The Innovation of StackOverflow
onlinelabor.blogspot.com
onlinelabor.blogspot.com
To participate effectively in the SO community, there are pretty clear guidelines. Do some initial research, state exactly what you are trying to do, state what you have already tried, and state a specific question. After that, there are clear guidelines for how to interact with the people who try to help you. These guidelines are much more real than a lot of the artificial rules I see students subjected to in schools.
A student who understands the SO community is a student who will likely be able to get their own questions answered throughout their lives, in any field they are interested in. Meaningful participation in SO is one of the clearest signs I've ever seen that a student has let go of their need to have a teacher standing in front of them in a classroom in order to learn something.
I already use one esr link for new programming students. I have no patience for students who say they want to learn programming and then start talking about hacking school computers and hacking facebook etc. I give them a brief description of what hacking really is, maybe with an example about hacking on the facebook api. If they insist on talking about cracking, I send them to esr's piece "What is a Hacker?" [1]
Then I treat my classroom sort of like a buddhist monastery. If they show up one day and show that they have a clear understanding of what good, hard hacking is, they are accepted into the class. If they try to go on about cracking, they get the metaphorical door slammed in their face. Most students come around when they see that neither I nor the more experienced programming students take them seriously at all, as long as they are going off about cracking.
[1] - http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html#what_is