Howard's 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book has become one of the top 200 of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati, and won Utne Magazine's Independent Press Award in 2003.

In 2005, Howard taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that Howard undertook in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of his ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action.

He teaches Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism and VirtualCommunity/Social Media at Stanford University. He is a non-resident Fellow of the Annenberg School for Communication, and a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.

In 2008, Howard was a winner in the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning competition and he used his award to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom. He has a very popular videoblog that covers a range of subjects.

Most recently, Howard has been concentrating on learning and teaching 21st Century literacies. Howard can be found all over the Web: howard@rheingold.com http://twitter.com/hrheingold http://www.rheingold.com  http://www.smartmobs.com http://www.rheingold.com/university <---Rheingold U! what it is ---> is --->up to us