Submitted by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz on Aug 24, 2008-05:41am
Sun, 08/24/2008 - 04:41


Howard Rheingold, technology writer and all around social media guru, joins the HASTAC Scholars for an online discussion about the participatory classroom. He teaches Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford University, and is a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. Rheingold's vlogs can be viewed here, and he writes for SmartMobs, a widely popular blog inspired by his prescient 2002 book Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Rheingold has been developing new tools and a new curriculum for his participatory classroom, and we're thrilled to have him here with us to discuss his thoughts on teaching social media. HASTAC Scholar Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz's Digital Arts and New Media program, interviews Howard and moderates the discussion. We encourage you to take part in the forum or add your own video to the widget below.

Welcome to this discussion about participatory learning. You can
stop the video widget below from playing (and start it again, if you
wish), by hovering your mouse over the video window, which will make
the clickable controls appear. Note that one of the controls is
"reply." If you click on that, and you have an account at
http://www.seesmic.com (it doesn't take long to register, and accounts
are free), then an authentication form will pop up. Enter your Seesmic
login info and you can reply to the video with your own video. See the
small horizontal strip of thumbnails at the bottom of the video? Hover
and click on those to play the replies. The replies are displayed in
chronological order, with the earliest videos at your right -- you can
scroll through them in either direction, stop and click on any one, and
stop it the same way, by hovering over the controls.

At
the same time that we invite you to join the discussion "horizontally"
through these videos, you are invited to enter plain old text comments
by way of the comment thread that scrolls vertically below this post.

Howard Rheingold is one of the recent winners of the Digital Media and Learning competition sponsored by HASTAC and the MacArthur Foundation. His project
combines a large set of online affordances (wiki, forum, chat,
blogging, microblogging, social bookmarking, RSS, video sharing, etc.)
into one single, open source, classroom tool. He explains more about
the project in his recent vlog, The Social Media Classroom Co-laboratory. For more information about the Digital Media and Learning Competition, focusing on participatory learning, please visit www.dmlcompetition.net.

I was eager to hear Howard Rheingold's thoughts on participatory
learning and to learn more about his new course. In the video thread
above, Howard goes into detail about the ways that "student-led
collaborative inquiry and involvement... enlists their enthusiasm in
ways that even very good lectures and texts don't." He details a loose
set of what he calls meta-skills, which include: critical inquiry,
pathfinding, balancing individual and collective voice, and
attention-to-attention.

Regarding the first skill, critical inquiry, he
points out that we have moved irrevocably into a world where the
authority of texts has to be questioned, and that, for all sorts of
media, this responsibility now falls on the consumer rather than the
publisher. This meta-skill is a new kind of literacy that relies on the
Dewey-esque process of "learning by doing." Howard, argues that in
studying social media, students need to be able to make critical
judgments and connections on their own (a skill he calls pathfinding)
without relying too complacently on pedagogical authority.

In a follow up video, Howard bemoans the quickness with which students
tend to ask the question "what will be on the test?" His solution has
increasingly been to have students decide collaboratively what material
is important enough to merit this distinction. Here, the ability to
make decisions collectively about the accountability of a group seems
to call forth another meta-skill: balancing individual and collective
voice.

I asked Howard how these meta-skills are acquired and, in particular, what deeply ingrained assumptions and practices have to be unlearned in order for these skills to flourish?

Watch the videos above to learn more about Howard's thoughts on these questions and more. Feel free to jump in and post your own video or
join in the forum. Howard and I will be conversing simultaneously
through the video thread as well as through the textual thread below.
The video portion of our conversation has already started (on seesmic),
and most recently I've asked Howard to talk more about the kinds of key
questions that students developed in his Participatory Media/Collective Action course at Berkeley and his Digital Journalism course
at Stanford. In addition, I wanted to know how the surprises and
discoveries he made while teaching those courses helped inform the
kinds of tools that he is currently developing for his Social Media Classroom Co-laboratory and that he may try out in his new course at Stanford on Virtual Community.

"What's Going On in Digital Humanities?" The Future of the Digital Humanities

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Surprises and discoveries
Posted on Aug 24, 2008-12:13pm by Howard Rheingold

As I mentioned, one surprise was simple -- asking students to move their chairs into a circle. I did this twice, once at Stanford with 20 students and once at Berkeley with 40 students. The resulting effect on discussion was explosive. From reluctant discussion, where I had to call on people and prompt more frequently, it moved to enthusiastic discussion where my main job was to shut up. I think the specific individual orientation of the student, moving from "I'm safe in my little niche, hidden behind my laptop, one of many scanned by the professor" to "Everyone can see me, and we're all exposed to each other" had something to do with it. More subtly, I have always taught the interrealtionship between the technological, social, and institutional. The professor standing at the head of the class, who are ordered in rows and columns facing front, instantiates a power hierarchy and is the physical manifestation of what Goffman would call the "working consensus" of what goes on in a classroom: Teacher is in power, teacher has the knowledge, teacher delivers the knowledge to those without power, who take notes so they can replay what they've been fed when tested.

Interestingly, in one circumstance, we had a classroom with detached, stacked chairs. The first couple of classes, students unstacked the chairs, set them up themselves, and without being told, arranged them in rows and columns. The next class meeting, they even sat in the same places. I don't think they were even conscious that they were enacting a ritual of institutionalized behavior.

Re: Surprises and discoveries
Posted on Aug 24, 2008-02:34pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

Interesting! Michael Wesch echoes your comments about the relationship between architecture and power in the classroom here. This point you make about the difference between a stacked verses circular seating arrangement seems to mirror earlier comments you made about authorship?i.e. I wonder if the individually authored book (without links or collective discussion) in some ways mirrors the physical boundedness (and rigid pedagocial structure) of the traditionally stacked classroom. For certain subjects that boundedness seems useful?especially because it focuses our attention?but for other subjects this boundedness can be counter productive.

 

Howard, I was really
Posted on Aug 24, 2008-07:45pm by slgrant
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Howard,

I was really struck by the de-emphasis on technology that you mention: students turning off laptops, having only one note-taker in a class, giving the students the authority to decide what should be on the test, and doing something as simple as getting rid of the desks to form circles. I hadn't expected that eye contact would be something so critical to this discussion!

It would be easy to think that technology is what makes participatory learning possible (wikis, blogs, social networks, virtual worlds, etc.), but you've highlighted barriers that are just as much about traditional pedagogies as they are about affordances in new technological tools.

I've had some very high-tech classes in the past years-- those experiences have been wonderful, not just for seeing what kind of technology is out there and the promises it holds, but to see how those classes can fail. If the simple, non-technology barriers aren't addressed, the technology ends up looking like a gadget. And I noticed that new technologies (for example, a real-life class that met in person as well as in Second Life) can simply emphasize the limitations of old-school type learning without adding anything to the learning process.

In the Second Life class, we tried to adapt a virtual world learning experience to a traditional course syllabus and there was, for lack of a better word, a mutiny. Some students resented having to learn a new technological skill and be graded on unexpected criteria such as creativity (we made machinimas or movies in Second Life) when the class was essentially a required course. After an overwhelming number of complaints, the instructor gave students the option of writing a traditional paper, instead of building an object in Second Life as the final project. Students resented the learning curve involved in acquiring a new tool, without much investment in teaching the tool, and were then graded on their ability to use the technology well. It was like building a high-speed train, telling the students to drive, and letting it run on tracks that were too narrow.

One of the other things that I'm really interested in is this idea that we have to unlearn some traditional pedagogies and ways we're trained to learn -- Josh put it really succinctly -- while at the same understanding the implications and possibilities of new technologies. It makes it such an exciting time to be an educator. Thanks for a great post.

