Thing 23

The material that I have covered over the last ten weeks has helped me focus my thoughts on the most effective ways of sharing Web 2.0 tools with students and faculty in order to create a collaborative and conversant community. I appreciate the flexibility of digital texts and the simplicity with which most can be communicated nearly instantaneously. There are of course inherent dangers in un-mediated communication as anyone who has ever sent an impusive email no doubt has discovered. I am somewhat anxious about the disrupted rhetorics and governance to which Dr. Welsh alludes in the final video and definitely feel that the only hope of privacy in a Web 2.0 universe is to bury oneself in the crowd. This will lead to myriad blogs this year that are vaguely familiar (nearly all narcissistic and nearly all trite). The blog becomes the medium and the message, and the blogger one of many mouthpieces for the spirit of a digital age. As we have witnessed in the fractious debate over health care, our social mobs are riotous whether they meet in person or online. In education, we hope that we can teach digital citizenship that will temper the passion of zealots and awaken the virtue of the silent. There are too many opportunities for cowardice in a virtual world. Something about the screen allows our children to bully and demean each other in a way they rarely would do in person. There are too many false heroes in a virtual world. Our students succumb inevitably to the temptation of borrowing/stealing the work of others in order to appear brighter than they really are. I think this particular danger should inspire us to design online tasks that reward authenticity and that validate creativity. My generation (Xers) was probably the last of the rote learners and possibly the last to share a common cultural language. The future belongs to a generation that must learn to speak in their First lives as impressively as they do in their Second Life, across cultures. My plan is to continue to invite students to connect who they are to what they do. Integrity must be critical element in every assignment so that it becomes a shared expectation and practiced habit. My big takeaway from this exercise is a renewed sense that teachers , guides and coaches are needed more than ever in increasingly adult-free spaces so that learners might find models for lifelong learning on the razors' edge of the digital revolution. Web 2.0 edges are sharp, but democracy and culture hang in the balance. What is currently being negotiated in our schools is not so much the tool we shall choose to inscribe our history but the language with which we will articulate our realistic hopes.

Thing 22

Last spring our library was awarded one of the Picturing America grants from NEH and I had the pleasure of attending a summer workshop in Boston hosted by Primary Source on the "democratic vistas" of American realism. We were tasked with developing lesson plans that could be shared with other educators about at least one painting in the collection and one theme relevant to our students. I chose to explore further the Rowing Pictures of Thomas Eakins. Thing 22 motivated me to think of different ways of sharing this information. We have to submit a 5 page paper that I suspect some truly dedicated faculty will find on the NEH pages. A wiki, by contrast, is quick and very public way of engaging your peers in a conversation about best practices. I have started working on http://eakins.wikispaces.com/ and expect to spend the next month adding better links and more interactive widgets for faculty to explore as they consider the contribution that Eakins made to our our shared appreciation of amateur sports. I expect that the final product will be organized around three central questions: 1) what is a sport? 2) who is an athlete? and 3) how can you tell an amateur from a professional? At present the Navigation menu on the left hand side only lists home, Introduction to Thomas Eakins and Resources as place holders. A wiki fundamentally differs from a blog in this respect: thise who consult the wiki will likely share 1) an affinity for the subject matter, 2) a controlled vocabulary and 3) an expectation that the subject matter rather than the wiki author is central. With blogs (this one is no exception), I often get the sense that one voice dominates. With a wiki, I will strive to contribute to an apen discussion where many people share authority of experience and may contribute useful resources and insights. I think that a wiki is most appropriate for collaborative curricular projects and that a blog supports journaling and introspection.

Thing 21

I enjoyed Westmont Wiki https://westmontwiki.wikispaces.com/
I particularly like the librarian's use of Glogster to enhance navigation on the home page. It offers a visually appealing way of promoting information literacy. I enjoyed the fact that the act of pointing the cursor to a subject heading leads to that heading being circled. I also appreciated the fact that every page has a table of contents that allows the user to quickly drill down into an area of interest. For example, on the "Parent and Family Resources" page, parents can use the table of contents to explore "safety on the internet" without having to scroll through several dozen links. I also like the fact several teacher wikis are linked on the westmont wiki which promotes collegiality and offers a one stop shop for parents and students. The "Special Needs" resources ensure that all constituencies at Westmont are well served. Finally, I applaud Ms Houle for updating links on a regular basis. I noticed that the "News and Media Resources" links had been updated well into the end of the school year (May 2009). Keeping a wiki current has to be the greatest challenge of all. In order to remove this hurdle, I would seek out colleagues to help me edit and update a school library wiki. This summer I used wikispaces to create a wiki to support summer reading. It would have been far more effective and comprehensive if I had created a space for other teachers to share their insights about the required reading. This of course would require relinquishing some control over "my space" but I believe that it would benefit our students and create an interactive and conversant community of devoted readers.

