Collaboration

As of late, new media and social media have been the focus in education. Applications Facebook, Twitter, and You Tube have become an integral part of our teaching practices. Project New Media Literacies, created by MIT, has been examining where New Media is going and how it can apply in education. Check out their new video.

Lately I have been following Howard Rheingold’s work with social media. It is innovators like Rheingold and Danah Boyd who have been at the forefront of the discussion on social media in education.

Social Media is “the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings”.

One of our main goals as educators is to promote the development of critical thinking skills. Social Media is a perfect example of this. Using the technology that our students are familiar with, video, twitter, blogs, forums, wikis and chat, we can support our curricular goals with new methods.

Rheingold has created a platform, that will go public soon, that brings all these social media tools together and promote a higher level of understanding. The web platform takes these social media in order to support the skills we attempt to impart to our students.

He states in a video, “student-led collaborative inquiry and involvement… enlists their enthusiasm in ways that even very good lectures and texts don’t.” He covers what he calls meta-skills, which include: critical inquiry, pathfinding, balancing individual and collective voice, and attention-to-attention.

Social Media like Seesmic, which allows video posts and responses, can provide a platform for support of the skills that Rheingold mentions in his aforementioned video.

These meta-skills are a core part of what we teach, it just makes sense to use technology that will bolster our teaching efforts and keep our students engaged.

If you like the potential of virtual worlds for educational purposes but are afraid of the openness/shadyness of Second Life there is now Lively, which was created by Google. It is a program that you can download on to your computer. You control who has access to the virtual community you create.

The ability to create a virtual conference room that you design yourself without the fear of access from strangers should calm the fears of many educators when examining the use of virtual worlds. Lively has a lot of potential to bridge the gap for distance learning and could be a great “flattening” tool. I can’t wait to check it out when they come out with a Mac version. This has the potential to do a great deal of good for distance learning and helping classrooms connect with schools from around the world, spreading cultures and ideas.

At this point in time Lively is only available for Windows.

Check out the promotional video that was produced by Google: