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Multitasking, or "continuous partial attention" as Linda Stone has called another form of attention-splitting, or "hyper attention" as N. Katherine Hayles has called another contemporary variant,2 are not necessarily bad alternatives to focused attention. It depends on what is happening in our own external and internal worlds at the moment.

As students become more aware of how they are directing their attention, I begin to emphasize the idea of using blogs and wikis as a means of connecting with their public voice and beginning to act with others in mind. Just because many students today are very good at learning and using online applications and at connecting and participating with friends and classmates via social media, that does not necessarily mean that they understand the implications of their participation within a much larger public.

ut how to participate in a way that's valuable to others as well as to yourself, I agree with Yochai Benkler, Henry Jenkins, and others that participating, even if it's no good and nobody cares, gives one a different sense of being in the world. When you participate, you become an active citizen rather than simply a passive consumer of what is sold to you, what is taught to you, and what your government wants you to believe. Simply participating is a start. (Note that I am not guaranteeing that having a sense of agency compels people to perform only true, good, and beautiful actions.)

I don't believe in the myth of the digital natives who are magically empowered and fluent in the use of social media simply because they carry laptops, they're never far from their phones, they're gamers, and they know how to use technologies. We are seeing a change in their participation in society—yet this does not mean that they automatically understand the rhetorics of participation, something that is particularly important for citizens.

Critical consumption, or what Ernest Hemingway called "crap detection," is the literacy of trying to figure out what and who is trustworthy—and what and who is not trustworthy—online. If you find people, whether you know them or not, who you can trust to be an authority on something or another, add them to your personal network. Consult them personally, consult what they've written, and consult their opinion about the subject.

Finally, crap detection takes us back, full circle, to the literacy of attention. When I assign my students to set up an RSS reader or a Twitter account, they panic. They ask how they are supposed to keep up with the overwhelming flood of information. I explain that social media is not a queue; it's a flow. An e-mail inbox is a queue, because we have to deal with each message in one way or another, even if we simply delete them. But no one can catch up on all 5,000 or so unread feeds in their RSS reader; no one can go back through all of the hundreds (or thousands) of tweets that were posted overnight. Using Twitter, one has to ask: "Do I pay attention to this? Do I click through? Do I open a tab and check it out later today? Do I bookmark it because I might be interested in the future?" We have to learn to sample the flow, and doing so involves knowing how to focus our attention.

There’s a very narrow band of writing that is assessed in schools, and a lot is at stake on that narrow field. So the question is how do we balance helping young people do well in assessment contexts with the other stuff that might actually take them fuarther in the world?

You mentioned earlier about teachers needing to have digital lives—why is that important to connected learning? We don’t want to just say to educators, “You do these fives steps and you’ll have active, enquiring learners.” That’s forgetting that the teacher is also a learner. We think if we have active, enquiring, connected, engaged adults, they’ll transfer that culture or learning and inquiry to young people.

How do we link what we’re learning about the creative opportunities in new digital environments to how people engage and learn in their communities and in society at large?

Cell phone radiation is more powerful than that emitted by Wi-Fi devices and the predominant concern is brain cancer, since people tend to hold cell phones against their heads. If cell phones caused brain cancer, the scientists say, we should already be seeing an increase in overall cases. We don’t.

Schools have consequently endeavored to teach children how to read and write at younger and younger ages, but Bell says that’s problematic because children mature and learn at very different rates. It also steals time away from more developmentally appropriate activities for young children.