Howard Rheingold on Social Media Classroom

Posted on | October 29, 2008 | No Comments

Greg Whitby has kindly mentioned in passing my own post on Howard Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom initiative (again, thanks to Euan Semple for the tip-off), and recommends that we watch the 7-minute video that Howard has produced on the project. This explains the genesis of the ideas encapsulated in the project as well as the practicalities of using the suite of tools it offers in an educational setting.

If you can get past the occasional Rheingoldian hyperbolic touch (’going into hyperdrive’; ’scholars flocked to Paris and Oxford a thousand years ago’) there is much food for thought here. He manages, for instance, to put the overblown Prensky opposition between digital native and digital immigrant into some kind of realistic perspective (see Greg Carroll’s blog for a recent discussion of this issue). More importantly, the Social Media Classroom seems to offer a relatively painless route for teachers and students into the apparent complexity of Web 2.0 and its place in education.

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