teacher-librarians

His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail. A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score?

a consultant on cyber-crimefighting speaks with undisguised joy about how much information the police could glean from Facebook, in order to infiltrate communities where criminals might lurk. Asked about privacy concerns, she replies: "Yeah – we'll have to keep an eye on that."

Until recently, the debate over "digital distraction" has been one of vested interests: authors nostalgic for the days of quiet book-reading have bemoaned it, while technology zealots have dismissed it. But the fusion of the virtual world with the real one exposes both sides of this argument as insufficient, and suggests a simpler answer: the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't.

at root managing textual information is about selecting or summarizing items of interest, and storing and sorting them in a way that makes them retrievable at a later date and possibly by other people

The potential to gather more information than we can comfortably manage has probably been around since writing first allowed for the accumulation of more material than could be remembered, but overload has not been a universal experience. In many times and places scholars have experienced a dearth of books rather than overload