Participatory media afford and enable partici...
Posted on Aug 24, 2008-10:18pm by Howard Rheingold

I de-emphasize the technology for a few reasons.

First, magical thinking about technology solving education problems and/or problems with schooling has done a lot of damage to the real value of using digital media and networks in education.

Second, I started teaching with an assumption that I came to question when the students pushed back -- that students were hungry for learning new online tools. The mutiny makes sense.

Third, it began to become clear to me inductively, as I tried all sorts of experiments, that the technology affords and enables a more student-centric, inquiry-based, collaborative learning. When I started to look into that, I rediscovered Postman, and was introduced to Freire, and started following edubloggers, and understood that the idea of participatory learning predates and can be thought of independently of participatory media. Indeed, Neal Postman is rotating rapidly in his grave, I'm sure, every time I cite him -- he was very suspicious of the kind of magical thinking I noted, and of the progressive computerization of everything, even fifteen, twenty years ago.

The technologies make it easy to experiment with participation in new ways beyond the standard classroom discussions, quizzes, tests, and papers.

Re: mutiny
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-05:36am by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
I've heard a lot of similar stories about students rejecting the pairing of social media tools with more traditional forms of accountability (such as grading). In my own experience with using social media tools in the classroom (both as a TA and as a student) I've found that rigid pedagogical structure can sometimes stymie expectations about what kind of interaction these tools afford. For example, when using class blogs, students' online writing can sometimes recreate the very insularity of the classroom that these tools are "supposed" to challenge. I'm not sure that eliminating traditional modes of accountability is really the answer though. Howard's courses seem to be addressing these challenges in really interesting ways. In particular, I'm interested in the ways he seems to be turning the pedagogical lens upon the social dynamics of the classroom itself (for instance, in calling on students to provide a meta-account of their attentional focus).
accomodating different learning styles
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-10:16am by whitneyt
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Even with all the careful caveats, there still seems to be a general assumption that if students don?t immediately latch onto social media used in the classroom ? or, for that matter, if students don?t participate much in classroom discussions ? that they must be disengaged, uninterested ? that we have to find questions that draw them into the media, or into the discussion. What excites me most about using blogs, wikis, etc. in education is *not* that they provide something new to add on to all the "stuff" that goes on in the classroom, but that they provide new entry points for students with different styles of learning to participate in ways that are meaningful to them. As someone who suffers from chronic shyness, I know I?m never going to be the student with an anecdote for everything during classroom discussions ? but put me on a forum, give me a blog, and I hope the professor will start to see how deeply I?m engaged with the material. (I'd venture to say we've learned a lot about introverts since giving them new tools to express themselves!) By the same token, certain types of extroverts who need that face-to-face contact to learn will never fully utilize the online tools; and that's okay. We all learn differently. New platforms for participatory learning have allowed us to recognize, appreciate, and more fully accommodate those differences. Howard mentioned something similar briefly, but it's worth emphasizing: social media shouldn?t run *parallel* to the work of classroom, but intersect with it at multiple points.
Keeping it simple
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-11:55am by Kylie Prymus
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I think part of the goal of projects like Howard's Social Media Classroom is to find a technology that is either intuitive enough or ubiquitious enough (ideally both) that is it not seen as an obstacle for the students to use. Arranging desks in an circle to better foster discussion has both - I may sometimes get students griping about it, but I've never had someone say they had never done it before. Other collaborative activities which are fairly commonplace, group presentations and projects etc, may be dismissed by some students because they don't like them, but you won't find students saying they dont' know how to do them.

I would agree that asking students unfamiliar with Second Life to craft an object as their final project is stretching a bit. It may also be the case that throwing many new modes of collaboration at them at once - wikis, blogs, twitter, backchanneling - may also be off putting. But individually each of these is doable, and as these modes of collaboration are also commonplace outside of the classroom it will become easier for students to accept them. The key may be not straying too far from the activities that they engage in voluntarily on a daily basis - or keep pushing these collaobrative technologies so that even if there are more complex and classroom specific uses of the technology it isn't unfamiliar to your average student. But that's part of the goal of things like HASTAC, no?

On the other hand perhaps a paradigm shift needs to take place in the way students approach learning. Rather than have a few specific ways of approaching classes - lectures, tests, discussions, etc - and being resistent to pedagogical styles outside of that, students could come to expect nothing from a course until they go into it. This puts the emphasis less on what the instructor knows and more on how the instructor teaches it.

Staging and Shifting
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-01:35pm by Howard Rheingold

As the instructor engaged in experimenting with new ways of teaching, and listening as closely as possible to how the students reacted, one message I clearly received was that I need to be careful to stage the introduction of new media. For example, students told me that the class coalesced as a community of discourse much more quickly after we moved from blogs to forums. It didn't take long for me to recognize that blogs are about individual voice -- although, unlike most papers, students read and commented on each others blogs. And forums are about braiding individual voices into a thread that built some kind of discussion collaboratively -- a kind of group discussion that tends to afford more of a feeling of community than a group blog does.

So I'm carefully starting with forums and making it clear that this is where we have group discussions that extend our classroom discussions -- and also present it as a tool that project groups can use themselves to discuss their project planning. And then, about a third of the way into the term, I plan to introduce blogging. At that point, the students are no longer required to participate in the forums -- but they are free to use them to talk about anything they'd like in regard to the course, and to use for their own projects. And the blogs are introduced in the context of individual voice.

But in terms of the shift in the way students approach learning -- I think it has to be set forth very clearly at the beginning that the instructor is attempting to teach in a way that will be new to most students, and that most students will be expected to take on roles that they are not accustomed to. You can see some of this scaffolding in the way I have set up http://socialmediaclassroom/vircom08

I see a certain amount of deprogramming involved. I ask the students, even after they are accustomed to moving their chairs into a circle, to move to different chairs and not sit with the same neighbors every time. Sometimes, I'll ask them to sit adjacent to other people in their project groups. So although part of what I am doing is giving up a great deal of the authority of the teacher as the deliverer of knowledge, lecturer, caller-upon-students-to-speak, I'm reserving the right to give them some orders to shake up their normal patterns.

Many teachers and students don't have a choice; i.e., required courses. But right now, I am asking students to apply for entry into my course this Fall, and to understand that we'll be doing things differently, and that they will be expected to co-teach. I won't have that freedom in the Spring, where I teach a version of the course to a larger number of students, and where I won't have the power to admit only the students who are the most highly motivated to experiment.

Re: Mutiny
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-12:31pm by Patrick Jagoda

Last semester, I had the opportunity to teach Second Life in an English course about "Literary Networks." Granted, I wasn't using the synthetic world to teach primarily technical skills, so I didn't experience a mutiny (which might have been productive in its own way). Nevertheless, this experience taught me a couple of interesting things:

First, during a class discussion that took place within a Second Life sim, I was able to call conversational dynamics to the forefront. In particular, I found that some students who were less likely to participate in our regular discussions in the classroom, were extremely vocal in the more anonymous textual/graphical setting of Second Life. After working through different facets of the world itself, we had an interesting conversation about identity, organization, and participation in online spaces. As Howard has been saying, in this case, technology became a way to experiment with and augment conversation: not to define it with particular tools. Certainly, the introduction of new mediums (including online worlds and blogs) helped us better understand our interactions and class chemistry, but the atmosphere of the course wasn't completely determined by technology.

