Howard Rheingold photo courtesy of Oscar Espiritusanto via Flickr used with permission via http://creativecommons.org

My Explorations of Social Media and Social Media Literacies in Teaching & Learning
Friday, November 11,8:50 a.m. – 9:50 a.m.
Howard Rheingold @hrheingold

Description:  Although not an educator by trade, I’ve been interested in the potential of online media for learning since I started exploring what I called “virtual communities” in the 1980s In particular, I was attracted to the ways online media could facilitate collaborative knowledge sharing and exploration In 1995, I designed a demonstration of a “university of the future” for NEC corporation In 2006, I started teaching at UC Berkeley and Stanford I was initially drawn to formal education because I perceived a need to introduce students to the issues of identity, privacy, collective action, public sphere, social capital raised by our increasing use of what are now called social media It only made sense to use blogs, wikis, forums, chat, and social bookmarking when introducing these subjects Contrary to popular beliefs about “digital natives,” I soon learned that social media literacies are not uniformly understood by today’s students At the same time, by paying attention to what students were telling me about our encounters, I was led to forms of pedagogy that have existed at least since the time of John Dewey but which have not been practical until the advent of social media—teaching and learning that is more collaborative and inquiry based and which extends beyond the face to face classroom In addition to the blended learning I’ve facilitated at Stanford and Berkeley, I’ve also started a totally online set of courses: http://www rheingold com/university—and I’m exploring the variety of peer-to-peer courses that are springing up online I’ll talk about how I’ve learned from my students, how we’ve learned to learn together, and how I am now experimenting with purely online teaching and learning I’ll touch upon the social media literacies that are the subject of my current book in progress: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, and network awareness.

Notes:

Learning is...

• Self-Directed
• Social and Peer to Peer

Working together to solve problems... is not cheating!  It's the best way to learn.

• Networked Learning
• Inquiry-based
• Start with questions and THEN go to the text.
• Collaborative
• "Virtual Communities" (1987 issue of whole earth review - first article)
• 1995 Vision - NEC Curriculum Goals - What would the future be like for learning?  Search and find other students, together you could contact a mentor, and use the media to conduct your own type of learning.  Discussion round tables, graphics and video and sound included.  
• Howard started teaching at University of California, Berkely about 8 years ago.  Photo of his classroom with most of his students with laptop.  Virtual Communities/Social Media - Sociology 167 
• Howard was a competition winnder for Digital Media and Learning Competition.  Socialmediaclassroom.com is a drupal installation and you can download and install it and use it. 
• Socialmediaclassroom.com includes:
  
  • Wikis are expandable.  The syllabus changes with dialogue with students.  Students are informed of cooperative learning.  Waiting until the night before class, the discussion forums are not a conversation so setting the importance of ongoing and committment to continuous and daily work on the course.  Syllabus is also available in a concept map as well as a Prezi.  See: http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/vircom 
  • Forums provide group voice.  Conversations in classroom happen online.  Individual contributions build a conversation so that the submission is part of the sum of parts.
  • Blogs are about the individual voice.  Students can read others and comment on them.  This provides reflection.  Reflect on media and the impact.
  • http://hastac.org/ is a site that connects social aspects of learning. "HASTAC ("haystack") is a network of individuals and institutions inspired by the possibilities that new technologies offer us for shaping how we learn, teach, communicate, create, and organize our local and global communities.  We are motivated by the conviction that the digital era provides rich opportunities for informal and formal learning and for collaborative, networked research that extends across traditional disciplines, across the boundaries of academe and community, across the "two cultures" of humanism and technology, across the divide of thinking versus making, and across social strata and national borders."
• What would you change about the course if you had to take it again?
• Move the student involvement earlier, along with that came their responsibility to learn. 

Classroom not in rows, but in a circle. There are no back rows in a circle.

• Collaborative authoring... most students are not used to this.  Students are provided frameworks, perspectives, and vocabulary and their assignment is to fill in definitions on a wiki.  Howard then projects the revision history to illustrate participation and good wiki practice.
• Mindmaps are used to cover a broad sweep of a bulk of subject matter quickly.  Each "co-teaching team" provides a weekly update to illustrate concepts.  Allows to see subject matter in non-liner and visual display and to look at it in new ways.  To look at content through different lenses.
• Socialbookmarking - Store and share resources. "Give people the freedom to generate the web."  Diigo and Delicious are examples.
• Blackboard Collaborate is used for live sessions for Howard's classes.  Whiteboard, chat, screen sharing, video, and group multi-tasking.  Encourage the participants to do a group mindmap using the whiteboard.  It's a dynamic learning session between the face to face sessions.  Voices are heard and students participate.  Bb Collaborate powers the "co-learners" concept.
• Mini-courses use YouTube videos.   These stand alone and can be accessed after the course. See: http://www.rheingold.com/university/mini-courses/ 

"Peeragogy" - Peers helping each other learn.

• Students can use technology but they do often need literacy of encoding and decoding and the social aspects of doing things together to learn.  Such as how to use blogs, wikis, and discussion forums for conversation and learning. 
• Know how to deploy and train your attention. See: http://www.infotention.com/  - Know how to use the technology available to be productive.
• Infotention: Cognitive - Matching attention to toolsets:
  • Spatial arrangements
  • Visible goals
  • Start small, cultivate habits 
  • What are your attention probes...?
  • Sometimes I ask students to close laptops, close notebooks, close their eyes... and listen to their thoughts and how they are deploying their attention.
  • Which mode of attention is appropriate at the time?
• Crap detection... Critical Consumption of Searching and Googling
• Participation is an essential literacy today.  Tagging, blogging, commenting, interaction, bookmarking, discussing, etc.  Vast collective intelligence.
• Collobaration is an essential skill in the world today.
• Network awarness and understanding and your position in the network is also important
• Book: "Net Smart - How to thrive online."