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For many schools, the hardest part is making it acceptable to turn to technologies that aren't traditionally used in schools. It's a culture that has to be cultivated at the school itself. In the book I'm working on now, many of the teachers in the case studies I discuss approached their administrators with something they'd been using with success outside of school, and their administrators were open to trying it out within school. Kipp Rogers at Passages Middle School in Newport News, Va., has done a phenomenal job modeling that approach and valuing not only his teachers, but also his students, who are involved in planning, as well.

Q: From what you've seen in the field, what's the most interesting instructional use of mobile devices happening now? Keren-Kolb: Definitely what's going on in Australia. Teachers are using QR (two-dimensional bar codes) for activities and learning. In the United States, about 60 percent of the phones can do this, but in most other countries, it's almost universal. So, in some Australian schools, this means [that] students come in on the first day of class and their entire syllabus is on a bar code they scan directly into their phone—same thing with some books and homework assignments. They'll scan a code for their homework, and it'll link to video tutorials and activities. So, moving away from textbooks and moving toward paperless learning that's much more interactive. I think that's exciting—how much information you can attach to that little bar code, and use it to extend learning.

When students can use whatever tools are around them, obviously, testing changes. It's not just about a right or wrong answer—it's about inquiry, collaboration, and the higher-order thinking skills we want students to do.

I love learning by making my own mistakes - and that is certainly part of learning to be a decent programmer

Or are we to allow that "this is a solved problem, that is a solved problem (read about it here if it helps) but here is a real-world problem that needs research done on it..."

Wouldn't it be great if universities once again became places where new knowledge grew and spread from, rather than where it went to be locked up and die?

The model of "Trust no-one and write all your code yourself" is outdated. The model of "Trust your fellow humans and write your code with their help" is the future.

The virtual tutor takes care of the basic concepts that typically dominate lectures, leaving professors open to plan the face-to-face component of the course according to what parts of the curriculum the software tells him students are picking up more slowly, and what concepts could bear reinforcement. For example, if a statistics professor notices in the data he receives from activity in the open-learning program that a great number of students struggled with the assessments the program gave while teaching conditional probability, the professor could use the class periods to hold a discussion with his students about that concept until he is confident they get it -- a preferable alternative, Thille says, to rolling through concepts didactically and hoping they stick.

Lectures and the classroom spaces built to accommodate them, she explains, represent academe’s first attempt to do higher education at scale after new waves of students started flooding into America’s universities following World War II. With technology having evolved to its current state, such a method is primitive, she says. “You have this poor faculty member,” Thille says, “who’s sitting there as an expert in their area trying to figure out how to transfer their expertise to this large number of students, who are all variable. And it’s a horrible task. The affordances of the technology and also the learning sciences… for the first time enable us to really think about how to scale in a much more effective way, so we truly can serve many many many more students."