How can we use digital media to help ourselves and our learners become empowered participants rather than passive consumers? In his latest book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, Howard Rheingold shows how to use social media intelligently, humanely, and—above all—mindfully. Howard’s book outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that help with attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (AKA “crap detection”), and network smarts.

In this session, we’ll talk with Howard about his new book, and discuss what eLearning professionals can learn from it. We’ll discuss how attention works and how we can use our attention to focus ourselves and our learners on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information; the quality of participation that empowers the best of bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online-community participants; and how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways.

Session Video