It is important for students to recognize that although technology gives us a lot of power, it also restricts us in many ways, and we need to question how the affordances of technology modify our communication and our behavior.

Affordance Description ExamplesDistantcommunicationThe sender and receiver need not becollocated.Video conferencing, email,instant messaging, webcamAsynchronouscommunicationThe recipient of communication accesses itat a later time.Voice mail, emailPeripheralpresentationAn interaction need not take the user's fullattention, and may not come to the attentionof other people who are co-present.Vibrating beeper, headphones,heads-up display inautomobile

For instance, the study found some evidence that divers were more likely to spend time working outside jobs during the school year, which hints at financial stress as a complicating circumstance in their lives.

First of all, the more we talk, the less pressure they are under to read carefully beforehand – and the texts we make them read reveal the certain way of thinking much better than our (amateur) lecturing does. Second, as I said, when we talk for long periods I just don’t think they can focus enough (and I don’t think that is a defect in them at all). Third, as I also said, the most effective way to make them think in the certain way that we want them to be able to, is to induce them to talk in that way.

I am also very deliberate about the questions I ask. Normally, class discussions are a response to some problem or prompt that I have devised, which related to a problem that arises in the reading, or directly about the reading itself, and which they have written down either on a handout or (if its short, and this is generally better) on a ppt slide.

'New' is of course a relative term. For those who today call themselves social historians but whose early training was in more specifically economic history, the present search for quantifiable data is a natural progression and the urge to encompass the whole of society no more than axiomatic.

Social history has the defects of its qualities. Its preference for 'human' documents and for close-up views have the effect of domesticating the subject matter of history, and rendering it – albeit unintentionally – harmless.

Unfortunately, however, states’ mandates go beyond the capacity and capabilities of their standards, tests, data systems and existing curricula.

Students who go to college part time, over many years, attending multiple institutions, come to equate a college education with counting credits and hoping that they transfer. But that is because students have been seeking credits, perhaps out of the necessity of their own working or personal lives, rather going to college.

The explanation for our apparent inefficiency in switching back and forth between projects has to do with the manner in which our brains process conceptual or higher-level information.