Thing 20

I used EPN to locate the Genocide Prevention Network to which I subscribed. This year we are hosing Immacule Ilibagiza, a survivor of the Rwandan Genocide. She will be addressing our faculty and students in early February during Catholic Schools Week. I expect tp use this podcast to help our community prepare for her visit by becoming better versed in the political and economic factors at stake in the Darfur tragedy. Most of our students will be able to subscribe to the podcast on their iPhones and to play episodes in the car on the way to school or to a game (two out of every three of our students are athletes).
I used Podcast Alley to locate World Vision Report with Peggy Wehmeyer whom I respect greatly for her clear and candid way of reporting on religion. For our students at a Catholic school, a podcast such as this is invaluable. The Genocide Prevention Network podcast will give them a sense of the scope of the evil that men can do. The World Vision Report will affirm the power of Gospel inspired concerted collective social action.
I preferred EPN to Podcast Alley because I had to sift through three pages of News and Politics podcasts to locate World Vision Report (which I recognized because I was familiar with World Vision. The details section did not make clear the context for these gripping reports from the developing world) . I preferred Bloglines as my aggregator to iTunes because it made sense to keep track of the new episodes as part of a news folder where I get my Reuters feeds.

Thing 19

I enjoy NPR podcasts because they allow me to keep up with some of my favorite shows. Two of my favorites are Talk of the Nation http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=5 and All Songs Considered http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510019
While discussions can sometimes be heated on Talk of the Nation, I think that my students would benefit from hearing mostly informed adults disagree on matters of public policy in a generally civil tone. I think that students who only get their news from cable tend to imbibe extreme language like mother's milk and often fail to listen charitably to different points of view. I can imagine using All Songs considered to discourage piracy and file sharing because so many indie tracks are available and so many interviews with up and coming artists. In my experience, students are less likely to cheat an artists of their derserved royalties if they have heard their life story and hear them sing in studio. My students tend to excuse piracy when they believe that multinational conglomerates are charging usurious prices or unnecessarily complicating their ability to share the tunes with their friends (DRM). So both podcasts would be used to teach good digital citizenship.

Thing 18

(Schools out). Personal Learning Environments - what they are and why they might be useful

View more documents from GrahamAttwell.

I added this presentation because it touches on the potential of social media in shaping new and more engaging pedagogies. I like thew comic book format and the audio track that accompanies the slides. If we are serious about lifelong learning, I think Atwell's "personal learning environments" will lead the way. If learners develop their own networks and their own communities of practice, a more authentic approach to turning data into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. The promise, as Atwell correctly states, is that every learner will articulate their voice over a lifetime of exploration and discovery. The danger remains that learners will only pursue the questions that feel safe and opinions that are consonant with their own. "Personal learning environments" have to challenge accepted truths and trigger some cognitive dissonance if learners are to grow in their understanding , empathy and experience. Otherwise, we will have parallel narcissistic, self-referential universes where learners reinforce prejudice and initial perception ( otherwise known as Facebook) or public confessionals inundated with pithy inappropriate self-disclosure (otherwise known as Twitter).

Slideshare could be a useful tool for bringing to fruition Atwell's vision of "personal learning environments". To adequately address the dangers that I named in the preceding paragraph, I believe that "slideshare communities" must be formed around essential questions and a more formal process for encouraging communities of practice should be instituted. As subscribers create their profiles, certain keywords should trigger invitations to join like-minded learners in exploration of key concepts and an invitation to enter into civil debate with someone with a differing worldview. For example a slideshare presentation on "Intelligent Design" should trigger invitations to join Darwinists and creationists in conversation. In the classroom, teachers would ensure diversity of opinions. Outside of school, individuals would have to model the intellectual courage to challenge their assumptions and their accepted truths.

