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By focusing on a range of issues — sexual predation, teenage suicide, bullying, sexting, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual trafficking — Dr. Boyd has shown, often to the dismay of those in the tech community who believe that the Internet is the ultimate equalizer, that issues of race, class and gender persist in the virtual world just as in the real world. The children in families characterized by alcohol and drug abuse, financial stress, divorce and sexual abuse reveal their struggles online just as they do off. “She was the first to say that the teenagers at risk off line are the same ones who are at risk online,” said Alice Marwick, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft who works closely with Dr. Boyd. “It’s not that the Internet is doing something bad to these kids, it’s that these bad things are in kids’ lives and the Internet is just a component of that.” Most broadly, with troubled teenagers and model youth alike, adolescent online behavior is a reflection of what teenagers’ social lives have always been: friendship, gossip, flirting, transgressing and keeping it all — good and bad — from parents.

the “learning paradox”: the more you struggle and even fail while you’re trying to master new information, the better you’re likely to recall and apply that information later.

let the neophytes wrestle with the material on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the start.

These students weren’t able to complete the problems correctly. But in the course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nature of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when the two groups were tested on what they’d learned, the second group “significantly outperformed” the first.

Finland follows the basic formula that has been performed by math teachers for centuries: The teachers go over homework, they present a lesson (some of the kids listen and some don’t), and then they assign homework.

What if we didn’t force students who know that their talents reside outside of the world of formal academics to take three years of high school classes that they found boring and useless?  What if we allowed them to train in and explore vocations they found fascinating and in which they were gifted?

This system allows the Finnish teacher more time to plan and think about each lesson.  It allows them to create great, thought provoking lessons.

intellectual humility

“They, instead, commit the fundamental attribution error, which is if something good happens, it’s because I’m a genius. If something bad happens, it’s because someone’s an idiot or I didn’t get the resources or the market moved.

. Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job. The world only cares about — and pays off on — what you can do with what you know (and it doesn’t care how you learned it).

Howard Rheingold (howard@rheingold.com) is the author of Tools For Thought, The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs, and other books and is currently lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.

I focus on five social media literacies: Attention Participation Collaboration Network awareness Critical consumption

lthough I consider attention to be fundamental to all the other literacies, the one that links together all the others, and although it is the one I will spend the most time discussing in this article, none of these literacies live in isolation.

A defining condition of being human is that we have to understand the meaning of our experience

we want students to get into the habit of linking and constructing meaning from their experiences. Such work requires reflection

Reflection has many facets. For example, reflecting on work enhances its meaning. Reflecting on experiences encourages insight and complex learning. We foster our own growth when we control our learning, so some reflection is best done alone. Reflection is also enhanced, however, when we ponder our learning with others.