC in their dorm room. Those newer devices, he said, are easier to store and easier to set up.

He found that in nearly identical classes, Canadian college students learned a lot more from teaching assistants using interactive tools than they did from a veteran professor giving a traditional lecture. The students who had to engage interactively using the TV remote-like devices scored about twice as high on a test compared to those who heard the normal lecture, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science.