First taught at Stanford, Winter 2013. (ask me for editing privs) and (ask me).
I’ve taught this course at Stanford since 2007. I also taught at U.C. Berkeley’s School of Information and Department of Sociology.
I taught this course at Stanford 2005-2010.
This is the first course I offered via Rheingold U. It changes with each iteration, in response to co-learners. It has been through five iterations so far.
This grew out of the 2005 Stanford seminar and my work with Institute for the Future. I’ve offered it twice, so far.
I was invited to create this proposed course for Stanford’s Winter 2013 quarter; it’s working its way through the academic bureaucracy. Here is that I’m expanding for college (and eventually high school) instructors everywhere.
With the html assistance of , I developed a series of standalone mini-courses that include videos, links to resources, and a feed from my Diigo/Delicious tags for the topic.
I received from HASTAC/Macarthur Foundation’s which I used to pay developer to create a browser-based, free and open source, social media classroom with forums, blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, and mindmaps.
When I was invited to deliver, I proposed a lecture about my experiences using social media in teaching and learning, leading up to a proposed project: students would join me in two face-to-face seminars of about two hours; between face-to-face meetings we would meet online via forum, wiki, and one live session with the Blackboard Collaborate platform. We would be joined by others online who might not have attended the lecture and/or face to face seminars, with the objective of creating a living resource for self-organized groups of self learners — a peeragogy handbook that would complement existing resources such as, including guidelines and annotated resource guides to methods, theories, tools, examples, and more. A year later, a core community of around a dozen, supported by another dozen, continues to improve the .
Inspired by , I asked him to show me how to set up a hub for a course learning community, using the WordPress platform. In this one hour video, we talk about the why as well as they how, and Groom shows how to create a WordPress site, create pages, add plug-ins, feeds, and other widgets, and begin to customize the theme.
In this episode, we talk about why to use wikis in learning, how to experiment with themes, and how to set up a Mediawiki within a WordPress platform.
In this episode, we talk about assessment, WordPress themes, customizing menus, uploading headers.
Video of presentation to online Learning Revolution webinar
One of the first times I presented about this subject was for an online seminar for eXtension, which recorded it — audio, video, slides, chat.
“Jesse Stommel, executive director of the at the University of Mary Washington and director of the , recalls starring in a high school play about a one-room schoolhouse teacher: ‘I’ve been inspired ever since by this idea of a one-room schoolhouse — not necessarily in a single physical location. I’ve been thinking for quite a while about how to make the entire world into a one-room schoolhouse.'”
“‘The way an engineer, a scientist, a designer looks at a problem — these are all just different lenses with which to view objects or problems. Because designers, especially furniture designers, also design systems that people use, it’s not just about physical objects, but includes thinking about humans. Maybe the biggest difference in my approach is a focus on how people interact with each other and how the built environment affects human interactions in different ways,” Zeylikman says.
Toymaking (creating “tools for the imagination”) is, for , all about learning. “Play and a playful pedagogy are so relevant to students. We don’t know what future jobs are going to be. Students are going to graduate into a world that contains roles we haven’t seen before. Every few years, whole new opportunities to do and be in ways that nobody has seen before open up, whether it’s about supporting ourselves or expressing ourselves or about how we move through the world. So I think that as younger generations come up, they should learn how to be good at inventing new models of how to be. One of the things I like about working with undergraduates is getting to plant that seed – you don’t have to become something you already see. Make your own version, whether it’s your business, your work, who you are as a person.”
She encourages educators to experiment with making connections between projects and subjects, problem-solving and peers, between multiple subjects, and navigating all these actions with mandated standards – and when you learn something that works, help your peers navigate the territory you’ve explored.
She encourages her students to take full advantage of technology and the connected nature of their lives to enhance learning and solve problems in their communities and beyond.
By 2010, Kuropatwa’s students are finding and sharing resources around a class hashtag. One night, the students started using the blog as a chat space through a comment thread. One of them commented that she wished they had a tag board. Darren didn’t know what that was, but he found out, and provided one for his students.
I wrote this as a personal assignment for a gifted twelve year old learner — about learning how to learn independently, to reflect, and to go deeper.
A project doesn’t have to be digital to embody : for example, the on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (“the world’s first underground park”), combines educational outreach, social connectedness, interest-based learning, shared purpose, equity, social connection, and full participation. Interaction is face-to-face and involves public service organizations, local schools, and settlement houses.
Laura Ritchie is a teacher, researcher, performer, and learner. She is currently a Reader in Pedagogy at the University of Chichester. She created Cello Weekend, a time for complete beginners to come together with novices, students, and professionals to learn to play the cello. Through Connected Courses, she created an open, online connected course about creating a curriculum for connected learning about music.
Brianna Crowley is a Pennsylvania high school teacher who encourages her students to use social media tools to express themselves and expand agency in the classroom. She also asks her students to use these platforms to teach each other about a range of topics and to build a sense of connectedness and community.
