"Write about what you know" -- a great bit of advice many of us have heard for years. So when opinion editor Maureen Trantham invited me to write an editorial for The Daily, my first thought was, "Write about what I know."

Later, however, I thought rather than writing about what I know, maybe I could write about what other people know. Instead of writing about what I thought was important, maybe I could write about what UW students found important.

So I set up a group on Facebook.

I called the group, "Please Help Me Come Up With a Topic To Write about For The Daily!" I set the access to open, which meant anyone with a UW account could join, be seen to others, and post to the message board.

Under the group description, I wrote:

hello! my name is david silver and I teach communication here at UW.

this aint no joke. please post YOUR ideas.

The response was remarkable.

UW students wrote long, reasoned and serious posts suggesting topics that were timely, provocative and deep. In all, more than 50 students wrote more than 100 posts.

Some of the suggested topics were so big they merit their own, one-word sentences. Darfur. Iraq. Katrina.

Some of the suggested topics were more local: Rising tuition rates per class and the high costs of living in the dorms.

Many suggested I write about topics related to contemporary media, my topic of teaching and research ("Write about what you know!") They suggested I write about media representations, about media consolidation, about what happens when media is run not by the people, but by the rich. They suggested I write about new media -- about the Internet, about iPods and about Facebook.

Many suggested that I write about race and racism. Some suggested that I directly challenge the particularly Seattle-esque silence that surrounds topics of race (not to mention gender, sexuality, class and disability).

One student posted a topic idea that was provocative enough to generate an extended discussion, something that rarely happens on Facebook. Suggesting that materialism and consumerism lie at the heart of the American experience, she wrote: "The cycle goes like this: we want to buy things, so we must work, we then find ourselves working our whole lives away to support our lifestyles and then we tend to alienate ourselves from the important things in life -- family and friends -- because we are so busy with our careers. We then start to feel empty and the solution is to go out and buy more things to fill that void."

For me, the fascinating part of the process was being reminded of how deeply UW students care. For me, the remarkable part was that it all took place within Facebook, a Web site usually reserved for posting pictures of beer pong.

According to much of the media, too many pundits and too too many UW professors, today's college students have effectively checked out.

College students, they say, are cynical and sarcastic, ironic and insincere. College students, they say, devote more time thinking about American Idol than American Empire. College students, they say, don't care, don't want to care, don't know how to care.

Maybe we're just not taking the time to listen.

I am grateful that so many UW students took the time to be heard. So many students, in fact, that too many topics were generated to fit within a single editorial. Fortunately, The Daily has given me permission to return to this space from time to time throughout spring quarter.

In the meantime, let's continue to learn to listen.

David Silver is an assistant professor of communication at the UW. He blogs at http://silverinseattle.blogspot.com.