For the last two years I have worked with Confluence Courseware to create Open Education Resource (OER) based Course Guides for my classes, in an effort to not only reduce the cost of classroom materials (the required textbook costs to students have been cut in half), and thus boost learning, but also to reverse current social trends by using digital technology not as an ends but a means—as a tool to promote genuine and significant human conversation. Using open access great works—including influential and important texts from all of human history in the creative arts and literature, religion, philosophy, the natural, applied and social sciences—these Course Guides utilize the more beneficial aspects of our technological society, while mitigating the more deleterious cultural consequences by requiring more classroom conversations (and out-of-class preparation for engagement). Having field tested this approach with over 1,000 students, I know it works.