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"The time has come to create privacy tools for normal people with a normal level of technical competence. That is to say, all of us"

Anyone who has ever tried to teach a kid how to multiply knows how hard that job is. (Try teaching a child what an adverb is long enough and you'll develop a facial tic.) But set the student up with an interactive, electronic game that is fun, competitive, and self-diagnostic, and suddenly teaching these basic subjects becomes both efficient and effective. Does that make teachers obsolete? Quite the opposite: it frees them to teach the higher levels of the cognitive domain-analysis, problem solving, synthesis, and creative thinking. The parts teachers normally never get around to because they're too bogged down in the basics.

"Today it was about a LOOC. Yes that is right, instead of a Massive Open Online Course it is a Little Open Online Course. The University of Maine is experimenting with opening up some courses for free to between 2 and 7 students. These students will be treated as any other student in the class with the same expectations and opportunities to complete assignments and exams if they wish. However, they will not receive credit for their work. They can decide to become a paying student before the normal add/drop period ends."

"Curation is a term that has always referred to the careful selection and pruning of aggregates, such as for a museum or an art exhibition. But the concept in the digital content world means the selection and presentation of these disparate items to help a browser or consumer navigate and select from them. Aggregation without curation is, normally, not very helpful. Curation creates the brand."

"At the end of the term, Hawkins will have completed the last college math class she will probably ever have to take. She will think back on this data-driven course model-so new and controversial right now-as the "normal" college experience. "Do we even have regular math classes here?" she asks."

"not all intelligence research is controversial: If you study cognitive development in toddlers, or the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, "that's treated as just normal science," says Douglas Detterman, founding editor of Intelligence, a leading journal in the field. The trouble starts whenever the heritability of intelligence is discussed, or when intelligence is compared between genders, socioeconomic classes, or-most explosively-racial groupings."

"What we're really trying to do is enable a new kind of interaction with Google where it's more like how you interact with a normal person," says Huffman. To illustrate, he picks up his smartphone and says "How far is it from here to Hearst Castle?"

"From email to social media, there comes a time in everyone's life when we need to sit up and face the truth about our online selves. And the best way to make us all see the light is with graphs. Danish artists Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler created the series "Truth Facts" on their comedy website Kind of Normal. The humorously honest graphs show the hard truths of everyday life - especially online life."

"The chart below shows the number of deleted posts every day since April among a sample of between 50,000 and 60,000 users in mainland China. On September 28th, the most tumultuous day of the protests, deletions hit a record: 15 of every 1,000 posts, more than five times normal levels. Mentions of "Hong Kong police" and any posts with a #HongKong hashtag fell afoul of the censors. The data were compiled by Weiboscope, a censorship-monitoring programme at the University of Hong Kong. FreeWeibo, a website developed by GreatFire.org, another Chinese censorship watchdog, captured many of the deleted posts. Most were written by ordinary users: people with a few thousand followers whose non-censored messages revealed otherwise unexceptional lives, of dinners with family and frustrations with traffic jams."

"Google has funded an associate professor in the Indiana University School of Education to develop a "Big Open Online Course," or BOOC. Daniel Hickey will offer a free course in September focused on educators and titled "Assessment Practices, Principles and Policies" for as many as 500 students, funded by a $50,000 Google grant."

"Put another way, in ten or fifteen years' time, students may expect to find educational nuggets on demand whenever they need them. Some will have had many years' experience of creating and sharing content, perhaps quite complex, perhaps to do with education. Will they be happy to accept timetabled classes and sit through lectures?"