Second, in my course, I was struck by the ways that new technologies and organizational modes helped students understand older modes. As most of my students were composing "traditional" papers about Second Life, they found it difficult to write about an online world. Up to that point in the semester, they had composed essays about novels and films. An entire world seemed too immense to grapple with in 10 pages. Interestingly, the problems they initially had with this assignment never came up when I had them write a paper about a Thomas Pynchon novel (an equally complex "world" in its own way). In any case, I was able to use their initial discomfort about using Second Life and writing about it to explore various differences between mediums. Even the fundamental difference between a "novel" and a "game" proved to be an extremely generative topic of conversation.

Patrick Jagoda

More Anxiety
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-03:34pm by jed
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Hi, Howard, thanks for talking with us. Luckily the camera embedded in my laptop has decided to no longer function. As I filled out the registration form for seesmic and began to formulate a response or question in my head a familiar queasy feeling that, for me, accompanies any situation of public address began. I?m interested in your understanding of the development of ?individual voice? in collaborative environments and how digital tools, such as video, might alter this process. Confronted with a mirror image of myself in my screen as I prepare to respond to you I?m already projecting myself up here (there), positioned horizontally alongside the other responses. I know too little about this particular technology. Can we edit these videos? Will the little icon for my entry feature me with my mouth wide open, eyes closed, or worse, rubbing at my nose? Will you see the Badiou on my shelf and know that I?m a serious scholar or see the coffee stain on my shirt and know that I?m clumsy? In response to Cathy on the topic of attention of vlogs, if it is mine, why yes, I?m paying plenty of attention to video! Where the possibility for authenticity exists, there is also hyper-attention. Not just that of the instructor, but of all participants. To return to the topic of individual voice, while repositioning myself vertically, do you think that in the realm of the digital, or the social media classroom, we have as much flexibility to explore this, or are we perhaps (even) further limited than in the traditional classroom? In Michael Gavin?s post he correctly asks about being wrong. Related to that is how, if this is what you are interested in (or even think is a possibility), to create the space to be, in the words of M.T.V., ?real? when constantly confronted with the persistence of your own self-image?
Re: More Anxiety
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-05:05pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

Hi Jed,

I definitely identify with the hyper-awareness of self that you're describing here. It's a really common experience associated with video blogging, and people like Michael Wesch, Alex Juhasz, and Howard Rheingold have been exploring this phenomenon in their classrooms as well. I think part of the anxiety comes from the uncertainty about address. We are simultaneously addressing Howard Rheingold, the HASTAC audience, the Seesmic community, and any other future audience that might see our videos reframed in an alternative context. It's easy to focus on how our off-the-cuff comments and clumsy phrasing will become media objects in their own right, possibly torn from their contextual moorings of what would otherwise be an ephemeral conversation. Will future employers watch these videos and scrutinize the way we form a sentece? [gasp!] Wesch refers to this phenomenon as "context collapse," and I've heard danah boyd use the phrase "context clash." Video blogging seems to exacerbate our own fears about context clash and heighten our own sense self-scrutiny.

So first of all. Yes, I empathize with you. Here's the good and bad news. If you go to the main seesmic site and find one of Howard's posts (and here's one: http://www.seesmic.com/#/video/KkGeN6f0M0/watch)... you can respond there, and you'll have the option of hitting a "discard" button after you've recorded and previewed your video. This ability to re-record helped alleviate some of my own hesitation at first. But be careful, the "discard" button also seems to amplify this problem of hyper-awareness-of-self. I.e. given the opportunity to scrutinize and revise our "performances," it's easy to become overly self critical. I've hit the "discard" button way too many times:)

Looking forward to seeing your videos!

ps: it's also possible to make and edit a video in imovie or some other app and then upload that video to seesmic on their site.

Sparking discussion
Posted on Aug 24, 2008-03:41pm by Erin Gentry Lamb

My classes are almost exclusively discussion-based classes, and regardless of the room set up, I make my students rearrange the desks/chairs into a circle every day (if the room is not particularly accommodating, this can become a habitual pain. It is interesting how difficult it can be to find rooms set up for this sort of pedagogical approach - which says something about institutional traditions, if not values.)

Perhaps in part because of the subject matter I teach (cultural studies, literature, etc. - disciplines not invested in "right answers"), I believe that the vast majority of the "knowledge" the students take away from my classes are what they, themselves, produce in their discussions. And to generate discussion, I think people have to be able to look one another in the eye. I find there is no lack of participation, and if anything, the challenge comes with trying to subtly guide the discussion in fruitful directions (or in rerouting it entirely if it wanders too far off-track).

The one problem I regularly encounter, however, and that I would love for anyone's feedback or suggestions on, is that students still look to me to call on them to speak. I try to let this happen organically, but the result is that bolder students will begin to speak up without prompting, but the less assertive students will still wait to be called on - resulting in some overly dominant voices in the discussion. There needs to be some formal system of ordering who speaks and when; I would just like to figure out a way to do this that empowers the students, rather than me. I read a suggestion somewhere that it works well to have the student who has just finished speaking call on the next student to speak (which still involves hand-raising, but at least is not about "my" authority). Has anyone tried this? Does anyone have other useful strategies to suggest?

Round tables
Posted on Aug 24, 2008-04:56pm by Michael Widner

I've noticed the same dynamic in my courses. Over the summer I taught a rhetoric course to summer Freshmen. One of the things we did regularly was a paper showcase, in which the entire class would read one of their peer's papers, then discuss it. At the beginning of the semester, I stood at the front of the class and put the paper up on the projector screen with the document camera. I found myself calling on or permitting students to talk, then summarizing the comments at the end.

After a few showcases like that, I started making them put their desks in a circle and the shift in tone, energy, and productivity was impressive. While I still had a few students far more willing to talk than others, my students took the lead in the discussion and got through far more points than we managed when I was leading. I would also sit in the circle and periodically interject comments to either elaborate, disagree, or raise questions that nobody had mentioned yet, but otherwise I left it up to the students.

One aspect of the dynamic I did find troubling, though, was that the men were far more willing to speak. I had a few women who were more assertive, but in general, I had to make it a point to ask for feedback from the more silent students. Since we were sitting in a circle, though, I just asked them to give their comments by going around that circle, which seemed to work fine. I also found that noting the gender disparity led to a few more of the women speaking up on their own. I like the idea of having students decide who goes next, perhaps with the rule that it has to be someone who hasn't spoken yet until everyone has said at least one thing.

Based on this experience, I'm going to always do my paper showcases and discussions in circles from now on. I am, however, going to be careful, especially early on in the semester, to direct the comments. Students have a tendency to focus on smaller, local-level concerns like wording or grammar rather than the organization of papers as a whole or other systemic problems. I see a large part of my job as refocusing their attention on these larger problem until they start to do it on their own.

So, that's my wordy way of saying, "circles good (with guidance)."

Round tables
Posted on Aug 27, 2008-12:41am by kgallego
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Michael from an undergraduate student's perspective I would have to completely agree with your comment "circles good (with guidance)". Last semester I had a course where we predominantly focused on collaborative learning as a means to get through the class material. At first, I had reservations about adapting to a newavenue of learning. For so long I had grown accustomed to going to class, taking notes, and turning in papers/ exams, where the only person who really heardwhat I had to saywas theinstructor. I found that I gained adifferent sense of knowledge in the discussion based classroom. I now was able to hear my peersthoughts that for the longest time were supressed inthe traditional classroom setting. I felt that my thoughts were challenged andultimately strengthened more so by fellow classmates than that of myinstructor. We became somewhat critical of eachothers thoughts, which in turn promoted a deeper, more insightful thinkingamongst the class. This might not had beengenerated by a typical lecture based classroom. No longer was I just writing down my thoughts, but I was forced to put them into action, putting them to the test of withstanding the scrutiny of my fellow classmates. I believe that this type of learning was truly effective.

