Then she plunged into the task: Spend 15 minutes doing e-mail. Only e-mail, and nothing else.

Soon enough, though, a familiar craving bubbled up. For some people, the rabbit hole of Internet distraction begins with cat videos. For Ms. Hill, who calls herself “a massive weather geek,” it starts with a compulsion to check conditions in outer space.

As Ms. Hill plowed through e-mails, the voice beckoned: If I could only just leave and go to Spaceweather.com …

But the assignment had her trapped. After a while, she says, staying on e-mail felt more natural.

The e-mail drill was one of numerous mind-training exercises in a unique class designed to raise students’ awareness about how they use their digital tools. Colleges have experimented with short-term social-media blackouts in the past. But Ms. Hill’s course, “Information and Contemplation,” goes way further. Participants scrutinize their use of technology: how much time they spend with it, how it affects their emotions, how it fragments their attention. They watch videos of themselves multitasking and write guidelines for improving their habits. They also practice meditation—during class—to sharpen their attention.

Their professor, David M. Levy, sees these techniques as the template for a grass-roots movement that could spur similar investigations on other campuses and beyond. Mr. Levy hopes to open a fresh window on the polarized cultural debate about Internet distraction and information abundance.

At its extreme, that debate plays out in the writing of authors whom the critic Adam Gopnik has dubbed the Never-Betters and the Better-Nevers. Those camps duke it out over whether the Internet will unleash vast reservoirs of human potential (Clay Shirky) or destroy our capacity for concentration and contemplation (Nicholas Carr).

On college campuses, meanwhile, educators struggle to manage what the Stanford University multitasking researcher Clifford Nass describes as a radical shift in the nature of attention. Mr. Nass, who lives in a freshman dormitory as a “dorm parent,” sees that shift on students’ screens. They write papers while toggling among YouTube and Facebook and Spotify. They text and talk on smartphones. They hang out in lounges where the TV is on.

Amid this scampering attention, some fear for the future of long-form reading. That was a theme of a keynote speech at this year’s conference of the American Historical Association by the group’s departing president, William J. Cronon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Speaking to a ballroom of book-worshiping professors, the environmental historian expressed his anxiety about what he called “the Anna Karenina problem.”

Within 20 years, he wondered, will students manage to muster the dozens of hours of attention necessary to get through a lengthy novel like Tolstoy’s 19th-century classic? If not, what does that mean for works of history that are even harder to read?

When I ask Mr. Cronon what prompted him to stress that issue, he points to an encounter that illustrates the peril to the discipline of history:

A young man came up to him after a lecture he gave at another university. The talk had presented the themes of a 500- to 800-page book that Mr. Cronon is writing about the history of a small Wisconsin town, called Portage, from the glacier to the present. The young man told the historian how much he liked the lecture, but lamented that he could never read the book. Looking sad and ashamed, he said he had never read anything that lengthy.

But Mr. Levy, a professor in the Information School at University of Washington, sees a problem with many discussions about what technology is doing to our minds.

“So many of those debates fail to even acknowledge or realize that we can educate ourselves, even in the digital era, to be more attentive,” he says. “What’s crucial is education.”

(Read the rest of the story here.)

Until recently, intelligence analysts had taken no interest in Morris. The Stanford University professor is an authority on ancient Greece who turned to archaeology after failing as a heavy-metal guitarist. Morris makes his home as far from Washington bureaucracy as you can imagine: atop a ridge in this hippie town in the Santa Cruz Mountains, surrounded by towering redwoods and a menagerie of two dogs, two horses, and eight cats.

Yet the British-born 53-year-old is increasingly swapping this world of kale chips and hugs for the company of bankers and spooks. Their interest stems from his 2010 book Why the West Rules—for Now (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which analyzes 15,000 years of data to explain how the West came to dominate the globe over the past two centuries. Its backbone is an attempt to quantify, going back to the end of the last Ice Age, the “social development” of Eastern and Western societies—basically, their ability to get stuff done.

If that isn’t chutzpah enough, the final chapter goes further. It predicts the future.

Hence the summons to Langley. Morris gave a seminar about his data to a dozen people connected with the National Intelligence Council, which publishes a global trends report after each presidential election to guide the incoming administration. By Morris’s calculations, the “Western age” will end by 2103, with the East regaining the development lead.

But Morris encouraged his CIA audience to see the bigger picture. Throughout history, the development of societies has spawned forces that disrupted them. As Morris has written, the empires of ancient Rome and Han China “set off migrations, wars, famines, and plagues that brought them down.” Today development promises to reach astonishing levels. By his calculations, it will grow “twice as much between now and 2050 as in the previous 15,000 years,” and double again by 2100.

That means the rest of the 21st century won’t be just a shinier, faster version of the present. It will boil down to a race. Either technology will change what it means to be human, possibly rendering most of today’s problems irrelevant, or an Armageddon induced by climate change will destroy civilization first.

