Learning on and off-line civics
Whenever I taught civics, I repeatedly told my classes that I would measure my success as a teacher on how many of them were voting in elections in five years. Of course, I had no way to measure this, but it was one of my most concrete goals of teaching a civics course.
This was my definition of active citizenship. It was based on an earlier definition of citizenship, before I had fully integrated the lessons from Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat into my classroom. While globalization has made the world flat, it is really technology I see as having expanded the definition of active citizenship and the opportunities to engage in citizenship.