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Howard Rheingold is not waiting for schools to change. On Now, New, Next he posted:
It’s time for social media literacy to enter mainstream education.
Learning to use online forums, be they social network services like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, or wikis is not a sexily contemporary add-on to the curriculum - it’s an essential part of the literacy today’s youth require for the world they inhabit…
We don’t have time for institutions to change, which is why I’ve worked to provide tools for those educators who are using social media to prepare students for the 21st century.
Many educators are coming to similar conclusions. Social media is available and accessible to students. They already use it but need training in how to use it well. He continues:
When I first faced students in a classroom, I was surprised to discover that the mythology I had believed about “digital natives” was not entirely accurate. Just because they’re on Facebook and chat online during class and can send text messages with one hand does not mean that young people are acquainted with the rhetoric of blogging, understand the way wikis can be used collaboratively, or know the techniques necessary for vetting the validity of information discovered online. Just as learning the alphabet requires further education before a literate person can compose a coherent argument, learning the skills of effective social media use requires an education that today’s institutions and teachers are ill-prepared to provide. More
New tools need new instruction. Reingold has developed Social Media Classroom (SMC) as an attempt to provide that new instruction. SMC is open source and invites teachers to try it out and add to it. I like what I’ve seen so far.
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Tags: Education, facebook, LinkedIn, Media literacy, myspace, Social media, Social network, Social network service, Twitter
October 27th, 2008 at 9:13 am
Social Media Classroom looks to be a very interesting concept, but I’m not sure about the design. Seems most of the older generation miss the value of a well-designed product. If potential users are going to take it seriously, it must be simple to comprehend and navigate. They need to work on that. There seems to be a infinitesimally short attention span for new users of online tools.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:31 pm
@TheInfamousGdub -
The design surprised me too. However, I’ve watched a few Rheingold projects over the years. He always seems to be up to something important.