I ask my RHE 306 class, Rhetoric and Writing, to focus their writing for the semester around a single public issue. I want students in my class to concentrate on the kinds of disagreements that, however intractable, demand a response. So I ask them to frame their issues as policy questions. As we near the time when I ask students to begin researching their issues in earnest, I've been looking for ways to improve my lesson on library research.

Social media has long stood out to me as something rhetoric instructors should discuss in the classroom. Aside from email, it is perhaps the most commonly used technology by our students and ourselves. Increasingly, it’s the medium through which we access news stories and forms of information and promotion. Yet, because it raises questions about the overlap between public and private and what’s acceptable or desired in terms of pedagogy, I’ve often hesitated to use it.