There is nothing wrong with having non-educational interests or pursuing a "regular" life; it isn't that everyone should be under the pressure of trying to become a genius, but I think it's a sad state when higher ambitions are almost discouraged — that we are pressured, instead, into shooting for average because the ones who don't are singled out as "nerds" or "think they are better than everyone else" or what have you.

Your last paragraph hits the spot, hope you don't mind if I quote you.

“People respond to the economics of food choices. Lab scientists aren’t able to handle this concept—for them, talking about the price of food is taboo—but it’s extremely important. Americans spend about three dollars and seventy-five cents a day on food that they eat at home. They can eat pizza at about a thousand calories a dollar, or Oreo cookies at about twelve hundred calories a dollar. M&M’s, at about three thousand calories per dollar, are a huge bargain. Spinach is about thirty calories a dollar, not a bargain. And don’t even think about lettuce or cucumbers or tomatoes or, heaven forbid, strawberries—by comparison, those foods are a rip-off! Nutrition educators tell us how to eat, but they don’t give us the money to change our behavior. Given that people don’t really want to spend more on food, I don’t see that they have any choice here … the choice is really made for them. Rats in a lab have a choice. But humans are constrained by costs.”
— Adam Drewnowski, Director of the Nutritional Sciences Program and Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle. Drewnowski was quoted in The Hungry Gene by Ellen Ruppel Shell.

FLOSS [Free/libre open source software] communities possess many characteristics that educational communities could benefit by adopting:

1. Open and inclusive ethos: everyone can participate, no charges, no deadlines, life long participation
2. Up to date content; everyone can add, edit and update the content
3. Materials are usually the product of many authors with many contributions from people other than authors
4. Frequent releases and updates where product features and community structures are the result of a continuous re-negotiation / reflection process within a continuous development cycle
5. Prior learning outcomes and processes are systematically available through mailing lists, forums, commented code and further instructional materials (re-use)
6. A large support network; provided voluntarily by the community member in a collaborative manner nearly 24/7
7. Free Riders (lurker) welcome paradox – the more the better
8. New ICT [information and communication technology] solutions are adapted early by the community

Education professionals may be aware that FLOSS-like principles can benefit education, but there has been no systematic and comprehensive approach to map and transfer those principles, or to develop new educational models and scenarios around them.

The WikiEducator is an evolving community intended for the collaborative:

* planning of education projects linked with the development of free content;
* development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning;
* work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OERs.
* networking on funding proposals developed as free content.

I've heard of babies who can learn the names of all the presidents, I know that I sure can't.

Digital media and networks can only empower the people who learn how to use them — and pose dangers to those who don't know what they are doing. Yes, it's easy to drift into distraction, fall for misinformation, allow attention to fragment rather than focus, but those mental temptations pose dangers only for the untrained mind..

Those people who do not gain fundamental literacies of attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness are in danger of all the pitfalls critics point out — shallowness, credulity, distraction, alienation, addiction. I worry about the billions of people who are gaining access to the Net without the slightest clue about how to find knowledge and verify it for accuracy, how to advocate and participate rather than passively consume, how to discipline and deploy attention in an always-on milieu, how and why to use those privacy protections that remain available in an increasingly intrusive environment..

Online attention-taming begins with what meditators call "mindfulness" — the simple, self-influencing awareness of how attention wanders..

Crap detection — Hemingway's name for what digital librarians call credibility assessment — is another essential literacy. If all schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any question and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is accurate or not.

Network awareness, from the strength of weak ties and the nature of small-world networks to the power of publics and the how and why of changing Facebook privacy settings, would be the next literacy I would teach, after crap detection. Networks aren't magic, and knowing the principles by which they operate confers power on the knowledgeable..

The health of the online commons will depend on whether more than a tiny minority of Net users become literate Netizens.

- Howard Rheingold

Editorial Review - Kirkus Reviews Copyright (c) VNU Business Media, Inc.
A common-sense, practical (and at times simplistic) thinking guide that is probably most effective in de Bono's seminars, or with the BBC-TV series this book is meant to accompany. (See also following review.) Thinking is a concept that, de Bono says, has little to do with innate intelligence. In fact, he asserts, ""highly intelligent people may my out to be rather poor thinkers."" Among the elements of his way of ""better thinking"": thorough exploration of alternatives; suppression of emotion until a problem or question has been addressed; lack of contentment with merely adequate solutions; rejection of familiar patterns of thinking; use of ""bad"" ideas as stepping stones to other ideas. In the most interesting parts of this book, de Bono tells of students of his whose thinking changed. A telling—if minor—example is the computer executive who for 25 years had been putting two packets of sugar in his coffee, always opening the two separately, and who while taking a de Bono thinking course began spontaneously to place one packet atop the other and open them together. But for every concrete example de Bono offers, there is an annoying acronym that refers to concepts he discusses. Typical ones include FI-FO, standing for inFormation-In and inFormation-Out; FQ, fishing question; SQ, shooting question. As scores of these acronyms are introduced, one begins encountering sentences that read: ""Explore first with such tools as PMI, CAF, APC, EBS, ADI, OPV."" Eventually, the prose starts to have the grace of an electronics manual. More crucially, like many teachers of cure-all systems, de Bono glibly dismisses actual or perceived competition. Thus he makes such blanket statements as ""Western civilization in its philosophy and in its practice has been obsessed with the 'clash' system in which two opposing views fight it out."" In his brief discussion of the matter, he distorts the process of dialectics, apparently understanding only thesis and antithesis but not the key concept of synthesis. He also defines critical and constructive thinking as antagonistic, leading to the unfortunate remark that ""many of the more brilliant minds in Western civilization are trapped into this unconstructive mode [of negative criticism]."" The intelligent and valuable points—and they are several—could be covered in a book a quarter of the length and with less jargon. . .especially those bubbling acronyms.