[Inverted classes]

… Other teachers are even more aggressive about inverting their classes: They assign videos to be watched at home, then have the students do the homework in class, flipping their instruction inside out.

… A video can often be a better way to deliver a lecture-style lesson, because students can pause and rewind when they get confused – impossible with a live classroom lesson.

In contrast, homework is better done in a classroom, because that’s when you’re likely to need to ask the teacher for extra help.

The classroom hasn’t changed much over the years. Over the centuries actually.

… As various educational analysts have joked, if you brought a bunch of surgeons from a hundred years ago, into today’s hospitals, they would have no idea what was going on, because everything about their craft had evolved: antibiotics, laparoscopic devices, MRIs,

But time-traveling teachers would have no trouble walking into an elementary school (or even Harvard) and going to work, because schools are nearly identical. Walk to the front of the class, pick up the chalk, and start lecturing.

[On the importance of tracking student’s progress]

Khan’s videos are the most prominent part of the system.

But they’re also the least innovative one.

They’re still pretty much just traditional lessons and lectures, albeit ones that can be consulted and re-consulted worldwide, at any time.

What’s new is how teachers use the Khan Academy to track progress.

Composing essays is meaningless.

Teachers are an inauthentic audience. They aren’t necessarily interested in what their students have to say; they’re just reading as a part of their jobs. A writer is being forced to write for an audience that’s being forced to read.

Definition of ambient awareness

[Ambient awareness is kind of ESP (Extrasensory Perception).]

Social scientists have a phrase for this type of ESP: “ambient awareness.”

Ambient awareness is, they say, almost like being in the same room as someone and picking up on his mood and thoughts by the stray signals he gives off.

You create a picture of someone else’s internal state gradually, almost unconsciously, by assembling many small observations.

How the total image emerges from tiny bit of social information

Mizuko Ito, a cultural anthropologist, first noticed this effect more than ten years ago while studying text messaging in Japan.

Ito talked to young Japanese couples, all of whom lived in separate apartments (and in one case, separate cities).

She found that the couples who trade short messages all day and night to establish a sense of connection.

They’d ping each other with tidbits like “I guess I’ll take a bath now,” “Just bought a pair of shoes,” or “The episode today sucked today, didn’t it?”

One young businessman jokingly described his text messages to his girlfriend as “mutterings” and the responses he got as “mutterings in reply.”

This is the paradox of status updates.

Each little update – each individual bit of social information – is, on its own, pretty insignificant, even mundane.

But taken together over time, the snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friend’s inner lives.

… “It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a partner architect at Microsoft, tells me. “No message is the single-most-important message.”

Chapter 1: The Rise of the Centaurs

Chapter 2: We, the Memorious

Chapter 3: Public Thinking

Chapter 4: The New Literacies

Chapter 5: The Art of Finding

Chapter 6: The Puzzle-Hungry World

Chapter 7: Digital School

Chapter 8: Ambient Awareness

Chapter 9: The Connected Society

Last chapter: Epilogue

The Shallows (Nicholas Carr)

As Clive Thompson is too optimistic about technology and the web, “The Shallows”  is a good choice to read afterward. The Shallows has a pessimistic point of view and both books together can give you a balanced view on this topic.

Traditionally, “literacy” has primarily meant two things: being able to read and being able to write.

That’s still true, and it will remain true for a long time, because the written word remains an exquisitely flexible tool for formalizing and manipulating knowledge.

Computational power isn’t just changing the old literacies of reading and writing.

It’s creating new ones. This includes literacies in video, images, and data sets, forms of information that are becoming newly plastic.

A decade’s worth of e-mail, text messages, photos, and health information can provide fascinating glimpses into hidden contours of your life, if you’re able to seek patterns in the noise.

Will everybody actually want to develop data literacy? Probably not, just as not everyone wants to develop their skill at writing or pencil drawing.

Still, the number of people who already find data visualization enjoyable in surprising.

Tools for though often are most powerful when they become second nature, thus somewhat invisible.

Writing transforms thinking only after the post where you no longer have to struggle with the act of writing itself.

“Filtering, and otherwise bending visual light to our creative tendencies, has been part of the professional photography since the beginning,” Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom tells me in an e-mail.

“All Instragram did was take the creative tools that the pros have been using and put them in the hands of the masses.”

For years, commercial journalism struggled with the problems of using one mode to talk about everything.

If you started a TV-station, you had to tell every story with the moving images, even when it clearly wasn’t suited for slow-moving, nonvisual issues.

If you started a radio station, you had to tell every story with sound, even when that was less useful…

And if you had a newspaper, you used text and photos for everything, even when the didn’t work very well…

But these silos break down in digital environments, where any news organization can deploy any tool.

I calculate that we’re composing at least 3.6 trillion words daily, or the equivalent of 36 million books every day.

The entire U.S. Library of Congress, by comparison, holds around about 35 million books.

The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously said something like, “Ninty percent of everything is crap,” a formulation that geeks now refer to as Sturgeon’s Law.

Literacy in North America has historically been focused on reading, not writing; consumption, not production… While many parents worked hard to ensure their children were regular readers, they rarely pushed them to become regular writers… The advent of digital communications, Brandt argues, has upended that notion.

This writing changes our cognitive behavior. It can help clarify our thinking.

Professional writers have long described the way that the act of writing forces them to distill their vague notions into clear ideas.

By putting half-formed thoughts on the page, we externalize them and are able to evaluate them much more objectively.

 We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand. 

I’d argue that the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of ten people (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from ten people to a million people.