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Back in 1999, when there were still a few people muttering that the Internet was “just a fad”, the science fiction writer and visionary Douglas Adams wrote an article expressing amusement at the way the mainstream media considered the Internet something odd, and slightly sinister: …you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. (Adams, 1999)

Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption.

Mr. Jobs’s supernatural magnetism and tend to ignore the other crucial figure in Apple’s creation: a kindly, introverted engineering wizard, Steve Wozniak, who toiled alone on a beloved invention, the personal computer.

What is school for?

School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it's not a goal we need to achieve any longer.

A good lecture does more than convey facts or put problems on the board — it lays bare the cognitive processes that an expert uses to assimilate those facts or think his or her way through those problems.

Lectures provide the important opportunity for the lecturer to share the mental models and internal cognitive frameworks that worked for him/her when he/she was learning the content.

Since the lecture was invented in the era before the existence of the printing press – never mind the Internet – what is the role of the lecture in the modern era? Does it have great value? Or does it hang on by habit?

Web 2.0 and/as The Apocalypse: What The Terminator Has to Teach Us About Our Future

only mean to highlight the disruptive and destructive consequences that have been set in motion by the shift from a life mediated by paper to a life mediated by the screen.

educators occupy the position now that astronomers held during the 16th century. For astronomers, the choice between models for the universe was neither trivial nor inconsequential; it was definitive.

But first, a caveat: there are exceptions to every generalization I am about to make.

irresolvable paradox that, without writing, we would not have Plato's staging of this discussion nor any record at all of Socrates' encounter with Phaedrus or of the Socratic method, nor indeed would there have been an Athens, as such, to remember.

Plato’s struggle with the relatively new technology of writing

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.