Thing 17

I subscribed to Remember the Milk two weeks ago and downloaded the free app to my smartphone. It refused to sync and I supect that this feature only works with the premium/paid version of the program. The failure to sync prompted me to make use of my Calendar entry feature on the home screen of my phone. This application functions much like Remember the Milk in that I can can create a to do list and check off my progress as I complete my tasks. RTM probably filled a niche that smartphones have usurped.

Sinced my RTM experiment proved less than ideal, I thought I would write a review of librarything which our library has used for over two years. When I started at DCHS, I uploaded all our print holdings to librarything and decided to use it as our primary online interface for students. Adding books to a collection is very simple and copy catalogiing is a one touch operation. Once you have selected a catalog record source ( we use the University of Michigan Collection and Amazon), you can use the ISBN to find a record for a particular title. You can edit the record to your satisfaction (we have opted to leave the records unaltered). For students searching our collection,a keyword search sifts through all fields: so the term "mice" would be enough to retrieve the popular Steinbeck title. Students would immediately know whether we owned the title. I have added barcode as a tag for each title. Still the question that arises is how students are meant to find the physical book rather than the record that refers to it. Our library is currently arranged according to Dewey. My hope is to convert our collection to LC call numbers ( a very ambitious hope). At present, students find me once they know for sure that we own the title and I use a Google Doc to let them know if the item is available (or checked out). I am waiting for an ILS that wuill provide circulation and acquisition modules using librarything as a backbone and then we will be able to pursue Kroger-style self-checkout for our students. Librarything also offers review copies of books and we have added a half dozen titles to our collection this way (I'm still working on the reviews of these free titles to fulfill our end of the bargain).

Thing 16

We use Google Docs extensively. We have had our domain hosted by Google for the last two years. I regularly share documents with my assistant principal and a half dozen faculty who feel comfortable with the tool. Every DC student has a gmail account through us and we encourage them to use Google Docs to collaborate on projects (particularly presentations) remotely and asynchronously. We have experimetend in a few classes with having students submit assignments through Google Docs. The Playwriting class this past spring submitted their projects this way and their teacher was able to comment on their work in progress and make suggestions to shape the final versions of their plays. One of the great benefits to using this tool is asynchronous collaboration: two out of every three of our students are athletes and often do not get home until 8 or 9pm. Google Docs allows them to catch up on work that peers have started. For faculty, Google Docs has helped us to think through curriculum maping and strategic planning for our accreditation visit. We have found it useful to have each contributor choose a color to make individual contributions jump off the page. We rarely have to revert to earlier versions of a document but has proved useful whe we share documents with students who are new to Google Docs and mistakenly overwrite someone else's contribution. We have had great success with Google presentations which our studets prefer to PowerPoint because they only need Internet access and do not have to bother with thumb drives and finicky format issues (Office 2007 vs 2003 suite loaded onto our school computers. We really enjoy the ease with which data can be migrated to Google Spreadsheets using CSV data.

Thing 15

I have still not made RSS a habit. I went ahead and added a few more news feeds ( Rolling Stone, Fast Company, Publisher's Weekly)and skimmed through the two hundred feed updates that I had accumulated since last I checked (earlier this week. I am not finding skimming all that beneficial as most of what I collect I end up marking as read (whether I have given it my full attention or not. I also played with subscribing to a delicious tag. I decided to try and follow feeds on one of my favorite authors, Jose Saramago. Potentially, this could reap some benefits as I am unfamiliar with the Portuguese sources that Saramago's name returned. If these sources turn out to offer bilingual posts, I will have found a tool that rivals Google or Yahoo where typically my searches are monolingual. Being able to filter according to popularity may help me identify those fan communities that delve deeper than Blindness or Seeing and appreciate Saramago's work in its entirety. If social mobs are to be "value-added", I think they will need to be polyglot global communities of contributors versed in something more than the most recent fads. I yearn for expert communities of affinity.

Thing 14

My Delicious username is dclibrarymius. I enjoyed playing with Delicious, but I doubt it will increase my productivity. I decided to explore chess once again and was led to Jen Shahahde 's page and her recent work on Marcel Duchamp. For most of my bookmarks, I was part of a small community. Often fewer than a dozen people had tagged the pages I found. I think the key to delicious is herding and I prefer to stray from the beaten path. I am concerned that social bookmarking that prizes popularity and trendiness will lead to less intellectual diversity. I chose to keep my bookmarks public even when some pages included nudity. I think the "do not share" option is a cop-out. If social networking is to promote communities with shared affinities, contributors have to make a commitment to share the paths they explore: the dead ends, the dark alleys and the open highway that everyone can see. Profiles appear somewhat manufactured for some of the pages that I looked at. Some folks seem quite content to celebrate the homogeneity to which they subscribe or with which they would like to be associated. Social networks should be honest, complex networks.

Thing 13

I think that social bookmarking and tagging will be useful to me. I do worry about becoming a "lemming" and "following the herd". I understand the need for conventions and for a controlled vocabulary. Still I suspect that there are more cognitive liabilities with social bookmarking than with indexing. I also have some concerns about the the potential for online mobbing and bullying using tags. In settings such as Facebook or Flickr, I worry that our students may succumb to the temptation to be cruel. On a more positive note, I can see benefits for persons with "orphaned" academic interests. I wrote my undergraduate thesis ( a long time ago in a land far away) on Edward Blyden and the work of the Southern Baptist Convention in Liberia in the nineteenth century. My research would have been much speedier if I could have leveraged the knowledge of my "social mob" to track down references to Blyden, the SBC or missionaries to Liberia. Still I cannot see bookmarking serving as an adequate substitute for research. I spent most of my time in the archives of the SBC in Richmond reading through correspondence. If the letters had been "tagged", I would have missed a lot of useful information because herding might have led some taggers to categorize a letter as "evangelism" where I might be looking for competing cosmogonies, theodicy, soteriology...I worry that tagging lends itself to reductionism and that complex social phenomena might be misunderstood or mis-categorized.

Thing 12

I added Polaroid Puzzle from Widgetbox to my blog and what annoyed me is that I have to pay in order to remove the "Get widget" button and to avoid having ads populate my blog. I thin this is the tradeoff for free onlined stuff that troubles me the most. In his excellent new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, Chris Anderson shares wonderful insights on the new expectations that consumers have now that the cost of processing, bandwidth and storage are nearly negligible. One of the expectations is that Web 2.0 tools will resemble Flickr more than Widgetbox. I expect to have a less functional version of an application for free and to pay a freemium in order to enjoy the most refined version of the same app. What I think is less than honest is to lure me into adding a banner ad masquerading as a widget in order to defraud an even larger audience. The cost outweighs the benefit for me. I encountered the same problem when I initially added the Simpsons Quiz to my blog. Because the preview window in Blogger works poorly, you only realize that you have been suckered after you hit save. Of course you can remove the widget, but what I would prefer is informed consent from the get-go with transparent disclaimers about the commercial nature of the app. I think there might be a market for testing beta versions of widgets without the shameless self-promotion by developers and their marketing departments.I decided to leave the widget on my page for now as a kind of cautionary tale: CAVEAT EMPTOR and of course CAVEAT NON-EMPTOR in this radical new digital economy that is sullying our best intentions and pimping our best ideas.

Thing 11

I still feel somewhat uneasy leaving comments. I feel like a stranger in a public place sharing unsolicited advice. I tried to be complimentary every time I left a comment and to be as brief as possible. On many of the blogs I chose to comment on the pictures that my peers had dowloaded from Flickr. It felt a little less awkward to comment about a third party's CC licensed photograph. I didn't feel as intrusive. Comments in my mind presuppose a level of familiarity that I simply do not have with professionals outside of my school or the associations to which I belong. I am an introvert by nature and leaving comments stretches my comfort zone. For those who actively solicit comments I can understand how this bi-directional medium can enhance learning and build community. For me a blog still remains rather personal and I would prefer to be invited by a peer to converse about a topic where we can learn from each other. I also must admit that it is difficult to establish a context for any aspect of a post that catches my eye. I do not want to telescope arguments or decontextualize reflections by a blogger. That's why pictures feel safer. When a post captures sustained and complex thought, the challenge to the person commenting is to demonstrate active and charitable listening while giving evidence of authentic engagement. I don't know how to do this yet in a meaningful way.

