From The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion’s “Wired Cam­pus” Blog:

“Cole W. Cam­plese, direc­tor of edu­ca­tion-tech­nol­o­gy ser­vices at Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­si­ty at Uni­ver­si­ty Park, prefers to teach in class­rooms with two screens — one to project his slides, and anoth­er to project a Twit­ter stream of notes from stu­dents. He knows he is invit­ing dis­trac­tion — after all, he’s essen­tial­ly ask­ing stu­dents to pass notes dur­ing class. But he argues that the addi­tion­al lay­er of com­mu­ni­ca­tion will make for rich­er class dis­cus­sions…

Once stu­dents warmed to the idea that their pro­fes­sors actu­al­ly want­ed them to chat dur­ing class, stu­dents begin float­ing ideas or post­ing links to relat­ed mate­ri­als, the pro­fes­sor says. In some cas­es, a shy stu­dent would type an obser­va­tion or ques­tion on Twit­ter, and oth­ers in the class would respond with notes encour­ag­ing the stu­dent to raise the top­ic out loud. Oth­er times, one of the pro­fes­sors would see a link post­ed by a stu­dent and stop class to dis­cuss it.

Get the full sto­ry here, and feel free to tell us about oth­er edu­ca­tion­al uses of Twit­ter. Just add them to the com­ments below. Last­ly, you can find us on Twit­ter here.

Not­ed by the LA Times:

With­out per­mis­sion or advance notice, Filed­ByAu­thor has cat­a­loged the infor­ma­tion of about 1.8 mil­lion authors into indi­vid­ual pages. There are biogra­phies, pho­tos, links to pur­chase books from online retail­ers and links to share the author’s Filed­By page through a dizzy­ing list of social net­work­ing sites. And every­one is there, from the novice self-pub­lished author to Stephe­nie Mey­er.

The not so favor­able LA Times piece con­tin­ues here. Get the Filed­ByAu­thor web site here.

Have you ever lied about read­ing a book? Well, if so, you’re hard­ly alone. Accord­ing to The Guardian, 65% of peo­ple polled in a sur­vey admit­ted to hav­ing made such a lie. And what books did they claim to have read? George Orwell’s 1984 ranked #1. Then the order went some­thing like this: Tol­stoy’s War and Peace, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and the Bible. 

I was remind­ed today that 1984 was first pub­lished 60 years ago. You can get the 60th anniver­sary edi­tion here, or you can always down­load a free, high qual­i­ty audio book from Archive.org. And, for more free audio books, vis­it our large col­lec­tion.

Fol­low us on Twit­ter here…

Here’s a handy way to weath­er the reces­sion with your intel­lect and pock­et book intact…

In this very down econ­o­my, you can keep feed­ing your read­ing habit by book swap­ping. Yes, that’s right, book swap­ping. What goes on here is fair­ly straight­for­ward. You give away books that you’ve already read. In exchange, you get books that you want to read. And the cost (aside from ship­ping fees) is zero. Plus you’ll save more than a few trees.

On the web, you’ll find two major online book swap­ping ser­vices. The first is PaperBackSwap.com. The sec­ond is Book­Mooch. You can learn more about each ser­vice (respec­tive­ly) here and here.

We not­ed last week that New York­er writer Adam Gop­nik has just released a new book, Angels and Ages, which exam­ines the unique stamp that Dar­win and Lin­coln placed on our mod­ern times. Thanks to The New York Times, you can now read the first chap­ter of Gop­nik’s book for free. It will give you a feel for his writ­ing, which nev­er dis­ap­points. As a quick aside, I should men­tion that the Times has a sec­tion called First Chap­ters. It gives you free access to the first pages of many new and impor­tant books. A good resource to keep your eye on.