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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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Mashable Social Networking News has proclaimed that Twitter has “Bounced Back!.”

I’m sure that many readers of this blog may not have realized that Twitter was falling, needed to bounce back,  or for that matter, that Twitter even existed.

Twitter is a microblogging service just into it’s second year on the net. It is a backbone of many personal networks. 140 character messages let communities know what’s happening and which other network has more information. For a good explanation of Twitter go to the Twitter Handbook Blog.

Twitter has bounced back from a decrease in users caused by a recent string of growing pains. The service has experienced huge growth and frankly, was not prepared. Many users began searching for alternatives and cut back on use. But, as Mashable explains better than I could, the service is on the mend.

Why would I care? And why should my faithful readers care?

First, I’m a contributor to the Twitter Handbook and I like being associated with successful stuff. I also use Twitter as an important part of my Personal Learning Network. I don’t want to rebuild a network some where else.

Many websites and services have come and gone on the internet during the last 15 odd years. It’s difficult to know which ones to invest time with.

And that brings me to why it matters to you.

You should be on Twitter. Whatever matters to you, whatever your, there are people like you on Twitter. Hundreds of thousands, of people post what they are doing 140 characters at a time. It’s a great link to people you want to know and read.

Go. Sign up. You’ll see. And follow me on Twitter. I’m wwhitlock.

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