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As the public grows more desperate, scholars are working to randomly italicize different sections of the text, hoping the italics will land on the important parts and allow everyone to go on with their day. For now, though, millions of panicked and exhausted Americans continue to repetitively search the single column of print from top to bottom and right to left, looking for even the slightest semblance of meaning or perhaps a blurb.

Some have speculated that the never-ending flood of sentences may be a news article, medical study, urgent product recall notice, letter, user agreement, or even a binding contract of some kind. But until the news does a segment in which they take sections of the text and read them aloud in a slow, calm voice while highlighting those same words on the screen, no one can say for sure.

Faculty have a total right to control what happens in the classroom. If a faculty member says "lids closed", then her students should close their laptops. The minute faculty lose the ability to control the behavior in the classroom is the point at which teaching and learning effectiveness stops. With this authority, however, comes the responsibility to use it wisely.

A total ban on laptops is a bad idea because laptops can be a marvelous learning tool within the classroom. There are many instances where having your students utilize their laptops will accomplish the active learning that faculty would like to promote. Students want to use their laptops, and you can turn this desire into opportunities for learning.

When the mouse worked, hand motions followed a mathematical form known as “one over frequency,” or pink noise. It’s a pattern that pops up repeatedly in the natural world, from universal electromagnetic wave fluctuations to tidal flows to DNA sequences. Scientists don’t fully understand pink noise, but there’s evidence that our cognitive processes are naturally attuned to it.

But when the researchers’ mouse malfunctioned, the pink noise vanished. Computer malfunction made test subjects aware of it — what Heidegger called “unreadiness-at-hand” — and the computer was no longer part of their cognition. Only when the mouse started working again did cognition return to normal. (One assumes, though the researchers didn’t test the proposition, that cognition would also have returned to normal had test subjects stood up and stopped using the computer.)

People need a really good reason to click on your link. Remember, at any given time (and in almost any Twitter client) the reader is faced with a number of choices to make – there might be as many as a dozen different tweets on their screen, and a lot more if they’re using columns or groups.

And things move fast – one or two refreshes later, and you could be long gone.

Furthermore, having access to a ready network of peers means you have the ability to run ideas by people, get them peer-reviewed, so to speak. And if producing, for instance, a scheme of work, or an observed lesson, you can ask for and get immediate feedback as to where the best research has been done on this subject. All it takes is a cry for help, and such is the all-pervasive sense of fraternity on Twitter that you get a guiding hand on your shoulder within seconds of asking for it.

As a time commitment, getting something out of Twitter comes with negligible cost, and its potential benefits in terms of intellectual grazing away from the normal specific fenced enclave are manifold.

Dorsey, who attended the University of Missouri at Rolla (now the Missouri University of Science and Technology) and New York University (and left both without degrees to move to the business world), said that Twitter fills educational needs he felt when he was a student. "What mattered in school was the relationships I had with other students and professors," he said, and out-of-class sharing was more powerful than anything else. Twitter, by allowing anyone to say anything (within the space constraints) and allowing anyone to decide what to read, replicates that user-dominated experience, he said.

Facebook and Twitter, and not the blog, are now “the glue that holds online communities together,” says Dylan Wilbanks, a Web producer in Seattle. Gone are the days when Mr. Wilbanks would take to his blog to describe quotidian events or record passing fancies. “Sharing small pieces of data like links over blogs was like owning a heavy-duty pickup that you only used to pick up bread and milk at the grocery store,” he says. “Blogs are meant for people for whom being a writer, being a creator, is a passion, or perhaps a requirement of life. They’re meant for people for whom Facebook’s ‘What’s on your mind?’ question can’t always be answered in 500 characters or less.” As Wilbanks is quick to point out, not everyone has that passion, which is why blogging is losing its luster.

The online social network, which once dominated the field now lorded over by Facebook, will use information that users volunteer on the site -- and the celebrity pages they check out -- to recommend movie trailers, recently released songs and video games to them.

If it doesn't make MySpace more attractive to users -- and, not incidentally, advertisers -- the social network could be in danger of settling into a period of gradual decline, like the other senior citizens of the Internet: America Online and Yahoo.

Results show that the variable that best predicts the chances of a community to survive is its level of heterogeneity: the greater the member turnover, the higher the chances that the group will sustain itself over time. On the other hand, the number of members and the number of actual message posters do not predict the chances of survival.

According to the current study, another reliable predictor is the number of messages that are posted between members of an online community.

slow-changing facts are what I term “mesofacts.” Mesofacts are the facts that change neither too quickly nor too slowly, that lie in this difficult-to-comprehend middle, or meso-, scale. Often, we learn these in school when young and hold onto them, even after they change. For example, if, as a baby boomer, you learned high school chemistry in 1970, and then, as we all are apt to do, did not take care to brush up on your chemistry periodically, you would not realize that there are 12 new elements in the Periodic Table. Over a tenth of the elements have been discovered since you graduated high school! While this might not affect your daily life, it is astonishing and a bit humbling.

For these kinds of facts, the analogy of how to boil a frog is apt: Change the temperature quickly, and the frog jumps out of the pot. But slowly increase the temperature, and the frog doesn’t realize that things are getting warmer, until it’s been boiled. So, too, is it with humans and how we process information.