Traditional geographic community-based places of learning and knowledge are now also growing into places of learning and knowing through making. If you are interested in adding a makerspace to your school or public library, , media specialist for , can give you helpful hints.
“I don’t put students in groups so they can learn to work in groups or be social…I put people in groups because I think that’s how knowledge is created–by people who talk though ideas and puzzle through problems.”
Zack Baker, a 16-year-old high school junior in Noblesville, Indiana, told me that the most important skill when learning how to code is knowing how to search , the free online question and answer site where both expert programmers and novice learners solve problems together. For Zack, an accomplished app creator since age 14, learning how to program has always been networked, peer-supported, interest-powered, and participatory.
“For those who doubt that “playing around” with seemingly trivial online games can lead to more robust learning, note that Veronica’s introduction to her ability to make her own web objects was her use of at age nine.”
“We educators have this need or impulse to take an expert stance in the classroom,” says Mia Zamora, Associate Professor of English at Kean University. “I found that relinquishing some of that stance and giving students ways to be the experts can lead them to lean over each other’s shoulders, teaching each other as they teach themselves, and ultimately teaching me something I didn’t know.”
“I’m interested in helping students create artifacts and experiences that have meaning, value, and utility and working with students as co-learners to help them define what those words mean to them.”
If you want something more than students progressing according to plan against teacher-set goals, start out by thinking “How do I invite students to take matters into their own hands? How do I allow for them to become agents of change?
Engaging students in their learning starts with listening to what is going on in their lives outside the classroom and co-designing projects that involve their real-world interests.
Today’s engaged learners are also teachers.
Applying Doug Engelbart’s ideas of networked improvement communities to education reforem
A case study of a pioneering course in which teachers and students work together on interest-based, peer-to-peer, open, networked learning at the University of Mary Washington — and around the world
A preview to my book, addressed to educators interested in technology, about essential social media literacies, starting with attention.
“The point of this story isn’t to get everyone to pay attention to me or professors in general – it’s that I want my students to learn that attention is a skill that must be learned, shaped, practiced; this skill must evolve if we are to evolve.”
“ to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters.”
I was asked to comment on an article about distraction by Maggie Jackson, a technology critic whose opinions I don’t always agree with but do respect.
Joi Ito asked a number of his friends to contribute to a book of his cc-licensed photographs of people in the digital culture and social media worlds. Joi is now director of MIT Media Lab.
Spanish translation of my article, “Participatory Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies” Pedagogía Participativa para una Alfabetización de Alfabetizaciones 12/31/2008
“Before I got to Wesch’s notion of a ‘crisis of significance,’ I had probed my students about exactly what was going on with them, and it was clear that they had been bored for years.”
“How new learning environments foster entrepreneurship and innovation” [PDF Document] Coauthored by Max Senges, Stanford University, and John Seely Brown, University of Southern California and member on the NPRI Internacional Advisor Panel
Teaching young people how to use digital media to convey their public voices could connect youthful interest in identity exploration and social interaction with direct experiences of civic engagement. Learning to use blogs, wikis , podcasts and digital video as media of self-expression, with an emphasis on “public voice,” should be considered a pillar—not just a component—of twenty-first-century civic curriculum.
I interviewed educators who use digital media innovatively, including video interviews and blog posts. Thanks to master editor for illustrations, headlines, copy-editing.
Learning by stumbling upon things — and cultivating the ability to recognize when you’ve stumbled onto something valuable — can be amplified manyfold if you regularly look where people in your personal learning network are pointing.
…we talk about learning and literacy; commercial culture; democracy, civic engagement, and activism; and reimagining participatory culture.
…if you want the best and latest evidence-based, authoritative, nuanced, critical knowledge about how digital media and networks are transforming not just learning but commercial media, citizen participation in democracy, and the everyday practices of young people, my advice is to obtain a copy of the new book, “Participatory Culture in A Networked Era,” by Henry Jenkins, Mizuko Ito, and danah boyd.
As Jim Groom put it, because students are now telling the stories of their lives online, they need to take active control of the process to understand: “what it means to shape their digital identity, what it means to shape who they are online.”
If you’ve encountered and have only encountered it in theory, meet Shannon White, who teaches social studies “through a social justice and community-oriented lens, fostering deep critical thinking that challenges the status quo and engages students in as many authentic experiences as possible.”
Dr. Deborah Cohen, associate professor in the Global Education Innovation Center at in South Korea, uses three digital media-based practices to encourage her students:
Newsactivist was born when Gabriel Flacks, instructor and chair of the Humanities Program at Saint-Lambert Champlain Regional College in Montreal, started looking for ways that students could write about the news in a networked way.
Young faculty who came of age at the same time that social media emerged are beginning to experiment with new containers for old curricular vintages such as English composition. , lecturer in English at Brown University, is rethinking traditional forms more radically than simply recasting traditional literature in digital media formats: “What happens when we take the form of a dictionary and use it for other, hopefully nefarious purposes? How can an essay be a waltz?
So many online courses concentrate on hard sciences and practical skills. How about the humanities? , who teaches two purely online courses for the University of Oklahoma, most certainly qualifies as a humanities enthusiast.
“I learned more on Twitter in six months than in two years of graduate school” is the epigraph of the first chapter of Tom Whitby’s book (co-authored with ), “” This quote could summarize Whitby’s philosophy of learning and teaching, in which collaboration is the environment, not just an ingredient, in effective learning.
, “creative electronics for young innovators,” is a kit-of-the-month club for young makers, their parents, and their families. It was designed to empower kids and parents who weren’t necessarily close to a physical makerspace, by two women — — who are passionately devoted to maker education, not by an edu-biz conglomerate or VC-founded startup
What if we trusted students as a default and dealt with transgressions when and if they come up? What if we gave them web-accessible devices without filters but taught them common sense and used transgressions as teachable moments? What if we even gave learners of every age a bit of agency in the shaping of their own curriculum — above and beyond recess and show-and-tell?
Jaimie Hoffman gives advice on how to assess, frame and scaffold reflection on the open web, and words of encouragement for those who are contemplating jumping into connected learning.
Some enthusiasts of digital media in learning and — including myself — believe that , in person and online, can enhance social contexts for peer learning and for learning thinking skills.
, and have always owned more physical notebooks than I need at any one time, and I’m an enthusiastic novice at electronics, so several of my antennae tingled vigorously when I first came across the term “” — peel-and-stick circuitry and components that are flat enough to make paper pages blink and boop.
Like others who have become important co-learners in my personal learning network, I met Dr. Maha Bali, associate professor of practice of the Center for Learning and Teaching at American University in Cairo, through a hashtag.
not only — the visionary who invented the mouse, hypertext and many more of the digital tools so many people use every day — he understands that Engelbart’s technological attempt to “” also ought to be a central goal of pedagogy.
By the end of 2014, more than 3 billion people will have access to the , which means that they (we) have the power to ask any question at any time and get a multitude of answers within a second. The responsibility for distinguishing between accurate, credible, true information and misinformation or disinformation, however, is no longer vested in trained and vetted experts — editors, publishers, critics, librarians, professors, subject-matter specialists.
I’m always interested in technology critics who are accomplished users of the tools they criticize. Elizabeth Losh, director of Academic Programs, Sixth College at UC San Diego, teaches digital rhetoric, digital journalism, and software studies, and she was one of the organizers of a MOOC, so she is neither opposed to nor unfamiliar with the uses of digital media in education.
What most educators would call “subjects” or “disciplines,” Jeff Hopkins, principal of the, regards as “silos” when they restrict the scope of learning and when they serve as points of interconnection
High-school students actively making meaning and co-creating the curriculum, not just passively digesting knowledge fed to them by the teachewr
Alan Levine is a pedagogical technologist and architect of open, connected learning systems that enable students to take power over and responsibility for (and joy in!) their own learning.
I interviewed Amy Burvall, a high school teacher in Hawaii who teaches a course on “theory of knowledge,” using social media and learner-centric curriculum.
I interviewed two graduate students who participated in , a multi-institution MOOC that included an action element — “.”
Not directly about learning, but this podcast is about the tools I use for electronics, gardening, and woodworking.
“My conclusion, after many years of thinking about the impact of both digital and social media, is that a lot of it depends on what people know. It’s not just the tools themselves and their capabilities, it’s about having the skill to use those tools.”
Podcast interview about the commons, curation, and infotention.
“With virtual communities, smart mobs, and collective intelligence, we’re seeing the beginning of what people are learning to do with our new technologies.”
A co-learner in one of my Rheingold U courses, herself an educator, creates a quick and useful students’ survival guide to the web, using my advice.
“Underpinning a disdain for social media in higher education is the assumption that incoming students have an inherent aptitude for new technologies.”
The first time I taught university students, “I had not expected that so many laptop-carrying, one-handed-texting millennials would not know how to self-organize via wikis or to express critical and reflective opinions on blogs.”
“There is a significant change in the role of the teacher as the authority. Rather than the authoritative deliverer of knowledge, they’re the chief learners. So a lot of these are very challenging to institutions and to people who are familiar with old ways of doing things”
“Earlier this summer I sat down with to talk about his ideas for . The result is a two part video.”
“We convened a group of journalism educators, a trainer, a student and a J-school dropout to discuss how journalism education is shifting.”
Of everyone I’ve been reading lately, is the most innovative thinker about attention in the f2f in networked classrooms. Check out these two tweets about a social experiment he ran in his class today:
2 show capabilities of social networks, my ingenious students placed balloons arnd campus, challenged others 2 ask friends 2 locate them
Students sent SMS, tweets, Facebook updates @ start of class. An hour later, one student had located 11 balloons through her social network