The only drawback I found was that at times the discussion would drift off topic. This is where I feel the instructor plays a key role in the class, not asoutside figure,but rather as participant.By the instructor participating in the discussion he/she can add a fewcomments here and theretokeep the students on track. I wouldn't say that I would like to have every classasa discussion based class, but it is a nice change of pace from traditional learning.

Hi Michael!As an
Posted on Aug 30, 2008-01:38am by Lindsey
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Hi Michael!

As an undergraduate, I was a creative writing major. That meant that the classroom model you're describing -- the "paper showcase" with desks in a circle -- was the standard way of conducting class: the creative writing workshop. It's interesting that even with such closely related types of courses -- one teaching "academic" writing and rhetoric, and the other teaching fiction writing -- both students and teachers come in with different ideas about how, when, and to what extent to be collaborative, and how to go about doing that. It seems to me that this circular (what I think of as a "workshop") arrangement facilitates that sort of collaboration in a much deeper and more productive way, as it seems you discovered in your class. I found that in that environment -- when someone's more personal work was up for critique -- that, especially with eyes meeting eyes, students tended to stay much more focused, and be much more constructively critical in their engagement. I know, in retrospect, that my fiction writing developed much more quickly, as did my confidence about sharing it, and, consequently, my ability to EDIT it, thanks to that model. I don't think my academic writing caught up (especially my ability to see my own flaws and edit, edit, edit) until I later had to write a thesis in a course that was also constructed as a workshop.

So, there are two aspects of collaborative learning that you're bringing up in your example: one is the what of sharing one's work in a collective environment (that is, making the personal public, and then using other people's comments in order to re-work one's thoughts, thus making the previously personal work "collaborative), and the other is the how of doing that in a "circle" or workshop environment. Both seem to me to be especially valuable ways of encouraging collaborative work and developing individually by way of that collaborative involvement. So it seems like you've hit on something really valuable!

"Merry-go-round"
Posted on Aug 27, 2008-05:14am by Brunolondon
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Hi Erin,

I find a similar type of problem when I'm doing non-formal education in youth seminars. Although we insist on everybody participating freely, it can be somewhat of a problem (including gender balance, age balance, etc. of those who talk vs. those who don't).

A method/exercise that works well in this case is the "Merry-go-round" (adapted from the Council of Europe's training manual for non-formal educators, DOmino). It works particularly well if you're not overly keen on a discussionthat happens simultaneously with everyone in it (it amounts to a high amount of smaller discussions, which you then share together in the group).

Divide the group of learners into two groups (of the same population, say 9 and 9 people). One of them will form an inner circle facing outwards, and the other will be the outer circle facing inwards; everyone is facing someone from the other circle.

Start by asking a question, or setting a discussion topic. Students in the group have anything from 1 to 5 minutes (you decide) to discuss the issue at hand with the person opposite them. At the end of that time, you give a signal (something funnier than a whistle, like a horn...), and the outer circle takes a step to the right, and then they discuss another question/topic together. And so on, until the cycle is closed, or they've had enough.

Examples of questions/topics:

  • "Wikipedia is a reliable source of information." Agree? Disagree?
  • "You shouldn't use your real name on Facebook." Agree? Disagree?
  • What could we study next about Social Media?
  • Anything that is suggested by the students...

At the end, the group gathers again, and you ask people to present briefly the most exciting/quirky/original ides they've heard (constraint: it can't be their own). It makes for a great discussion!

An alternative is to set the time period by playing a short track that's good background music (bouncy, enthusiastic, motivating and positive, but not too loud so they can still hear each other)!

/stop rambling :-)

Merry-Go-Round
Posted on Aug 27, 2008-08:29pm by Erin Gentry Lamb

Hi Bruno,

This is a very interesting idea and I appreciate you sharing it! It sounds a little "speed dating" applied to education - "speed learning" perhaps? I'm finding it a little difficult to picture it working just like this in a college classroom (if for no other reason than to return to the sad fact that most university classrooms are just ill equipped for this kind of movement), but you've gotten me thinking about what it would mean to let go of my authority as the instructor so completely. After all, even when students are generating the discussion, when there is one centralized discussion, intervening to redirect is still possible (and you still have some sense of the quality or effectiveness of the conversation). Allowing discussions to happen so simultaneously, and shifting context so frequently, seems to offer an environment more like the one students enter every day when they multitask with IM and social networking sites and more traditional media all at once. Perhaps this sort of discussion might actually be more fitting with the ways our attention is trained in our digital age? Something I will think about... Thanks for sharing!

speed-dating
Posted on Aug 28, 2008-02:29pm by christinealfano

Hi Bruno,

I've actually use this technique in class occasionally -- though I tend to frame it in the "speed-dating" terms that Erin mentioned in her comment. I found that it provides a great opportunity for students to focus on PROCESS as well as thematics. In my course, one of our goals is to have students engage with the research process, and so I use the revolving inner circle/outer circle format to have each of them discuss in pairs their best advice for research or research writing. At the end, I ask students to comment on some of the best tips they heard, then inviting the original student who mentioned it to elaborate on his/her tip. It's a wonderful way for students who don't feel comfortable sharing their own good ideas to get recognition for them and to contribute to the overall class learning. I've also done a similar activity online, using discussion forums and blogging, asking people to post and then comment on research or writing ideas. You lose the time urgency, though. I bet it would be interesting to experiment with something like this in a chatroom.

On a side note, I was inspired to try this pseudo speed-learning activity by a colleague of mine, Alyssa O'Brien. Reading your post and thinking back on how I came to use this activity myself really reenforces for me why this sorts of forums are such powerful tools to help us develop and continue to take risks as instructors by being inspired by others ...

Yes, especially when the
Posted on Aug 29, 2008-03:55am by Brunolondon
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Yes, especially when the learners become the inspiring others!

Would your online version be available to view publicly?

meta-notes
Posted on Aug 28, 2008-10:23pm by nknouf
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Not sure if people noticed, but by default the forum system allows you to track whoever is visiting and looking at the page, including time, date, username etc. I don't know about you, but I think this is more than slightly intrusive, as it lists all of this information for every access:

URL https://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/8-25-08Rheingold-participatory-lea... Title HASTAC welcomes Howard Rheingold for a discussion on participatory learning Referrer http://www.hastac.org/scholars/forum/ Date Thursday, August 28, 2008 - 10:12pm User nknouf Hostname 67.241.22.252

(from https://www.hastac.org/admin/logs/access/16689425, which, by the URL, suggests that this is admin functionality, not just for anyone who uses the forum)

Um...can we get this shut off? This is certainly not public information, and should only be allowed in private server logs and not be made available to everyone. Otherwise...I'm going to have to start using tor, or stop using the forum system altogether.

Additionally, this page currently crashes my (up-to-date) firefox browser in Linux, probably due to the embedded flash, autostart, and size of the thread...

 

nick

meta-notes on meta-notes
Posted on Aug 29, 2008-03:52pm by Mark Olson
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Thanks for pointing out the privacy hole in our Drupal install. I've closed it. In the future, I'd like to encourage everyone to consider using HASTAC.org's feedback form for any website-related issues, particularly those that involve security and privacy. In this instance, for example, I'd rather not have had become public knowledge the fact that our server logs were unintentionally exposed nor the URL to access them. I'd also like to propose a future HASTAC Scholars Forum topic -- on the issue of digital privacy, anonymity, digital enclosure (per Mark Andrejevic, etc). Perhaps someone could frame these issues for us, particularly in relation to web 2.0, which seems to demand a certain "user awareness" that simultaneously threatens or transforms what constitutes privacy in the digital age.
Tyranny of the janitor
Posted on Aug 18, 2009-01:41pm by nils_peterson

Working consensus is one way to describe the bahavior. Another comes from our experience in a new classroom building where the tables and chairs were all mobile. The Janitor left big notes on the white boards about putting the tables and chairs back -- in rows. The needs of his broom became paramount to the learning.

How to deal with the widget
Posted on Aug 24, 2008-12:24pm by Howard Rheingold
The widget plays the introductory video every time you access this thread, which can be annoying. Hover your mouse over the video and you will see the parallel bars that will stop the video from playing if you click on it. You'll also see, under the thumbnails that run horizontally along the bottom of the thread, two other links: One will reveal a list of links about participatory pedagogy. The other leads to a video by mwesch, "A vision of students today." I like the idea of these widgets as micro-learning-objects that can include a brief video lecture, a list of links, even an RSS feed. I used http://www.sproutbuilder.com to make the widget.
meta-commentary
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-03:13pm by Jim Brown
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A couple of thoughts about Seesmic and the forum discussion:

1) I found it difficult to figure out the order of the video posts. I clicked "thread," but it was still not very easy to understand the flow of the conversation.

 

2) Is there any way we can turn on the RSS function for this page. I think the HASTAC page is run by Drupal (I use Drupal myself) and that would make it really easy to turn on RSS for the forum. This would make it much easier to keep up with updates to the forum. I'm assuming I'm not the only RSS geek contributing here :)

jb

 

James J. Brown, Jr.

University of Texas-Austin

Meta-discursive thoughts on seesmic as a medi...
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-05:44am by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

I've been thinking about the contrasting affordances of these two discursive tools being used in our forum (i.e. a video thread happening horizontally and a text thread happening vertically). Seesmic is a really interesting environment for thinking about performance and address, and so it's been fascinating for me to compare the experience of posting videos to the experience of writing in this forum.

More soon...

Seesmic Cognition
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-07:31am by Cathy Davidson
Hi, Howard and Joshua and EVeryone--This is really exciting. I'm learning a lot from your conversations and I'm learning a lot about how I view/listen. I fidget just watching so I multitask. I find I can listen and watch from the corner of my eye as I'm doing other things, like printing out a chapter on cognition and infant knowledge acquisition, preparatory to revising a different chapter on cognition and digitality. So that's what I'm thinking about as I hear you two (and sometimes see you two) as I buzz about my study, watching to make sure the printer doesn't jam, sorting the paper, getting folders out of my file cabinet, saving files. Does the vlog format actually command more attention than text? Or less? Is that a good or a bad thing? I'm obsessed these days with the BENEFITS of multi-distraction to bump us from the tired cognitive ruts created simply by being a citizen of our culture. And how would this work in a classroom? Would it focus, productively unfocus, or be something for outside the actual classroom? Hilarious (actually a performance piece) to think of a class of people all vlogging to other people and all of that going on at once. Any thoughts on this?
Different affordances of video and text
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-11:55am by Howard Rheingold

One important aspect of audio is that humans are well-equipped to turn our attention partially in other directions visually and still tune in to audio -- so because our vlog posts aren't really showing anything but our faces, and most of the information is carried in our voices, it's possible to print your paper while listening.

It's not really possible to read text and get much out of it if you are simultaneously trying to listen to someone talk, though.

I don't see using this kind of video discussion IN a classroom, but as a supplement. For example, with 20-40 students who meet once a week, it take too long to get them to get to know each other -- and for me to get to know their names and something about each one of them. But if you can imagine a mosaic like http://www.tiil.us/seesmic/norms/ (mouse over and click) with a 60 second intro from each student, wouldn't that be a great means of getting to know each other more quickly?

Possibilities of visual communication
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-08:32pm by alyssaobrien
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Hi Howard and everyone at HASTAC,

This is a fantastic forum for idea sharing/idea generation. I particularly appreciate reading about the concrete strategies people use in their classes.

The Seesmic norm video mosaic would be super for student introductions - we could use to connect studentsacross time andgeographic distances too. Here at Stanford we're using real-time video connections and blogging in our writing classes (see http://ccr.stanford.edu) butso far we haven't experimented with a dynamic mosaic like that one - I wonder two things:

1.How much could the video posting support asynchronous discussion or even peer review of student projects? Imagine a student peer review board through seesmic mosaic. Would it take too much work for students to produce and postclips?

2. Themulti-tasking distraction factor that Cathy Davidson talked about - is there a way to design the video assignment so it is not so much a talking head but avisualnarrative tosupport the audio content? Is this too much verging on documentary? I just wonder what we can do to retain interest in the speaking subject - maybe by including visuals?

The Vision of Students Today video, for instance (Awesome video, Michael Wesch!), kept my attention and didn't let medo otherthings - the way a good speaker will keep the attention through eye contact, etc.

Not that we don't want to explore the benefits of multi-tasking, but I how can we use mutliple modes of tech-enabled communication to deepen engagement and thinking (versus my experience of listening to the discussion videos while my brain is working on other things...)

Would love to hear people's thoughts on this

Thanks!

Alyssa O'Brien Stanford University

mosaic icebreaking
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-10:01am by Cathy Davidson
I love the mosaic idea, Howard. It would also be a great way for a visual person (moi) who has never been able to get a name right to have a great visual for an entire class, maybe everyone mugging and saying their name and a little about themselves. It would be a fantastic performance piece with which to begin my "How We Know the World" class that I'll be teaching next winter. Thanks for the suggestion!
I don't know if that's true
Posted on Aug 30, 2008-01:48am by Lindsey
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I don't know if that's true that it's not possible to both read a text and listen to someone and get something out of both. I tend to listen to the videos while also reading through the blogs. The much slower speed of information transfer via the video feed (because people have lot of "ums" or pauses) allows me to read between the pauses, or scan and skim in ways that are equally useful -- and I frequently find myself making new connections because I'm getting two different kinds of input at once.

Admittedly, I agree with you with regards to some kinds of reading (i.e. heavy theory, or novels that require really getting involved in another world), it's not possible to medially multi-task. But part of what's nice about running both the vlog and the blog at once, given the conversational nature of both, is the ability to move between and within the two simultaneously in generative ways.

The Ends of Learning
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-12:58pm by Patrick Jagoda

So far, we've been talking a great deal about the ways that learning can be improved through the introduction of new media and technologies to the classroom (as well as the limits of those tools). This discussion thread raises a number of questions about the value of learning as such:

First, how do different disciplines (e.g., in the humanities versus the social sciences) require different adaptations and applications of new technologies? How might my needs, as an English instructor, differ from those of someone in Communications, Philosophy, New Media Studies, Political Science, or any number of the fields represented within our community? How do disciplinary boundaries shift as a result of classroom experiments with content, form, and medium? How does something like the Social Media Classroom challenge existing disciplinary organization within the standard university? Can we think of interdisciplinarity not as an additive theoretical approach (a combination of methodologies), but as an emergent practice?

Second, what modes of thought emerge in courses that incorporate blogs, wikis, chats, social networking, online worlds, and so on? Are we teaching primarily new skills and techniques, or new cognitive ways of grappling with the world and understanding other people? Are we preparing students for success in high-powered jobs or giving them the tools to live more interesting lives that are driven by genuine curiosity? A university education, as such, can be thought of both as an end in itself and a means to some other end (e.g., employment or continuation in grad school). So I'm curious how social media affect the ways that different instructors approach pedagogy, education, and learning. For each of you, what is it about how you understand the underlying value of learning that has brought you to this conversation?

