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You don't have to know much about the psychology of learning to realise that a series of once-only, delivered lectures is pedagogic nonsense. We learn next to nothing from once-only experiences like unrecorded lectures. Indeed, everything we know about learning shows that repeated access to content is necessary for learning.

Students around the world are increasingly bringing their own mini-computers (or some connected device) to class. Whether this creates a distraction or a boon to learning is debatable, but these four uses of mobile phones in education - and countless others - could one day help prove the latter.

I suspect that many of us ask students to do some kind of writing in class: whether reflecting on the day's topic, responding to a brief prompt, or outlining their ideas. I include those kinds of writing-to-learn activities in my classes as well.

This innovative style of learning grew into "peer instruction" or "interactive learning," a pedagogical method that has spread far beyond physics and taken root on campuses nationally. Last year, Mazur gave nearly 100 lectures on the subject at venues all around the world. (His 1997 book Peer Instruction is a user's manual; a 2007 DVD, Interactive Teaching, produced by Harvard's Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, illustrates the method in detail.)

Students learned more than twice as much in the new "interactive" classes than they did in the lectures by the tenured prof with more than 30 years of experience, according to a report on the experiment to be published in the journal Science on Friday.