Shaping Young Minds

Tonight I start my teaching career. Alongside my frequent collaborator, Patrick Meier, I am creating a teaching a course to Tufts University undergraduate course entitled Digital Democracy:

In the last five years, text message campaigns, online social networks, and citizen media have played a major role in world events including a democratic revolution in Ukraine, a humanitarian emergency in Kenya and the election of the first African American President of the United States. This course explores how digital technology changes both the mode and the meaning of democratic participation. We will conduct this inquiry through the exploration of case studies and by putting an experimental social networking application to the test, exploring its use in civic projects throughout Boston.

Patrick posted the syllabus here (pdf). I'm incredibly excited, not least because no one has really figured out the effect of the Internet on politics yet. Andrew McLaughlin, my boss at Google, once said: "We are only in the most vague sense conscious of what the Internet's disruption means in the real world." There really is no better way to attack these unanswered questions than by getting a bunch of smart, open minded people together in a room to talk about it. This will be fun.