Thing 10

Since I anticipated in Thing 9 the embed part of the exercise, I went ahead and grabbed embed code from one of my favorite sites, reuters.com, and included one of their latest news videos. I am glad to see more sites making embedding more convenient with "Share" buttons trhat allow the user to paste html to the clipboard and then right click in Blogger to add the video to a post. As a librarian, I am happy that these tools make attribution more likely and more convenient. I am heartened by the mounting evidence that our students feel comfortable using these tools to share online resources ethically. I am also glad that they are not limited to YouTube which seems pretty cutting edge to my age group, but very passe for some of the tweeners and teens entering our school buildings today. I am also interested to see if these tools are just as easy to use as phone apps which are our students preferred way of communicating with each other and with their teachers (when it is allowed)

Thing 9

I love YouTube and thankfully it is not blocked in our building. I used this exercise to search for my favorite episodes of "Battle of the Planets" and to immerse myself in the volatile debate on whether the Japanese original "Gatchaman" or the Americanized "Battle of the Planets" was cooler. I commented on the following episode. This is the first time that I have commented on a video. Usually, I just watch my favorite videos anonymously. There is something about leaving a post on Youtube that is a little unsettling because I know anime/manga enthusiasts take this stuff much more seriously than I ever will.

Thing 8

I had fun creating this motivational poster. It was very easy. I uploaded the picture, gave it a title and provided a caption (all under a minute). I can imagime our students gleefully uploading their pictures and ordering the full sized posters to adorn their rooms. In fact this might make a pretty nice graduation gift for the freshmen who are pictured here when they finally head out to college. I can also imagine student council elections being a little more humorous if we made use of this tool. The challenge will be to encourage students to be funny without being mean. I worried a little about my caption because I wanted to refer to the action on the chess board and not suggest inadvertently that freshmen are pawns.

Thing 7

I uploaded a number of photos that I have taken over the last two months. The pictures capture many different aspects of our library. We consider the library a vital node in the life of Divine Child High School and Flickr allows us to share some of this vitality with parents, students and alumni. We have the parents of each of our students sign a waiver at the beginning of each academic year allowing the school to use their photos in publications and online as a part of our public relations activities. I still worry about privacy concerns and chose not to identify the students by name and instead used the abbreviation DC to describe them. I also hesitated to identify myself, my wife and my mother. I did however identify our most generous donors. I can imagine using Flickr to recognize those members of the DC Family who deserve public praise for their ongoing support and their continuing kindness. I have not yet played with the editing features within Flickr and feel somewhat conflicted about modifying photos. It feels like cheating to edit red eyes and shadows and glare. I expect my photos to capture the flaws in my technique and the graceful imperfections within my world.

Thing 6

I chose to upload this Winslow Homer sketch of rugby pioneers for two reasons. First , I will be traveling to a workshop on American Art next week and I have grown fond of Winslow Homer's seascapes and was less familiar with his work for Harper's Weekly. The second reason I chose this particularly photo is because I imagine that this is the type of primary evidence my students will want to engage. Flickr provides students with access to primary sources and the ability to be an eyewitness to history. I could not believe this 1865 sketch was available through Common license so long as I provide attribution ( it was uploaded by Frederic Humbert as part of his rugby-pioneers.com photostream and also belongs to USA Rugby) A long long time ago in a galaxy far away I was once a rugby player and this is just how I remember it.

Thing 5

My continued challlenge is to check Bloglines and see what's new on the blogs that I am following. I decided to follow some chess blogs in order to vet them for my chess club members and I find myself only reading through my blogline chess folder once a week ( or once every two weeks) . I am convinced that successful use of RSS requires a change in habit. I am used to thinking about chess by myself or with a small group of people. Subscribing to chess blogs opens up a wealth of knowledge, but also undermines the comfortable universe that chess has always been for me. Once I start reading, I realize how vast a network of chess players there are and it is somewhat overwhelming. RSS facilitates global chess awareness but threatens the sufficiency of my local chess universe. I am forever comparing what our team and our individual players have accomplished to the talented young men and women who have made chess their life. Blogs in this sense force one to take regular stock of one's affinity, talent and expertise. Each time I log into Bloglines and I placed my cursor over my chess folder, I confront my fear of inadequacy. I wrestle with my true commitment to the hobby that has for years been one facet of how I define myself.

Thing 4

"It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of blogs out there - how do you handle information overload and how do you think RSS might help with that?"

