When I am up against a deadline and I absolutely, definitely have to get on with my work, I use a few tactics to force myself to concentrate:

1. Switch off email. I don't start Outlook (or if I do, I disable all the notifications that tell me I have new mail).



2. Isolate myself. I use Bose noise-canceling headphones but don't plug them into anything. The silence really is golden.



3. Greed and guilt. I remind myself how much money I'm getting paid for a particular assignment and how ashamed I will be if I miss the deadline. This actually works sometimes.



4. Stop with the blog already. When I'm pressed for time, distractions like blogging and tidying up become very compelling. Knowing this makes it easier to resist.


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These are the five writer blogs that I, your humble editor, check out every day.

The Mechanic & the Muse . Reporter turned writing teacher Chip Scanlan's baby, on the art and carpentry of good prose.

Gangrey. Great storytelling from newspapers around the country, and so much more.

Collision Detection. Tech and culture writer Clive Thompson's collection.

Malcolm Gladwell . Tipping Point and Blink's author's. How can you not check it every day?

Creating Passionate Users . What writer doesn't want passionate readers?

On the evolution of my most recent novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, which was recently read on Dick Estell's Radio Reader and was a finalist for the SIBA (Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance) Award in Fiction 2006.

My father died of Alzheimer's seven years ago this past June. A couple of years before he died, I began keeping notes. At first we weren't sure he had Alzheimer's. He hadn't been to the doctor in 35 years, so we had no real frame of reference. My father was wonderful, smart, articulate, warm, very well read, obsessed with Eastern mysticism, a fine writer, and eccentric in a very charming way, and so it was hard to tell where any sort of illness like Alzheimer's started and where his personality left off. Looking back, we realized he had been a master at hiding what he didn't know or what he was forgetting.

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If you scroll down to the end of this article you can enter a comment on what you just read. It's a small deal that hints to a bigger deal: The evolution of the Internet into a collaborative universe. Educators have lately grasped the power of this in the classroom -- and are beginning to use collaboration tools to enhance learning. To find out more, we called up two education technology experts, Cristina Lopez and Kurtis Scaletta, both Instructional Multimedia Consultants at the Digital Media Center of the University of Minnesota. They've been studying the potential of a collaboration technology called "wikis" and run a website called Teaching With Wikis. We asked them how wikis can improve learning -- and the challenges teachers face using them.

VT: What in the world is a "wiki?"

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Subscriber Marije Martijn graciously sent suggested the following Visual Thesaurus learning activity for students, after she read our "Wanted" posting from a teacher:

"In response to the teacher's query: I was thinking it might be nice to give kids an association assignment, telling them to get from, say, tree to society in four steps. Entering tree in the VT would get you, among others, wood. Clicking on wood gets you club, and from club you get to society.

If this is too difficult, you can just ask them to find two words that are entirely unrelated in a small number of steps. This kind of assignments will make them think about synonyms (e.g. "club") and in general about relations between words. And to tell you the truth, I think it is also just fun to do. Best, Marije"

In his excellent blog, 2 Cents Worth, noted educator, author and speaker David Warlick argues for "an education system that is challenged to prepare children for their future -- and it's not their father's future." To meet this challenge, he says, a flat classroom is imperative. What does David mean by a "flat classroom?" To find out, read his post here.

Two of the science fiction authors that our colleague Robert recommends in the latest "Dog Eared" book picks also write regular... well, don't call them "blogs." Check out Neil Gaiman's Journal and George R.R. Martin's Not a Blog.