Twitterteachers

Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves.

"My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner."

In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned.

He urged other professors and teachers to “realize that in any class you could have a child, a young man or woman, who could do incredibly great things in the world. So teach as well as you can.”

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

The brevity of texting and status updating teaches young people to deploy haiku-like concision.

30.7 percent of respondents reported that they do, in fact, use Twitter in one way or another--a percentage that's fairly high compared with the percentage of the general adult American population that uses Twitter (which is projected to be in the neighborhood of 10 percent to 11 percent by 2010).

Twitter I just don’t get.

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