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One highlight of the new homepages is a new 'publisher' feature which looks almost exactly like a similar feature on FriendFeed. Users can now easily post updates, notes, photos, and videos right from their homepage without having to go to the specific application first.

Just like on FriendFeed, users can now easily block updates from others if they turn out to be spammers or are simply posting too few interesting (or too many) updates.

Thanks to updates to Facebook's privacy settings, users will now also be able to follow others without having to become actual 'friends.' This is basically the same 'friendship' model that Twitter has implemented on its service.

As we've added additional functionality, such as Access Controls, Document Management, Mobile support, and now our new Legal Edition, we've gone well beyond traditional wiki functionality.  As a result, the name "PBwiki" no longer reflected how we think of ourselves, and even more importantly, how our users think of us. 

The process involves so much physical manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to focus on and appreciate what we're reading

multimedia features, such as links to videos and animations, leave little room for imagination, limiting our ability to form our own mental pictures to illustrate what we're reading.

The visual happenings on the screen… and your physical interaction with the device is distracting," Mangen says. "All of these things are taxing on cognition and concentration in a way that a book is not."

This quote struck me on many levels. Specifically, the notion of being distracted in the "other features" seemed to be a loaded statement. Do students consider exploring outside the realm of what is defined as "learning" as a distraction? Isn't exploring different facets of an application just as important as using it for its intended purpose? This led me to consider how many educators have so poisoned students thinking that being "off-task" is even considered to be a bad thing. Have we so stymied students that they believe if they are not formally "learning," if they become "sidetracked," that they are wasting their time? When did curiosity become a negative thing? (When it killed the proverbial cat, I suppose.) As I think about it, if young adults find new media a distraction, then perhaps "learning" has become too narrowly defined. This then led me to wonder how we can "measure" self-directed learning in this new media context? In other words, how can we show the different levels of learning that takes place in these new contexts?