Biography: Tools for Thought, The Virtual Community, Smart Mobs Howard has taught: Participatory Media and Collective Action (UC Berkeley, SIMS, Fall
2005, 2006, 2007) Is:Visiting Professor, De Montfort University, UK. Current projects: The Cooperation Project, ,Participatory Media Literacy, MacArthur Foundation grantee
I never thought I'd get involved in open source development, but when I started teaching college students about social media issues (identity, community, public sphere, etc.), it only made sense to use social media such as forums, blogs, and wikis. My first surprise was how much the much-discussed "digital natives" had to learn about online media. Then I discovered how many educational institutions are locked into proprietary course management systems that are helpful for posting syllabi, taking roll, and reporting grades, but have clumsy and unworkable social media. I looked into the open source learning management environments such as Moodle and Sakai, and these appeared to be much more easily evolvable platforms. One of the problems with proprietary systems is that it isn't easy for the people who are doing the teaching to drive innovation; the open source philosophy (and support for more student-centric, constructivist pedagogy) behind Moodle and Sakai makes them more "evolvable." But I still wasn't happy with the affordances of the forum software, and what I wanted wasn't a course management system but a social media classroom that students and teachers could use and modify as we explore more open learning methods. Ideally, high school and elementary teachers could prepare their students to use these new media before they enter college.
So when I learned that the MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC were sponsoring a competition on digital media and learning, I entered my proposal to work with a developer to create a free and open source social media classroom and a suite of curricular materials including videos and syllabi to help educators use social media - particularly, not exclusively, in teaching students about the psychological, social, economic, and political issues that arise from the use of social media. I was delighted to learn that my project was one of the winners, and set out to create what has become the "social media classroom". It isn't meant to compete with open-source course management platforms; we hope to be able to integrate it into Sakai. We've launched a community of practice and plan to launch a hosted version soon. The hope is that teachers will use the social media environment in their teaching, share what works and what doesn't work, technically and pedagogically, and inspire further development.
Considering that young people growing up today spend a significant part of their social lives online, and will use social media in their professional lives, I am concerned that so little time is spent educating students not only about the way these tools can be used to learn and communicate, but about the significant issues that their social media practices raise for them as individuals, citizens, and workers. In a world where the answer to any question can be plucked out of the air through wireless devices and search engines - but nobody can guarantee the veracity of any particular answer - students need to learn not just software skills, but skills in critical thinking, evaluation, verification, and communication. That means more than introducing basic online skills. It means using these media in the context of a learning environment in which students are encouraged to ask questions, pursue answers collaboratively, critically examine knowledge. Although there are still many great lecturers, the emergence of social media in education - and appearance of lectures on YouTube - challenges the 1000 year old tradition of one old person standing in front of a room full of youngsters, reciting facts that are duly recorded and replayed at test time. Social media alone won't accomplish this change, but for those teachers who want to open their teaching as well as their software, social media can afford such experimentation.