Yesterday, Sam posted a blurb about Howard Rheingold's Social Media Classroom Wiki http://socialmediaclassroom.com/community/ on the OLFSC http://socialsynergyweb.org/oardc/node/262.
I joined the site when Sam sent an email to us about it last month.
Below is the Social Media Classroom Wik home page announcement:
Welcome to Social media classroom wiki!
Discussions are taking place in the Forums. Please join us there! Feel free to start a blog or to edit the wiki.
This wiki is for the use of the community of practice that we hope will coalesce around the use of the Social Media Classroom specifically and more generally around the use of participatory media in teaching and learning. At the beginning, the main purpose is to build out a repository of resources for teachers and learners around all aspects of participatory media literacy, but like all wikis, the future shape will depend on the community that uses it.
This is the root or index page out of which all the rest will grow. Feel free to use the comment link at the bottom of this page to make suggestions and discuss alternatives for growing out the wiki, but most discussions are in the community of practice forums.
* Welcome to Participatory Media Literacy
* Participatory Media Education Resources
* Projects and Courses that use the Social Media Classroom
Howard has done a credible job providing people with an interactive and intuitive virtual forum within which they can learn about "participatory media" to get up to speed using the "tools of the trade", so to speak. By collaborating with Howard, we could adapt his materials to the USDA-SCRI project and shortcut the development of curricula intended to serve the same basic purpose. Since Sam is well-connected to Howard, perhaps he could broker an introduction for Ross to Howard so they can explore the possibility of leveraging Howard's work with the USDA-SCRI project. And, since Howard and Ross are located in the Bay Area, perhaps they could arrange a face-to-face visit before the first of the year just to facilitate the process of engagement.
Just a suggestion...
Comments
Steve wrote: "Howard has
Steve wrote:
"Howard has done a credible job providing people with an interactive and intuitive virtual forum within which they can learn about "participatory media" to get up to speed using the "tools of the trade", so to speak. By collaborating with Howard, we could adapt his materials to the USDA-SCRI project and shortcut the development of curricula intended to serve the same basic purpose."
Maybe you did not realize this?: I am the person who made this software (with a wishlist on hand from Howard). I am the software project manager *and* main developer of Social Media Classroom project, a grant project of the Macarthur Digital Media Learning division. I am also the system admin for socialmediaclassroom.com site
That is what we made this software release for, specifically (in no order of importance):
* to help people learn how to learn using collaborative inquiry
* to help people learn to use collections of social media tools, by integrating them all into one place (thus eliminating some of the issues with multiple logins, tools, sites, etc)
* to give educators a way to bypass IT departments, and get there hands on one tool that incorporates wiki, chat, blogging, social bookmarking, forums, and is extremely extandable (will also soon include microblogging, "mindmapping" and rss filtering)
We could easily adapt social media classroom to be a platform for teaching people how to effectively use combinations of social media tools for coolaborative inquiry. One thing to keep in mind, of course, is that this type of program also needs a teacher. I have already adapted social media classroom software to many different contexts, including working with students in libraries, music education (collaborating on music recording and composition with bittorrent files) and much more.