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you need to be aware of issues anywhere in the globe. And to solve these sorts of problems, you need to be in dialogue with people across the globe.

This is the fundamental question: How do you make people want to do something that seems to be against our very nature, which is to reach out beyond what we think we know, what we're comfortable with, to something utterly foreign and unfamiliar?

The Internet makes it easy for us to seal ourselves into little impermeable spheres, where we never have to encounter ideas we don't like or issues we don't care about. Is that where we're all headed?

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn't serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.