Cognitive Surplus and the Fifth Son Project

One of my greatest pleasures as a teacher is meeting passionate students and, with just a little bit of guidance, watching them turn their dreams into a reality. As the Talmud says (Sanhedrin 105b), "A person can be jealous of anyone except for his son and his student." When my students surpass me, it gives me great pride.

A few weeks ago, in my posting on Children in a Digital Age (which you can read here or here), I described just such a group of students who formed the fledgling organization, StudentsUnite4Israel.org. I used them as an example of Clay Shirky's Cognitive Surplus. Clay Shirky describes how the increase in leisure time since World War II has led to a Cognitive Surplus where people for the first time have a great deal of free time to spend on worthwhile endeavors. Until recently, however, most of this time was devoted by the overwhelming majority of the population to passive forms of entertainment like watching television. With the advent of the Internet and social media, people are just beginning to use some of this free time for more active pursuits.

Shirky describes four levels of these pursuits. Personal sharing, is where people share parts of their personal lives in the form of text, pictures, or videos on blogs or sites like Facebook and YouTube. Communal sharing, involves a more coordinated shared effort on the part of a group. Public sharing, is where similar minded people actively create something for the public good like the open source software movement where people collaborate on their free time to improve software that all can benefit from. Finally, Civic sharing where a group actively seeks to transform society. StudentsUnite4Israel.org is a great example of Civic sharing with high school students devoting their free time to advocating on behalf of the State of Israel and its people.

I remember two years ago when a freshman, Eric Tepper, first came to me with his dream of creating this world-wide student-run organization. I loved the way he dreamed big and possessed the passion and work ethic to make them become a reality so I helped him create a Students4Israel Wiki. Then he was joined this year by a sophomore, Ezra Gontownik, who was also a big dreamer, a hard-worker, and was passionate about political advocacy on behalf of Israel and the Jewish people. Together they wished to create a full-fledged website. I showed them the nuts and bolts of basic web design and warned them that, if they were really interested in succeeding, they had to work quickly and constantly update their site in order to keep up with the fast changing world of the web. Less than two weeks later, I was sitting at my school dinner proof-reading their website on my BlackBerry, as my students were feverishly sending me emails back and forth. Even after the site went live, I did not really understand the power of these students efforts until their first big project, The Gilad Shalit -- Fifth Son Project.

The Gilad Shalit -- Fifth Son Project is designed to raise awareness amongst Jews world-wide about the continued imprisonment of Gilad Shalit at the hands of Hamas. The idea is to create postcards people could use at their Passover Seder to remember Gilad Shalit as the Fifth Son, the son who is absent from the Seder. You can see an example of the postcard below:

Courtesy of http://studentsunite4israel.org/.

Courtesy of http://studentsunite4israel.org/.

The statistics of what these students have already accomplished with this project are staggering. Tens of thousands of these postcards have been distributed world-wide. They have attracted over 30 participating schools in over 10 states nation-wide. They have just been featured in a front page cover story by the local Jewish paper, the Jewish Standard in The Fifth Son Project, and in the leading editorial by The Jewish Week, the top Jewish newspaper in the NY/NJ area, A Night Of Watching For Shalit. I am so tremendously impressed and honestly flabbergasted by what these teens have done. I can't wait to see what future projects are in store for these amazing kids.

I now have an answer to those who say that kids should be banned from using social media because it can only lead to trouble. I never thought that it was productive to create new bans for our children (see this video for an example of one principal's attempt to do exactly that: N.J. Principal Calls for Social Network Ban and this video response: Response to Principal Who Bans Social Media). Rather, parents and teachers should guide them and help them to harness the awesome power that this new media can provide when used in constructive directions. We should give our children positive examples to aspire to. To begin with, we can show them the great work of StudentsUnite4Israel.org.