...this is shortsighted. Educators should stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media and start thinking about how to channel that energy awat from causing trouble and toward getting more out of their classes. After all, it's not as if most kids are investing commensurate energy into, say, their math homework. Why not try to start bridging the worlds of Facebook, YouTube, and the classroom?

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How can teachers bring social networking into the classroom? For starters, students could talk about what they're doing on Facebook and company, map out the ways they're making connections with one another, and share videos and software they've created. Once the conversation gets going, teachers could figure out whether some kids were being left out and find ways to increase those students' media literacy and bring them into the fold. Teachers can manage the project by selecting the best content and conversations, and incorporating it into other parts of the curriculum. If a student created an entry on Wikipedia for a local band or sports team, other students could work on revising the entry and building it into a larger local history project. The audience for school projects need no longer be one hurried teacher.

Schools could also find students like the ones who made the stairwell dance videos and get them to produce a school-sanctioned video with a better subject —the re-enactment of a literary or historical scene, for example. This isn't as simple as a teacher saying, "Why don't you write a poem about your frustration, rap it on video, and put it on YouTube?" Instead, a teacher could assign students the task of filmind a scene from The Scarlet Letter in the stairwell, identifying the dynamic of shaming in the novel, and writing about how it might be playing out in their Facebook news feeds. In math class, students could develop statistical models and graphs of the patterns of information flow in their social networks. To understand how advertising works, students from different backgrounds and with different online habits could compare what's being hawked to them. And for a school journalism project, teams of students could aggregate other students' narratives from blogs, Facebook, and Twitter and complile a real-time collective analysis of the state of their educational union.

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Schools also stand to gain from harnessing student's budding tech experitse. Rather than relying on private companies like Blackboard for expensive software, schools can get students who are taking computer programming to develop social media tools, apps, and platforms for creating and sharing class projects. These projects could then go on a school's Web site, in an iTunes-style store. Moodle, Ck12.org, and Sakai are great examples of how schools are using this new kind of open, cost-effective learning.

As described in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Matthew Woessner (a conservative academic) and April Kelly-Woessner (a liberal academic) looked at surveys completed by 15,569 college seniors, and what an analysis of the data suggests is that “the personal priorities of those on the left are more compatible with pursuing a Ph.D.” “Liberalism is more closely associated with a desire for excitement, an interest in creative outlets, and an aversion to a structured work environment. Conservatives express greater interest in financial success and stronger desires to raise families. From this perspective, the ideological imbalance that permeates much of academia may be somewhat intractable.” Or, put differently, this imbalance may not be going away any time soon.

"While the long term effects of genome mutations are quite well understood, we did not know how often new mutations arise in the first place," said Detlef Weigel, director at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. It is routine today to compare the genomes of related animal or plant species. Such comparisons, however, ignore mutations that have been lost in the millions of years since two species separated. The teams of Weigel and his colleague Michael Lynch at Indiana University therefore wanted to scrutinize the signature of evolution before selection occurs. To this end, they followed all genetic changes in five lines of the mustard relative Arabidopsis thaliana that occurred during 30 generations. In the genome of the final generation they then searched for differences to the genome of the original ancestor.

The painstakingly detailed comparison of the entire genome revealed that in over the course of only a few years some 20 DNA building blocks, so called base pairs, had been mutated in each of the five lines. "The probability that any letter of the genome changes in a single generation is thus about one in 140 million," explains Michael Lynch. To put it differently, each seedling has on average one new mutation in each of the two copies of its genome that it inherits from mum and dad. To find these tiny alterations in the 120 million base pair genome of Arabidopsis was akin to finding the proverbial needle in a haystack, says Weigel: "To ferret out where the genome had changed was only possibly because of new methods that allowed us to screen the entire genome with high precision and in very short time." Still, the effort was daunting: To distinguish true new mutations from detection errors, each letter in each genome had to be checked 30 times.

The number of new mutations in each individual plant might appear very small. But if one starts to consider that they occur in the genomes of every member of a species, it becomes clear how fluid the genome is: In a collection of only 60 million Arabidopsis plants, each letter in the genome is changed, on average, once. For an organism that produces thousands of seeds in each generation, 60 million is not such a big number at all.

Apart from the speed of new mutations, the study revealed that not every part of the genome is equally affected. With four different DNA letters, there are six possible changes—but only one of these is responsible for half of all the mutations found. In addition, scientists can now calculate more precisely when species split up. Arabidopsis thaliana and its closest relative, Arabidopsis lyrata, differ in a large number of traits including size and smell of flowers or longevity: Arabidopsis lyrata plants often live for years, while Arabidopsis thaliana plants normally survive only for a few months. Colleagues had previously assumed that only five million years had passed by since the two species went their separate ways. The new data suggest instead that the split occurred already 20 million years ago. Similar arguments might affect estimates of when in prehistory animals and plants were first domesticated.

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Turning to the larger picture, Weigel suggests that changes in the human genome are at least as rapid as in Arabidopsis: "If you apply our findings to humans, then each of us will have on the order of 60 new mutations that were not present in our parents." With more than six billion people on our planet, this implies that on average each letter of the human genome is altered in dozens of fellow citizens. "Everything that is genetically possible is being tested in a very short period," adds Lynch, emphasizing a very different view than perhaps the one we are all most familiar with: that evolution reveals itself only after thousands, if not millions of years.