Social Media in the Classroom
April 16th, 2008 | by Brad King |I’ve been off for a few days, traveling to San Francisco for the book. While I was there, I had the opportunity to meet with Howard Rheingold, who is currently lecturing on technology and journalism at both Stanford and Berkeley. We had a rather illuminating talk.
He’s working on a project that will give teachers — I assume college professors, but it’s possible that anyone could use these — the ability to easily integrate social media technologies into the classroom using PBWikis, for instance. That happened as I’m developing a course that will introduce students to social media in general — where we will start by registering a domain name, ftp’ing Word Press and getting that going before moving into the more aggressive social medias such as social bookmarking and the like. The idea for each of our classes: create an understanding of technology while exploring new ways to tell stories.
Of course, this isn’t the end all beat all of storytelling. Instead, we each want to expose people — teachers in Howard’s case, students in mine (although that is FAR more simplistic than either course will be) — to the nature of technology so they can attack storytelling with their own unique perspective using that technology.
