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What our computers cannot do, and in fact hinder us from doing, is to facilitate thinking deeply about complex issues.

When my students write an essay, there comes a time when they must slow down their thoughts to the speed of composition. For most students, this is an uncomfortable situation.

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."

The first automobiles were really horseless carriages, designed on the same frame as a horse-drawn carriage and with power defined in horsepower. The capabilities of these early contraptions were limited, and the infrastructure to support this new form of mobility was slow to develop as the early car owners rattled across the ruts and sank into the mud of unpaved and poorly maintained roads. These days, our society is built around the mobility provided by today's automobiles, and we are seeking to expand the infrastructure to accommodate battery-powered vehicles. How close is this analogy to the early stages of experimenting with cyberspace? I think the two stories are very similar, and I look forward to the day when the ruts in the cyberspace highway have been smoothed for a true community of learners to improve our world.

"When you talk about the choice between Android and iOS, that's a big decision. But the bigger decision is, 'Are we going to change our whole attitude to how we're delivering the lessons to the students?'"

"If you have a really slow wireless connection, and you're going to have to solely rely on apps, the amount of educational apps available for the iPad far outnumber what's available for Android and the quality of them," Starr said. But if you have a fast connection and want to use online content at no cost, remember that the majority of that content is based on Flash

As important as it is to be able to find lots of information quickly, what's even more important is to be able to think deeply about the information once we've found it. We need to slow down.

most dramatic technology-enabled transformations are still ahead of us.

second part is the mobility we now have, so that the resources and connections are in our hands wherever we go

“It’s absolutely unbelievable how slow change occurs in a school system. Even if something is proven to be a great idea or something we should try, it takes a long, long time to change the whole thing—administration, teachers, parents, students. I almost expect things to look not too different in the next 10 to 15 years, unfortunately, and that’s not something that I wish.”

notes that mobile devices have been listed before, but it says that resistance by many schools continues to slow the full integration of mobile devices into higher education.

Learning analytics

Challenges to adoption include incorporating information coming from a variety of sources and in different formats and concerns about privacy and profiling.

There is evidence, however, the slow death of exams is not simply a sympathetic response to quivering students, but to new science around cognition, which suggests the traditional high-stress, all-or-nothing final exam under gymnasium floodlights may not be an accurate measure of learning.