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"Like many kids of my generation growing up in India, I was an avid reader of Enid Blyton's novels. Many of her books were written as a series ("The Famous Five," "The Secret Seven" and "Five Find-Outers") and I recall wondering if the lives of characters overlapped in any way. Did a character from one series ever run into one from another, for example? I recall wondering the same thing in later years about P.G. Wodehouse's Blandings Castle and Jeeves series. Today, in a world where communities real and imagined are digitally connected via platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr, we can reframe that question in terms of those common nodes (or friends) in those characters' social networks. As it turns out, network theory as an analytic technique, or what I'd call computational literary analysis, is not just a bona fide research endeavor. It's also a great example of how computational thinking (CT) is truly a cross-disciplinary skill that can be weaved to enrich learning in any subject (not just math and science, as is sometimes the assumption). In an earlier article on computational thinking, I offered teasers of how CT could be integrated into language arts and social studies, in addition to math and science. Here's a detailed treatment of one of those examples, drawn from the work of Franco Moretti's group on "Computational Criticism," which is part of the broader Digital Humanities initiative at Stanford. (See this New York Times profile for more on the work of this group)."

"High school English teacher Michael Godsey's favorite work by William Shakespeare is Hamlet. But a few years ago, he stopped teaching his students about the centuries-old classic in favor of a story that was unfolding in the fall of 2014: Serial, the podcast. Michael Godsey The story of Adnan Syed, Hae Min Lee and the community at Woodlawn High School captivated podcast listeners around the world, including Godsey. The story was so engaging, he made listening to Serial in real time an assignment for his students and eventually made podcasts a regular part of his English class. He also teaches with episodes of This American Life, RadioLab and Serial Season 2 that cover subjects relevant to the lives of students."