I suspect that the same criteria I share with my students during information literacy sessions will guide me through the littered information landscape that the blogosphere no doubt contains. We rely on these core four principles: currency, relevance, bias and authority. RSS is a tool that I will use to put the blogs I encounter to these tests. RSS, by default, arranges new strands within feeds chronologically. Insofar as relevance is concerned, RSS seems agnostic on this count. With reagrd to bias and authority, I am certain that these are rarely evident early in my subscription to a particular feed. Circumstances and contexts will reveal whether the authors I am following are worthy of my trust and whether my worldview and theirs are truly congruent. I do not expect to agree with everything that I read. Still, I want the opinions and statements that I weigh to be coherent, reasoned, persuasive, witty, compassionate and charitable.

RSS highlights the difference for me between online and print literacy. I like to re-read print books all the time and I worry that blogs will never rise to the print standard I have set for myself. I can only imagine reading a blog once even if I follow a particular author's feed. While I may be enamored with an online author's style, I have yet to come across digital creations that are memorable the way La Chute by Albert Camus ot the The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot are memorable for me. With RSS, I feel like I am sorting through newspaper clippings in folders and grudgingly giving my attention to ephemeral things. It makes me thirst all the more for ageless wonders.

Thing 3

How might a blog support the work you do? How might you use a blog with students? How might they respond to a blog assignment? What concerns do you have about educational blogging?

I think that blogs hold some potential for supporting online book clubs. In the past, I have posted key passages and quotes to provide students with mile markers through a novel . I have always thought that this use of a blog was somewhat unimaginative, but I struggled to design an assignment that provided students with the opportunity to participate in the "un-packing" of the major themes in a novel.

One idea that I am playing with is to invite students to use podomatic to record their personal reading of key passages in a novel ( My test novel is The Catcher in The Rye because I am confident students will not pass up an opportunity to lend their voices to Holden Caufield). Students would then post comments to a blog where they explained why they chose to accent particular syllables, to stress un-italicized words, to pause where there is no obvious punctuation warranting a pause or stop. I suspect that students will have very different ideas about how Holden crafts his alibis and rationalizations and that we will all benefit from hearing each other's voices and reading each other's comments. I believe that this closer examination of the meter in Salinger's prose will lead to a more confident reading fluency.

My concern about educational blogging is that students will pass up opportunities to articulate their own voice and to construct their own meaning of the text. I am also concerned that the students will not be charitable in their reading of other students' ideas about the text. I think that prior to introducing the blog, much preparatory work must be done in the classroom to encourage disciplined inquiry and appreciative listening.

Thing 1 and Thing 2

I am participating in 23 Things because I am conducting an experiment this summer. My goal is to increase summer reading participation and to promote authentic reading and sustained reflection on reading. I have maintained a book club blog (tnbookclub.blogspot.com) that has pretty much flopped. I tried to use the blog medium to post questions and excerpts and students did not really respond to these prompts. I am trying a new approach by employing wiziq to be present online multiple times a week and provide a context and some resources for the books that our students are reading. I am hoping to stumble upon a method for balancing freedom and structure: I think students need the freedom to discover and the boundaries to linger/loiter long enough in one place to realize that discovery is afoot . Knowing that many/some people could potentially read this blog does not make me self-conscious (though I am trying to be better about typos). The blog remains an online diary until someoe engages me in conversation. This blog is helping me document my efforts to add substance to form. I subscribe to the very trendy notion that education should nurture a culture of evidence and a culture of mastery.

Thing 1

I like the idea of bridging the gap between how students live and how they learn. Many of the technologies discusssed (wikis, blogs, e-portfolios) appeal more to people my age (just turned 40--long live X) than to the digital learners under 18 with whom I work every day. They are far more enamored with iPhone Apps, Facebook quizzes and bittorrent grand theft audio/video. I worry that the digital learning revolution has succeeded in honing the core competencies of our best students, but failed to engage our most reluctant learners. They still "play school" every time we ask them to answer Ning prompts or collaborate on projects using Google Docs. They still live in a world completely foreign to the digital learning experience that we have tried to craft for them. Assignments are still assignments whether or not you get to use your phone or computer. There is a superficiality to the digital revolution so far that disturbs me. In very rare instances have I read posts or replies that resemble considered thought, measured argument or careful investigation. Instead, my students remain narcissistic and solipsistic. It's always about them and the rest of the world is fake. I want to contribute to initiatives that remedy this unrepentant and twittering Catcher in Rye worldview.