One curious difference between the author's approach and learning theory: he just made students ask questions, whereas learning theory wants students to actively answer them.
I once had a psychology class where the professor, who worked on learning theory, went so far as to work with some software company to develop Palm OS software which could be used to make students answer questions. He would put up a question on a projection screen in front of the class, and everyone would tap out an answer on a Wi-Fi enabled Treo PDA, which would send the students' answers to a server. Then the right answer would show up on the projection screen, so students get immediate feedback.
Maybe this shows that active involvement is essential, and it does not matter if students ask or answer questions. A little common sense might have done better than high technology.
Look at item 4 in the set of ideas that I tried. I asked a lot of questions, and did it in such a way that everyone figured out the answer before someone was asked to say it.
The method that I used wouldn't scale to a large class. Your psychology professor's piece of software would.
My son's high school physics teacher has something like this that appears to be a commercial product, with lots of IR remote controls that get pointed at an IR receiver connected to the teacher's laptop. He runs it sort of like Who Wants to be a Millionaire.
Several of my high school classes, including math classes, used "clickers." http://telr.osu.edu/clickers/
They were better when the questions were interesting, but the competition to get the fastest response made even easy questions fun.
I think there's room for improvement in the technology, though. For example, my geometry class figured out the code to reassign individual clickers, in order to make other people lose points by changing their answers.
I once had a psychology class where the professor, who worked on learning theory, went so far as to work with some software company to develop Palm OS software which could be used to make students answer questions. He would put up a question on a projection screen in front of the class, and everyone would tap out an answer on a Wi-Fi enabled Treo PDA, which would send the students' answers to a server. Then the right answer would show up on the projection screen, so students get immediate feedback.
Maybe this shows that active involvement is essential, and it does not matter if students ask or answer questions. A little common sense might have done better than high technology.