Patrick Jagoda

Re: The Ends of Learning
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-03:02pm by Kylie Prymus
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I think one way that interdisciplinarity arises from this sort of collaborative approach (rather than being merely additive) is through the creation of ideas that cannot necessarily be ascribed to a discipline nor analyzed as such. Anyone who approaches interdisciplinarity with a goal towards bringing in something scultped from their home discipline and taking out something that looks like it came from their home discipline quickly becomes dissapointed (and all too often raises concerns about the productivity of interdisciplinarity as such).

When it comes to collaborative learning in a classroom setting what emerges is not so much a solid disciplinary framework as it is a record of ideas and a conversation. Howard hinted at this when he mentioned pathfiding in his second video - something that is required when approaching a subject that lacks an established canon, and Michael went further when talking about collaboration itself as the artifact. But even for those things that do have a canon, if those of us from traditional fields who want to teach collaboratively in this way are willing to give up some of that authority and let students choose a path then you end up with something, what, nondisciplinary? I don't think that's the case because we all started somewhere and that will inform our choices, but if it's truly collaborative then it will be interdisciplinary even if the disciplinary links aren't explicit. But why should they be?

I taught a philosophy of technology course last spring and made del.icio.us a mandatory part of the course with students posting links that they found interesting during the semester. At the end we produced a record that is, while not necessarily canonical for the field, certainly canonical for the course. The result was a course that I hope approached being an end for itself with regards to university education. Granted I'm a philosopher so there's not much to the subject other than pursuing it for its own end!

Archive-Making and Participatory Learning
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-03:41pm by Jentery Sayers

First, a big thank you to Howard and HASTAC for making this conversation possible.

As an instructor of English at the University of Washington, one of my pedagogical investments in participatory learning and social media is collaborative archive-making. This archive-making can assume multiple forms, including collectively: mapping a university campus or urban space, annotating digitized texts, and researching a particular topic or event. Alan Liu's notion of "literature+" also comes to mind. And whatever the example, the idea is that archive-making is more than storing and preserving information; it is also transmitting it in new ways.

That said, I want to return to Howard's comments about co-teaching here. How might collaborative archive-making also be a means of not only de-centering the classroom, but also re-situating how course material emerges, how expertise is articulated, and how knowledge is produced? I pose these questions because my experiences teaching through the collaborative archive have really de-stabilized my position as the sole authority on the topic at hand, particularly when students "discover" something new to me about the very material I am researching.

For me, then, social media becomes a way to animate information and events and also intermediate them in new ways. This animation can occur quite literally (e.g., animating a 19th century text using Flash) or figuratively (e.g., making literature "move" in new ways through collaboration that does not always assume agreement amongst the participants). Framed as such, to participate in learning is (for both the students and the instructor) to compile course material over a period of time. The course is by necessity an ongoing process, always under construction.

But -- and here's my ultimate question for Howard, the other HASTAC scholars, and those who are also participating -- once an instructor and a group of students have, in fact, made an archive for a specific topic or event, how might that archive be mobilized for change (institutional, epistemological, or otherwise)? In other words, how do we make the archive matter once the quarter or semester is over? Does anyone have some examples? I fear that a lot of archive-based courses I have taught end when grades are due, and the archive becomes static (or anything but animated).

Thanks again, and I hope this finds each of you well.

A scary radical idea -- a course wiki over ti...
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-04:45pm by Howard Rheingold
So I explained in the video that the students in my Fall class will be constructing a wiki around each of the weekly themes. Here is a scary idea that might be a response to your question, Jentery. What if the wiki lives on the next year, and the second year, students will h ave to build on what the students did the previous year? Sure, the first year students get to pick the low-hanging fruit. But the second year students can add depth, linkages. I'm not sure. What do you think? I'm wary of doing too many radical experiments at once.
Re: Radical Experiments
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-07:10pm by Jentery Sayers

A wonderfully scary idea indeed, Howard. Last academic year, I attempted this with student writing---giving students the chance to pick up on and revise the writing that the previous quarter's students did. However, I have not attempted this with an online, collaborative archive.

What I particularly like about your idea is that it really reformulates how we understand course construction. It demands that we think in trajectories beyond the quarter or semester. And in so doing, it forces us to think about course outcomes and, relevant to other posts emerging during today's discussion, evaluation and expertise.

For example: How do we construct archives that are future-oriented, with change, revision and contradiction in mind? How do we write for audiences that do not yet exist?

Brilliant stuff. I'm going to sit on this idea for a bit. In the meantime, thanks for the suggestion!

What about social bookmarking? (and a quick ?...
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-02:08pm by christinealfano

Hi Howard!

I've really enjoyed watching the videos above and reading this discussion thread; it's wonderful to dive into such a rich discussion about participatory media just as the new school year is about to start. It's got me playing with all sorts of new ideas ...

 

So here's one, building off your long-term wiki idea: have you ever done something similar with social bookmarking? For instance, have you ever established a del.icio.us account for a class, and then have different classes contribute to developing that resource over several quarters/semesters? I can see how it could be done with a wiki (in fact I've experimented with having students contribute to an annotated bibliography that I carry over between quarters), but I'm still new to social bookmarking and haven't quite resolved how to incorporate it into a class without a top-down approach -- though having an entire class contribute would seem a logical idea if you were interested in building an archive of knowledge around a specific theme.

 

Also, here's the quick question on vlogging. I saw your mosaic suggestion about -- it was brilliant. Have you done much vlogging in the classroom yet? If so, do you have any words of advice for those of us interested in experimenting with it? Also, how do we deal with issues of access when vlogging presupposes access to a computer with webcam and microphone?

 

Thanks for your thoughts on these questions!

Christine

Re: What about social bookmarking?
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-02:37pm by Kylie Prymus
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I've used del.icio.us in two of my courses and it's work reasonably well. I haven't had the opportunity to teach either of those two courses again, but that's a great idea having it carry over. It's a good way to keep the archive current and relevant. I'll be sure to do it!
Hi Christine! Social bookmarking in class
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-04:19pm by Howard Rheingold

Christine, I've been collecting tags for my digital journalism class -- a trove of ideas for me and projects for them -- at http://delicious.com/hrheingold/comm217

I ask them to start their own delicious accounts and to bookmark relevant materials to that tag.

I've built a native social bookmarking capability into the social media classroom -- to simplify the process and focus on using socialbookmarking in the context of collaborative work. So here is an experiment I tried with a workshop, and which I'll try with classes this year:

1. People come up with ideas for questions they want to pursue that are relevant to the course AND to themselves. They write them on post-it notes and stick them to the whiteboard. Two or three notes per student.

2. We stand in front of the whiteboard and try to cluster questions by moving the post-its and writing on the whiteboard to label clusters.

3. We agree on a set of questions and divide into groups.

4. Each group tries to find relevant resources over a week, tagging with agreed-upon tags. If five people come up with ten resources each, that's the beginning of a formidable collection of resources.

5. Each group then uses a forum topic to discuss, asynchronously, which of the resources are best, and how to describe them.

6. Each group compiles an annotated list of resources, with a paragraph introduction, on a wiki

 

Unfortunately, the results of that experiment are lost, but they will be recorded next time.

 

There's more to social bookmarking. I tried to simplify it with that exercise, but I put my own delicious account up on the screen, and I show how I can troll for experts in a particular field by seeing who else has bookmarked key resources, inspecting their other bookmarks, then subscribing to those people's tags about my subject via RSS. The "social discover" part of social bookmarking.

 

In regard to vlogging and the mosaic. I have NOT done it in the classroom yet. Seesmic tells me they will have private groups ready in time for the first quarter. I've added the Seesmic comment widget to the social media classroom, so students can enter their introduction into a forum topic thread. But just using Seesmic, they can set up accounts, join the private group for the class, and record a short intro video. I use a MacBook Pro and nothing is easier than using the built-in microphone and camera in a fairly quiet, well-lit environment.

 

Another workaround is to post the s hort videos in a private flickr group.

 

But I like the Seesmic mosaic idea most of all. It's a hack by a Seesmic user! They haven't incorporated it yet. But if anyone wants to try it, I'll be happy to ask the Seesmic user if he could help us.

Re: Archive-Making and Participatory Learning
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-07:25pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

??Jentery

Really fascinating comments and questions about the relationship between an archive and its ability to mobilize change. I'm interested to hear and see more about the archives you're developing.

Also, there's a project called MetaVid produced by some colleagues of mine that you might be interested in:

http://metavid.ucsc.edu/

It's a video archive of everything that happens on the house and senate floor, organized and searchable via close-captioned text.

THANK YOU, HOWARD
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-03:35pm by Cathy Davidson
Howard, I cannot believe you are giving us this much of your time. I'm amazed, abashed, grateful. On behalf of ALL of HASTAC---whatever that means---Thank you. This is an incredible conversation. And thanks to the HASTAC Scholars for their interesting, smart remarks. Fabulous, everyone!
RE: Evaluation
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-05:36pm by Mark Olson
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I'd post a video, but since I've been writing all afternoon my 'do is showing the effects of being pulled on for several hours -- Where's Erving Coif-man when I need him!? ;-) What a great conversation! The pitfall of the "authoritarian" classroom has been mentioned on a few occasions, something I'd like to speak to, particularly because in my own work on medicine and visual culture the issues of expertise and authority -- their use and misuse -- are often at stake. When grappling with the issue of evaluation and the power structures of the classroom, I think it's important to understand the difference between authoritarianism and authority. The former concerns the exertion of power from a place of structural inequality, and is self-referential in that it gains its effectivity from the static inequality upon which it relies. As humanists, I think we're often uncomfortable with authority, fearing it is the same thing as authoritarianism. But authority is much more mutable, fluid, shifting about the classroom, or the online discussion forum, or the open source software community (choose your own learning community). It is something both practiced, performed, and negotiated. We should articulate, not abdicate, the basis of our own authority in the classroom, and seek to cultivate in our students an ability to articulate their own. I think the best classroom interactions occur when there is both a foregrounding and a proliferation of different bases of authority. In my classroom this often takes the form of a meta-disciplinary discussion about what constitutes knowledge in a particular field (I
Fascinating new video posts!
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-06:31pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

I'm really pleased to see how engaging the video thread has become! Thanks to Michael Gavin and Kylie Prymus for adding their remarkably thoughtful video posts to the thread above.

Kyle, your thoughts on the role of evaluation in the classroom has gotten me thinking a lot.

And Michael, I'm really fascinated by your questions: "When is it OK to be wrong about digital media [in the classroom]... and when is it required to be right?"

Your answer, that "it is strangely both always and never" strikes me as really insightful. Perhaps there is a relationship to what linguistic anthropologists call plausible deniability... i.e. that much of what we "do" with language (in terms of social action) is buried beneath complex layers of ambiguity and social lubricant. Part of the reason that these functional moves remain implicit is that we need to have an "out" when someone calls into question our motives (by making them explicit). It's important to be able to backtrack, whether by claiming someone misunderstood your intentions or by resorting to humor ("lighten up, I was just kidding," for example).

This feature of plausible deniability seems present in the way that the more traditionally ephemeral classroom interactions happen. For example, students "perform" the act of being sincerely engaged with the classroom experience even as they have an awareness about some of these more fluid interactions being evaluated as part of a class participation grade. This performance of engagement is sincere precisely to the degree to which students and teachers preserve an unspoken contract to keep this evaluative framework in the background. This is the "never wrong" part of Michael's answer.

In a classroom where these interactions take place over social media platforms, however, the artifacts that these learning processes create in their wake become fixed and explicit. Perhaps there is less opportunity, then, to practice plausible deniability (on both the student and the instructor's part).

Could this be why the answer to your question above is also "always right." In a world of non-ephemeral online interaction, we are always performing facets of "self" that can be potentially evaluated and have real-world impact on our reputations and careers. This goes for undergraduates, graduate students, and professors alike. But at the very same time, it's considered impolite to acknowledge or dwell upon this very fact. The irritation that some instructors have felt when students ask the question "what is going to be on the test" reflects this taboo against explicitly acknowledging the institutional power relations present the classroom (and this is especially the case for the humanities and social sciences).... So we are back to "never."

I'm not supposed to acknowledge for example, that in the videos I posted (above) the camera is placed conveniently facing my bookshelf (with the television and dirty laundry deliberately out of frame). Likewise, I'm not supposed to acknowledge that I made a concerted effort to dress more casually??hipster T-shirt:)??on the second day of video-posts because I wanted to appear more confident. It's this Goldilocks-just-right-porridge mix of professionalism and casual confidence that we deliberately try to fashion in various interactions. And perhaps it's precisely this balance that we read as sincerity. But we're not supposed to acknowledge this attention to a performance of sincerity, because to do so deflates its impact entirely.

So perhaps the short answer to Kylie Prymus's questions about how students should be evaluated when these tools become integrated into the classroom is that students (and professors) need to retain some amount of plausible deniability about the evaluation of non-ephemeral digital interactions. Could this "inefficiency" be built into the system somehow?

update... on plausable deniability comments a...
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-06:48pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz

Hmm... I hadn't read Mark's comments on the disciplinary specificity of evaluation and knowledge until after I'd posted the comments above. Now I'm rethinking things.

I'm also recalling Mimi Ito's point in her Digital Learning Project presentation at Stanford where she argued that the "natural" learning that takes place within user-generated media can sometimes rely on outside mechanisms of accountability through academia.

For example, she talked about a youth involved in Anime translation for a community of fans. Egged on by the encouragement of his peers in this digital community, he went off and pursued a Japanese proficiency test. So here, the very explicitness of an outside evaluative mechanism is what was valued by the fan community who cheered him on.

 

refraining from showing a clear pathway
Posted on Aug 25, 2008-07:13pm by Jim Brown
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Hi, Howard. I was struck by your remark that you sometimes have to "refrain from showing them too clearly the pathway through the material." It reminded me of Greg Ulmer's work on "electrate" invention, particularly in his textbook Internet Invention. Ulmer's hope is to teach a new mode of rhetorical invention that incorporates the affective and the subjective - aspects of thinking/writing that have been largely dismissed by Western philosophy's literate practices.

I taught Ulmer's book last year, and one day I made the mistake of offering some possible examples of how they might tackle a particular assignment. This led to about 20 identical pieces of writing - all of them had provided a variation on the example I had provided. This reminded me of Ulmer's insistence (very similar to your own) that he only provides "relays" to students...not examples. A relay forces students to look at a text and, rather than mimic it, ask the question: "What is that for me?" Given that our task (as I see it) is to teach students to consider new modes/theories of writing and research (rather than applying old modes to new media situations), it seems imperative that we refrain from showing them the paths. A podcast is not just a radio program distributed on the Web, it can be many more things...Wikipedia is not just an electronic encylopedia, it is something (at least in some ways) that is brand new. It seems that we have to hold open the possibility that there are paths that have not yet been carved.

