I'm always thinking about how technology can enhance understanding and learning, but also how it can just as easily diminish those same things. Trying to tell the difference requires a sensitivity to how technology more generally enhances and diminishes our lives. I'm consumed by these thoughts as I put together a lesson on skills needed for the digital age. I'm teaching this class to 11th and 12th graders as part of a digital citizenship unit in a civics class (more on that in future posts). To think about what skills are necessary I'm thinking about the pitfalls that kids and adults alike fall prey to when using the Internet. Howard Gardner and Katie Davis' 2013 book The App Generation: How Today's Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World provides some great insight on this topic. Gardner and Davis explore how the Internet and the technologies we use to go online most often lead to only surface level understanding of comple