If there’s any liberatory impulse in education it’s the existential challenge of complication. Especially in undergraduate education, the goals is to move students away from the simple, emotion-dominated decision making common to both adolescents and commercial culture, and towards the more complex, nuanced, rationality-dominated thinking that is the ideal goal or most important skill of both adulthood and intellectual culture.

Adults and intellectuals can fall (back) into simplistic thinking almost as easily as adolescents, depending on the subject and circumstances. (Love comes to mind.) That’s why I favor research that works as a counterweight to conventional thinking; it’s complicating adult simplicity. That’s especially true of intellectuals my age (especially but not all men) and technology (which we love as much…

Every writer has a weakness; mine’s spelling. It’s probably worsened by my sometimes spastic typing skills, and my sometimes sticky keyboard. (My other weakness is eating breakfast sitting here at the computer; bagel crumbs get in everything.) So I was fascinated to hear researchers suggest that texting might in fact teach a certain kind of language awareness that might help students learn to spell (“Phone texting ‘helps pupils to spell“).

I’m not quite sure that Britain and the United States have quite the same context surrounding language in general and learning in particular. I haven’t taught in Britain, but here the problematic use of texting codes is often closely related to an entire complex of issues related to that…