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I remembered it this morning when I drove past a Google self-driving car and then again a few minutes later when a Tesla whipped past me and a third time during the same commute when I dictated an email to my mobile phone. Sometimes living in the Bay Area does feel like the living in future. But to Gibson's point, not every region can claim to have self-driving cars on its highways or electric car ownership or smart phone penetration rates as high as the Bay Area. Why not?

"Would you be shocked if your teacher assigned you to play Minecraft at school? At a few area schools, teachers are doing just that. The Lego-like building game has become a popular tool for classroom lessons as well as life lessons."

Screencasts can provide learners a student-centered and engaging learning experience in both distance and traditional learning settings. To align screencasts with lesson objectives, goals, assessment practices, and standards, instructors can create their own screencasts rather than searching through the thousands of educational screencast videos on the web. Good educational screencasts depend not only on thorough planning but also on thoughtful and careful editing to re-sequence lesson elements, eliminate awkward and unnecessary portions, and craft a focused, easy-to-follow presentation that uses students' time efficiently.

"Leveraging the revolutionary potential of digital technology to provide access to the world's best faculty members, this new method of dissemination takes what were once exclusive, limited-access, high-priced resources and puts them online for anyone to learn from, freely. Despite its somewhat goofy acronym, this new model has been embraced, sometimes in the face of faculty objections, because of its democratizing, globalizing potential, as well as its effectiveness in improving an institution's reputation for innovation and excellence. I am, of course, talking about Coapi. If you haven't heard of it, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, which now comprises more than 40, began in 2011 as a way for colleges to coordinate and advocate for open-access policies, which typically require that all faculty journal publications be made available freely online, whether on a personal Web site, institutional repository, or discipline-specific public archive."

"Fast-forward to October 2012: OERs have failed to significantly affect the day-to-day teaching of the vast majority of higher education institutions. Traditional textbooks and readings still dominate most teaching venues even though essentially all students are online: Course management systems are used only for the dissemination of syllabi, class notes, general communications, and as a grade book. OERs are out there…somewhere. Why aren't they on campus?"

"His online course drew 28,000 students when it opened last summer, but Sedgewick was not daunted. He had spent hundreds of hours readying the material, devoting as much as two weeks each to recording and fine-tuning videotaped lectures. The preparation itself, he said, was "a full-time job.""

And the iPad's future dominance is far from certain. "The iPad is a powerful pedagogical tool, but we are seeing the market take its course. Other companies are now providing competitive alternatives at lower price points," says Brian Lewis, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education.

The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students' awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill's course, "Information and Contemplation," goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation-during class-to sharpen their attention.

When deciding what to filter, the IT department considers two questions: 1) Is there a relevant ­educational need for the site? and 2) Does the site potentially expose students to inappropriate material? "The toughest area to assess is social media," Vomastek continues. "Right now, we block Facebook and Twitter during the school day but ­allow users of our guest wireless network to access them during non-school hours. There's no one choice that will make everybody happy."

Digital education shifting role of teacher

First is the idea of raising expectations and raising standards. Another piece: data-driven instruction. Every teacher in our state now spends 90 minutes a week sitting down with five peers to just drill into what the data is telling them about student performance. There's research that says the most effective economic development that a state could make is in early childhood education. We're increasing over a five-year period from 20 to 80 the percentage of high-need kids who are enrolled in preschool. That's a game changer.

"Network World - A recent slideshow, "10 Careers Robots Are Taking From You", highlighted things that, it argued, robots can do as well as humans. But most just augment and improve part of what humans do, not the whole job."

The Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning in Texas is replacing textbooks with digital open educational resources (OER) for its math and science classes using iPads. The specialty high school in Texas recently implemented a 1:1 iPad initiative, and the OER pilot program is intended to help cut costs while providing students with access to high-quality, easily updatable learning resources on their iPads. The district selected a free, Web-based solution, Net Texts, to provide teachers with access to a library of more than 21,000 free OER learning resources from Curriki, Khan Academy, and several universities and colleges.

"We present the concept of quad-blogging, and its potential for facilitating and enhancing peer-to-peer learning in higher education, specifically in a massive open online course (MOOC) by increasing peer engagement, promoting the practice of blogging and fostering the formation of professional learning networks through social media."

"My congratulations on completing your incomplete education," he told the DePauw University Class of 1995. "Now go out and finish it."

The top-ranked schools all focus on engineering, including Harvey Mudd College, California Institute of Technology, Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and SUNY - Maritime College. At the bottom of the rankings was the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, which had an opportunity cost of $155,000 to attend in 2012, including living expenses and lost wages from not working. The school had a graduation rate of 37 percent while its 30-year net return on investment was projected as a loss of $228,000, Payscale.com said.

"Worse, the first-order barriers often become self-fulfilling prophecies. For instance, the time needed to learn about a new technology is greatly extended by an individual's sporadic use of it. Lots of time is spent just logging in or setting up or getting back in the groove with the basics, making people feel like they are starting over-again and again."

Of course, I get tired. Eighty-hour work weeks and way too many red-eye flights will wear anybody down. Nor am I immune to the stress that comes with running a public company for 22 years and shouldering responsibility for more than 70,000 Panera associates. But thankfully, I've never experienced the chronic exhaustion, inertia, frustration, and cynicism that come with a temporary slump or even classic burnout. Hence, I've never had reason to refresh my spirit and renew my spark. The reason, I think, is that I view my work as a lifelong learning journey. I go to work to learn about how the world works. How humanity works. And what will work in the world.

"What makes so many of those atrocious singers laughable to us-excepting the ones who put on deliberately bad performances in order to get on camera-turns out to be a problem that plagues many undergraduates, especially the weakest among them: an inability to judge accurately their own level of skill or knowledge in a specific area. Poor metacognition means that some terrible yet hopeful singers on American Idol are unable to assess their own weak vocal talents. And it means that some students have a mistaken sense of confidence in the depth of their learning."