As Morris tells me this story, he seems unalarmed. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and the professor is walking his dogs, Fuzzy and Milo, around the woods near his house, 30 miles south of Palo Alto. Should doomsday arrive, this mountain ridge feels like a fine place to hunker down and survive. It used to be a pot-growing commune in the 60s. Now it supports an evolving cast of animals, plus a vegetable garden and plenty of wild mint for mojitos.

At 6-foot-3, Morris has the sturdy build of a steelworker or a miner—his grandfather’s and father’s jobs—with short gray hair, large ears, and a warm smile that spreads laugh lines around his eyes. The professor tends to smile while spinning these prophecies of cyberrevolution and collapse, a quirk that led one interviewer to joke that he must be “barking mad.”

Now he throws back his head and laughs. “It’s probably all going to be fine!”

If Morris’s predictions sound more like science fiction than scholarship, that’s just one way his work upends basic beliefs about how scholars should study the human past.

(Read the rest of the story here.)

Technology and economics are reshaping the textbook market, and the book-skipping trend is just one part of the story. Because books cost so much, students are highly motivated to find alternatives to new editions. The Web has fundamentally altered how they get those books. No longer must they trudge to the campus store. Instead, they shop a global market—a vast digital bazaar crammed with options for buying, renting, sharing, and stealing books. And for many, online grapevines like Facebook and Rate My Professors are now playing a role in the hunt for bargains, too.

To get a sense of these changes, The Chronicle conducted focus groups with undergraduates at Foothill College and the University of California at Berkeley. More than a dozen students participated at each location, representing a range of majors.

(Read the story here.)

Did it make a difference?

My new article looks at the influence of Wilson’s classic 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged. The Harvard sociologist’s book stimulated an enormous volume of research about inner-city neighborhoods, and it also shaped public policy. Yet 25 years after its publication, hardly anyone is talking about poverty. Not since the early 1960s has the issue received so little attention.

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

Jacqueline lived in one of the most toxic environments in urban America. If you’ve seenThe Wire, HBO’s series about crime and punishment in Baltimore, you can picture daily life in her neighborhood on that city’s West Side. Drug dealers. Junkies. Shootings. Her high-rise housing project felt like a concrete cell. Jacqueline, a single mother with a sick child, was desperate to escape.

Then she got a ticket out. In the mid-1990s, Jacqueline volunteered to participate in a far-reaching social experiment that would shed new light on urban poverty. The federal government gave her and many others housing vouchers to move out of ghettos—with a condition. Jacqueline (a pseudonym used by researchers to protect her privacy) had to use the voucher in an area where at least 90 percent of the residents lived above the federal poverty line.

It’s unlikely that Jacqueline had heard of William Julius Wilson, but the experiment that would change her life traces its intellectual roots in part to the Harvard sociologist’s 1987 book, The Truly Disadvantaged. Wilson upended urban research with his ideas about how cities had transformed in the post-civil-rights period. Writing to explain the rise of concentrated poverty in black inner-city neighborhoods after 1970, he focused on the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of black working- and middle-class families, which left ghettos with a greater proportion of poor people. And he examined the effects of extreme poverty and “social isolation” on their lives. The program that transplanted Jacqueline, Moving to Opportunity, was framed as a test of his arguments about “whether neighborhoods matter” in poor people’s lives.

Twenty-five years after its publication, The Truly Disadvantaged is back in the spotlight, thanks to a flurry of high-profile publications and events that address its ideas.

Researchers who have followed families like Jacqueline’s over 15 years are now reporting the long-term results of the mobility experiment. The mixed picture emerging from the project—”one of the nation’s largest attempts to eradicate concentrated poverty,” in the words of the Harvard sociologist Robert J. Sampson—is feeding a broader discussion about how to help the urban underclass.

(Read the rest of the story here.)

Since MIT and Harvard started edX, their joint experiment with free online courses, the venture has attracted enormous attention for opening the ivory tower to the world.

But in the process, the world will become part of an expensive and ambitious experiment testing some of the most interesting—and difficult—questions in digital education.

Can community-college students benefit from a new form of hybrid learning, based on a mix of local instruction and edX content? Can colleges tap alumni as teaching volunteers? Can labs be reinvented in the style of online video games?

EdX and its collaborators are developing tools and teaching models to answer those questions. And they view the project as a means to study even deeper problems, like understanding how people forget—and creating strategies to prevent it.

“It’s a live laboratory for studying how people learn, how the mind works, and how to improve education, both residential and online,” says Piotr Mitros, edX’s chief scientist.

(Read the rest of the story here.)

Here’s an except from my first post for the blog, about a new discovery in the field of musicology:

 

It was an unsolved mystery of classical music. An “Easter” sonata, sometimes attributed to the 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn, had largely disappeared from history. Scholars suspected the work was actually by the celebrated composer’s sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. But the manuscript seemed lost, so how could they prove it?

