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And so, we should teach this new generation to move beyond embarrassment and fear. This is not to condone manifestly insolent behavior online, rather in teaching the qualities -- the unique qualities -- of the globally connected public square, we should be instilling in students both a strident determination to take part in the unadulterated public debate and yet have humility.I think both are achieved through the crucial practice of critical thinking and earnest self-analysis. And no where, if sincerely met with daily conviction, can both be better employed than in the practice of blogging.

And so, I firmly believe that all teachers should be bloggers. Because if Descartes is wrong, then the thrust of our identity is determined not by our inalienable and essential state of being but by the differences in idea and sense that we demonstrate through our interactions with others.

The only way to make learning easy, is to create a passion and safe culture for easy learning. The only way to make learning any subject easy is to create a community of learners where the students feel comfortable and safe to take risks. I have broken down this "easy" rule into four steps that make it easier to understand. A. Listen to why students are participating in the classroom and fulfill the learning needs that they are identifying. When these needs are being met. the student’s interest level and cooperation with the teacher will be highest. B. Understand how the classwork relates to the student’s daily lives. The student’s have to see the connection between the material and who they are to feel motivated C. Immerse the students in both the theoretical and material ways that the classwork affects the students lives. If the teacher presents the material in a complete fashion the classwork will be easier to place in its context. D. Give students the chance to learn. Create a community of learners where every member is trying to learn. Students and teachers have the ability to learn at every moment of their lives

So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.