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Institutions should be teaching students about the importance of context in online communications, the fluidity of privacy, awareness of nuance, and the power of community-building through social media.

Students are learning and growing in tandem with faculty and staff. In the near future, judging someone’s social media postings from their pre-college days may be significantly reduced.

He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time.

Instead of developing a passion for one subject, they’re rewarded for becoming professional students, getting great grades across all subjects, regardless of their intrinsic interests. Instead of wandering across strange domains, they have to prudentially apportion their time, making productive use of each hour.

Competition has trumped value-creation. In this and other ways, the competitive arena undermines innovation.

By forbidding the use of social media sites in 52% of our nation’s classrooms, schools are suppressing a learning revolution that is characterized by several truths: 1) facility with social media tools is critical to learning and working in the 21st century; 2) 75% of online adolescents are already social networking outside of school; 3) many students hack through Internet filters during class; and 4) exploration of social media sites is part of the adolescent identity.

Workshop reports that, on average, kids can actually stuff eight hours of media exposure into five hours of non-school time by media multitasking—phone texting while participating in seven separate Facebook chats and posting to Tumblr.

Dr. Howard Rheingold, on his final exam, asked his Stanford students to demonstrate their understanding of the literacies that accompany new media by creating, rather than writing, an essay. B