Learn by Doing? Learn to be the best. Learn by school? Learn to be at the mercy of an authority figure.

It’s clearly evident that humans learn much better by doing rather than abstract listening and studying. So why do we keep structuring our school systems after hitting the books and listening to lectures when we should be giving students hands on experiences in fields of study? 

Why do we tend to sort out students based on their ability to live up to expectations of teachers, professors, lecturers, teaching graduate students? We have this need to sort out the smart kids from the dumb kids, and say these people have the ability to succeed, and these other people are wasting their time and shouldn’t even be here.

It’s easy. Because it’s easy. We need to get over this laziness and do something about reforming education. Instead of taking the easy path out and throwing money at it, maybe we should look deeper and determine what is the best way to produce cream of the crop students, and work hard to achieve that. Until then, money won’t solve anything.

Ultrabooks: Intel introduces new Notebook category

At Computex in Taipeh Intel announced Ultrabooks, a new class of slim and powerful subnotebooks, yesterday. Ultrabooks are as (or sometimes, due to their thinness even more) portable as the netbooks we all are used to, but way more powerful than these, featuring Intel ULV Core i5 and Core i7 processors.

The first Ultrabook is the ASUS UX21, which, while certainly resembling the Macbook Air in a way  (it´s a thin and powerful notebook, after all), shows that ASUS is the most innovative taiwanese PC maker these days, just think of the EeePC and the recently introduced Android running EeePads, which have one thing in common: They aren´t just “me too” products, but offer unique features.

Intel expects the Ultrabook category to be the next big thing - but didn´t they expect MIDs to be big, too? We will see how well this turns out. There has always been a demand for more powerful devices featuring a netbook form factor, so this might become a success.

Lastly, I assume that you want to see what Ultrabooks look like. Here is a video of Netbook king and expert Sascha Pallenberg of netbooknews.com going hands on with the ASUS UX21: