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effective infrastructure, delivery systems, and content are only half the story. The more exhilarating half of the story involves changing the classroom paradigm.

Try out this HOT (higher order thinking) challenge

f you like taking notes with a pen and paper, take a look at one of the LiveScribe smartpens.

e difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says.

"It's indisputable that the Internet has made us smarter.... The range of things you can explore in a day is just fantastic compared to 20 years ago," says David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "There's no question that we feel the Internet has made us better researchers, better thinkers, better writers."

Books "are not the shape of knowledge," he says. "They're a limitation on knowledge." The idea of a single author presenting her ideas "was born of the limitations of paper publishing. It's not necessarily the only way or the best way to think and to write."

It is a third gadget, the long-awaited Amazon tablet called the Kindle Fire, that represents his company’s most ambitious leap into the hearts, minds, and wallets of millions of consumers.

the Fire is an emblem of a post-web world, in which our devices are simply a means for us to directly connect with the goodies in someone’s data center.

Amazon, on the other hand, is a content-focused company—almost half of its revenue comes from sales of media like books, music, TV shows

Internet access is universal, with 99% of students able to access the Internet outside of school.

Close to half (49%) of students in Grade 4 have access to their own phone or someone else’s phone on a regular basis

online life has become increasingly social, with social networking now an integral component of many online activities.

almost half of the “sexual solicitations” came not from “predators” or adults but from other teens

There is a tendency for faculty to require students to do more work in a blended course than they normally would complete in a traditional face-to-face course. What are you going to do to ensure that you have not created a course and one-half? How will you evaluate the student workload (and your own) as compared to a traditional class?

You hear two opinions from experts on the topic of what happens when kids are perpetually exposed to technology. One: Constant multitasking makes teens work harder, reduces their focus, and screws up their sleep. Two: Using technology as a youth helps students adapt to a changing world in a way that will benefit them when they eventually have to live and work in it. Either of these might be true. More likely, they both are. But it is certainly the case that these kids are different—fundamentally and permanently different—from previous generations in ways that are sometimes surreal, as if you'd walked into a room where everyone is eating with his feet.

It's as if Beatlemania junkies in 1966 had had the ability to demand "Rain" be given as much radio time as "Paperback Writer," and John Lennon thought to tell everyone what a good idea that was. The fan–celebrity relationship has been so radically transformed that even sending reams of obsessive fan mail seems impersonal.

The teens' brains move just as quickly as teenage brains have always moved, constructing real human personalities, managing them, reaching out to meet others who might feel the same way or want the same things. Only, and here's the part that starts to seem very strange—they do all this virtually. Sitting next to friends, staring at screens, waiting for the return on investment. Everyone so together that they're actually all apart.