This is definitely something to read over the holidays, and reflect on. The pseudonymous author, "Ed Dante," tells about how he makes a living writing papers, theses, dissertations, and taking courses for others: Helping them cheat, in other words. He believes he is describing a structural problem in our educational system, and one that is not being addressed.

The comments to the article certainly drift off in various strange places, only occasionally addressing the author's issues. Having once been offered $5,000 to be a graduate student's "shadow" in a clinical psychology masters program, this writer has experienced this industry. (I turned the graduate student in, BTW.)

From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.

For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground—they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let's be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn't get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top. As for the first two types of students—the ESL and the hopelessly deficient—colleges are utterly failing them. Students who come to American universities from other countries find that their efforts to learn a new language are confounded not only by cultural difficulties but also by the pressures of grading. The focus on evaluation rather than education means that those who haven't mastered English must do so quickly or suffer the consequences. My service provides a particularly quick way to "master" English. And those who are hopelessly deficient—a euphemism, I admit—struggle with communication in general.

This writer's response to discussion of "information overload" has become pretty routine. Hearing that phrase makes me want to yawn. This nice essay in The Chronicle Review by Ann Blairabout information management before digital books is a calm, somewhat reflective piece of a sort I would like to see more of. In the near future, when I hear talk about "distraction," I will use this phrase from Seneca's work: "[T]he abundance of books is a distraction."

Reactions to overload have often been emotional, whether hostile or enthusiastic. Early negative responses include Ecclesiastes 12:12 ("Of making books there is no end," probably from the fourth or third century BC) and Seneca's "distringit librorum multitudo" ("the abundance of books is distraction," first century AD). But we also find enthusiasm for accumulation—of papyri at the Library of Alexandria (founded in the early third century BC) or of the 20,000 "facts" that Pliny the Elder accumulated in Historia naturalis (completed in AD 77). Though we no longer care especially about ancient precedent, we hear the same doom and praise today.

Overload has also triggered pragmatic responses, as generations have done their best to locate and use the information they seek, under inevitable constraints of time, energy, and other resources. Typically we select from collective storage facilities, like libraries and the Internet, and not only books and Web pages but also specific parts of them (like arguments, quotations, or facts). If we wish to revisit results, we need to store them so that they are retrievable. Electronic media have prompted attempts (as in Microsoft's MyLifeBits) to store the entirety of an individual's experiences, but among scholars a more conventional method is to take notes and store selections or summaries.