Social Media Classroom launches
The Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory, a project spearheaded by Howard Rheingold and funded by the MacArthur Foundation, launches this month. I’ll let them explain:
The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is what we call just the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and we host your Colab communities if you don’t want to install your own.
As Sarah Perez at Read Write Web explains, “students need a classroom where learning is a more participatory experience and where the tools they use in their everyday lives — social networking, videos, chat, aren’t checked at the door.” In addition, students who aren’t familiar with these tools — and yes, as Siva Vaidhyanathan’s recent article on the myth of digital natives points out, many aren’t — can start to learn the new literacies required for living in a networked world (something MIT’s ProjectNML, another MacArthur funded initiative, has been working on).
Metamedia, one of HyperStudio’s earliest platforms, was designed to serve a similar role as SMC. Teachers can upload videos, documents, images or audio files to create collections which students can then explore, comment on, or share with others. Students can also upload their own materials. While Metamedia has reached its conceptual end, it continues to be used in classrooms to share and discuss multimedia materials. At HyperStudio, we’ve discussed the idea of making Metamedia an open-source tool like SMC — who knows, perhaps then some of SMC’s Web 2.0 functionalities could then be easily integrated with Metamedia, giving the project new life.
(Thanks to Jess for alerting me to this! For more of Howard Rheingold on participatory learning, check out last month’s HASTAC Scholars discussion.)