Duke University announced this week that a 28-year-old Ph.D. student in musicology, Angela R. Mace, had unraveled the riddle, demonstrating that the 1828 sonata was Hensel’s work. How Ms. Mace did it is a story of archival digging and sheer luck that culminated in a trembling moment of excitement as she held the missing manuscript in the Paris office of its private owner.

The discovery helps shed light on a composer who wrote during an era when a musical career was impossible for such a high-status “lady of leisure.” Hensel lived in “a golden cage” while her younger brother won international fame and a place in history as a key composer of the early Romantic period. Today, Hensel is known for smaller pieces, especially “lieder,” or songs, says Ms. Mace.

The 25-minute “Easter” sonata adds a significant work to her catalog, one Ms. Mace hopes will find its way onto concert programs. (You can listen to the sonata’s first movement here.)

“That she did write this large form so successfully helps us re-evaluate who she was as a composer,” Ms. Mace says. “It helps us see her not just as a composer of these small forms, but someone who was every bit as ambitious, and every bit as capable, as a man.”

(Read the rest of the post here. And please let me know if you have any ideas for future posts.)

My latest Chronicle article explores that question through the story of an innovative historical crowdsourcing project at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media.

Here’s an excerpt:

On November 8, 1800, fire ravaged the federal War Office, in Washington. The agency’s files went up in smoke, leaving a gaping hole in the nation’s historical rec­ord.

“The most important window into the early republic had basically been boarded up,” says Christopher H. Hamner, a military historian at George Mason University.

Not anymore. Through years of shoe-leather detective work, scholars have recreated much of the archive by tracking down copies of nearly 45,000 documents. But now they face another challenge: transcribing them from digital images.

Their solution is to enlist the public to help, free. The experiment, run by George Mason’s Center for History and New Media, tests an increasingly important question: How will the Wikipedia model of open participation change humanities scholarship?

Many people have taken part in crowdsourced science research, volunteering to classify galaxies, fold proteins, or transcribe old weather information from wartime ship logs for use in climate modeling. These days humanists are increasingly throwing open the digital gates, too. Civil War-era diaries, historical menus, the papers of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham—all have been made available to volunteer transcribers in recent years. In January the National Archives released its own cache of documents to the crowd via its Citizen Archivist Dashboard, a collection that includes letters to a Civil War spy, suffrage petitions, and fugitive-slave case files.

The crowdsourcing boom is opening the ivory tower to people like Jaré Cardinal. Ms. Cardinal runs the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum, in western New York. Working in her home office overlooking the Allegheny River, she joins the 760 volunteers who have answered the call to transcribe War Office records. Their only official training is a short set of guidelines.

Here’s an excerpt:

CAMPUSES are places of intuition and serendipity: a professor senses confusion on a student’s face and repeats his point; a student majors in psychology after a roommate takes a course; two freshmen meet on the quad and eventually become husband and wife. Now imagine hard data substituting for happenstance.

As Katye Allisone, a freshman at Arizona State University, hunkers down in a computer lab for an 8:35 a.m. math class, the Web-based course watches her back. Answers, scores, pace, click paths — it hoovers up information, like Google. But rather than personalizing search results, data shape Ms. Allisone’s class according to her understanding of the material.

With 72,000 students, A.S.U. is both the country’s largest public university and a hotbed of data-driven experiments. One core effort is a degree-monitoring system that keeps tabs on how students are doing in their majors. Stray off-course and a student may have to switch fields.

And while not exactly matchmaking, Arizona State takes an interest in students’ social lives, too. Its Facebook app mines profiles to suggest friends. One classmate shares eight things in common with Ms. Allisone, who “likes” education, photography and tattoos. Researchers are even trying to figure out social ties based on anonymized data culled from swipes of ID cards around the Tempe campus.

This is college life, quantified.

Data mining hinges on one reality about life on the Web: what you do there leaves behind a trail of digital breadcrumbs. Companies scoop those up to tailor services, like the matchmaking of eHarmony or the book recommendations of Amazon. Now colleges, eager to get students out the door more efficiently, are awakening to the opportunities of so-called Big Data.

The new breed of software can predict how well students will do before they even set foot in the classroom. It recommends courses, Netflix-style, based on students’ academic records.

Data diggers hope to improve an education system in which professors often fly blind. That’s a particular problem in introductory-level courses, says Carol A. Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation. “The typical class, the professor rattles on in front of the class,” she says. “They give a midterm exam. Half the kids fail. Half the kids drop out. And they have no idea what’s going on with their students.”

As more of this technology comes online, it raises new tensions. What role does a professor play when an algorithm recommends the next lesson? If colleges can predict failure, should they steer students away from challenges? When paths are so tailored, do campuses cease to be places of exploration?

“We don’t want to turn into just eHarmony,” says Michael Zimmer, assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, where he studies ethical dimensions of new technology. “I’m worried that we’re taking both the richness and the serendipitous aspect of courses and professors and majors — and all the things that are supposed to be university life — and instead translating it into 18 variables that spit out, ‘This is your best fit. So go over here.’ ”