Agreed–it may be that online grassroots organizing coupled with independent writers, thinkers, and ultimately collaborators who are free from those sorts of constraints may be our best home for building capacity in the cyber world. Or “[our] only hope” if we want to be thematic.

Hmm…I think my first thought is both yes and no to contextual consideration. On one hand, I think that there are situations when it is likely that a person may not have something “meaningful” to add concerning the problem, situation, or question at hand. But the lack of “meaningfulness” is only relative, and restricted, to the framing of the problem. Albeit I would then want to question why there isn’t an openness and receptivity to alternative possibilities, and who exactly get to define “meaningful,” but that’s a different problem!

On the other hand, I’m worried that too often things may *seem* meaningless and then be disregarded when in fact the contribution, in coming from a different perspective, could add something important to the conversation that, arguably, could constitute a challenge the customary mode of doing x,y, or z and that could cause other types of problems.

tl;dr: I’m skeptical that appearing to have no meaning implies there actually being no meaning, so perhaps the middle ground would be to say that we can acknowledge that there are context specific instances when certain contributions would not be meaningful restricted to the context (albeit begrudgingly) and that seemingly meaningless contributions may in fact be more meaningful than we know or recognize (and I think that this is often the case).

I’ll have to think about this some more.

I have the same concern about people accepting the online materials as facts. Currently, everyone can post their ideas and opinions on the web, and distinguishing fact from fiction becomes much harder for our generation. I wonder how we can overcome this problem given our limited time and energy? Should we refer to some sources treated as authority? Or try to develop thinking ability? Or get more information to compare?

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Based on my experience, the biggest impact of motivating learning is the caring of the instructors and in-person interactions with them. Although social media is a convenient and quick way to reach them, but the communication is quite superficial as I feel.

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Yes, I agree that we expose to too much information from the web, and really need good judgement to select their ideas. So my question is how to train ourselves to be able to filter out the “noise”. Because in most classes, the instructor selects the learning materials for us and we don’t have a choice. Therefore, training students’ skills of filtering out “noise” will be an very important task for educators.