If there's a question here, it's this (and it's for everyone): How have you managed to avoid showing students the path? How do students react to this? In my experience, students are frustrated at first when I continually avoid giving clear answers. But they eventually find it liberating to have the freedom to carve their own path. It seems to me that teachers are sometimes to quick to step in and remove an obstracle...frustration is an important part of the learning process.

James J. Brown, Jr.

University of Texas-Austin

Do you know the work of Steve Downes?
Posted on Aug 29, 2008-04:11pm by Cathy Davidson

http://www.downes.ca/

 

I just came across this via Mandy, here at HASTAC: a video on participatory learning that is very clear and useful. What do you think?

Pathways
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-08:23am by Cathy Davidson
Hi, Howard and James and everyone on this thread, Thanks for this great discussion. I've been out of the undergraduate classroom for eight or is it ten years, working as an administrator, and I alternate between feeling confident about dipping back in and intimidated. There are so many new kinds of tools, so many new paths to collective and collaborative thinking together which, for me, is always the highest goal of a course. At the same time, some things remain so fundamentally the same--and yet, given the mood in education today, harder to make happen. For example, I used to work out contract grading systems with my students. I would ask students, at the beginning of the class, to decide from a menu of possibilities what they wanted to achieve in a course and when. I would deduct points for not meeting their own deadlines and for not doing what they set out to do, but if they accomplished everything on the menu, they were assured of a baseline grade. You could say you wanted your baseline to be a C or a B or a B+. No one had a baseline A simply by quantity of work. The rest of the grade was based on my evaluation of the quality. I liked doing this because it gave students control over some areas where they are usually totally without control: such as deadlines. Inevitably, someone has five papers due the same week. My menu-method allowed them to survey their requirements for their classes and plan their own deadlines. The other side of the giving of control was responsibility--I hate the "my aunt died (again)" year end casualties. Now, here's the problem: we're in a climate where everyone is worried about grade inflation (which I am not convinced really exists; why don't people worry about student over-excelling and preparation?? it's crazy what entering first-year students already bring to the college classroom, how high the bar has become: I'm far more alarmed, for social reasons, about College Applicant Expectation Inflation than grade inflation). Duke even has some schema (I need to investigate this more) whereby each prof finds out if they grade below the curve, above the curve, or off the map. With contract grading, I found the overall work of my students incredibly high . . . and often so were the grades. Is that even possible in today's climate? How do others handle grading? I love Mark's idea of having students discuss their own self-evaluations. I've also done group evaluation. Part of participatory learning should also be creative new measures of outcomes. What are the rest of you doing these days? All the best, Cathy
Grading/Evaluation
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-09:57am by Jim Brown
Jim Brown
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The contract system sounds really interesting. My preferred evaluation system is the Learning Record:

 

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~Syverson/olr/contents.html

 

It allows students to build an argument for their grade. It's not _only_ a portfolio system and it's not (this is what I tell my students) a "hippie" grading system where everybody gets an A. Students accumulate evidence throughout the semester, they observe their learning processes (and record these observations), and they build an argument for their grade at the midterm and at the final. With the learning record, I give the same number of A's and B's I ever did.

 

James J. Brown, Jr.

University of Texas-Austin

Thank you! I don't know
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-10:19am by Cathy Davidson

Thank you! I don't know this system and will investigate. It sounds ideal.

 

Hilarious to append a "This is Not a Hippy" warning . . . lol. I'll try that too. Thanks for writing.

 

Best,

 

Cathy

http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~Syverson/olr/cont...
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-10:21am by Cathy Davidson
Overview of the Learning Record

The Learning Record provides an architecture and process for documenting student progress and achievement, based on interviews, observations over time, samples of students' naturally-occurring work, and well-supported interpretations of learning across five dimensions. It is an evidence-based assessment with a deep foundation in learning theory and research. An 8-page print form (The Primary Language Record) was originally developed by London teachers and researchers to facilitate the process, gather information, and present it consistently. This information is collected and organized using a simple Word or RTF document that links to a selection of student work, prepared over the course of a semester or school year.

The Learning Record provides a way of accounting for learning that is richer and more meaningful than standardized testing, yet offers much more consistency and comparability across student populations than conventional portfolio assessment. It can serve as the sole record of students' achievement, or it can be used to inform and support conventional grading. The Learning Record seamlessly integrates student evaluation, research, program assessment, professional development, and teaching and learning practices. This is accomplished through the naturally-occurring activities and artifacts of the course, rather than artificial tasks, templates, ?frameworks,? and research protocols. Teachers and students work together to document and interpret evidence of student learning, based on criteria and standards established by the teacher and reflecting the collective understanding of what disciplines, fields of study, and departments believe students should know and know how to do. In this way we can discover whether and how students develop the habits of mind, practices, knowledge, and skills we hope to cultivate, and how our teaching can better serve this development.

Research and development of the Learning Record has been a cooperative project of UT's Computer Writing and Research Lab; the Institute for Teaching and Learning, and the College of Liberal Arts; Dick Richardson, professor of biological sciences, University of Texas at Austin; the Center for Language in Learning, San Diego, California; and the Center for Language in Primary Education, London, England.

In 2001, the President of the University of California criticized standardized testing as a destructive force in education and sought to end the use of the SAT test in UC college admissions (NY Times, Feb. 17, 2001, page 1). He argued that standardized tests are "not compatible with the American view on how merit should be defined and opportunities distributed." After observing classrooms where 12-year-olds were being drilled on analogies in preparation for the SAT's, he wrote, "The time involved was not aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather their test-taking skills. What I saw was disturbing and prompted me to spend time taking sample SAT tests and reviewing the literature. I concluded what many others have concluded?that America's overemphasis on the SAT is compromisng our educational system." He recommended that the university move away from admission processes that use quantitative formulas and instead adopt evaluative procedures that look at applicants in a comprehensive, holistic way.

We applaud President Atkinson's leadership in taking this bold initiative. In the years since this article was published, the situation with standardized testing in schools has not improved; indeed, it is markedly worse. The evidence mounts that we are doing irremediable damage to our children and our culture and deepening the inequities among schools. See, for example, the April 8, 2007 article in the Washington Post, by second-grade teacher David Keyes, "Classroom Caste System."

What is participatory learning to you? What w...
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-06:56pm by Howard Rheingold
The initial, intensive phase of this conversation seems to have plateaued, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to pick your brains: What is participatory learning in YOUR view? And what works? What engages students, fires them up about the subject, inspires them to dig deeper, to debate, to strike sparks?
Hi Howard!As you know from
Posted on Aug 30, 2008-02:15am by Lindsey
Lindsey
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Hi Howard!

As you know from my posts elsewhere, this summer I worked on (and am continuing to work on) one of the Digital Media and Learning Competition winners' projects: Virtual Peace: Turning Swords to Ploughshares. A big part of the the project was trying to not only engage those questions, but figure out how to incorporate the answers when designing a NEW learning environment. For those of you who haven't seen it elsewhere, the Virtual Peace project is making a digital learning environment that has both the aspects of a virtual simulation (think SecondLife) AND some of the goal-driven aspects of a video game. The game/simulation will be used to help students develop skills for delivering humanitarian aid and resolving conflicts in international contexts. So, that means that much of the game is ABOUT learning how to be better collaborators and participatory, collaborative learners for the purpose not just of knowing things in a deeper way (which is awesome, of course), but also from a very practical, goal oriented standpoint. In designing the game, we had to think about alternative ways of "evaluating" what's being "learned" because it's a mix of tangible and non-tangible skills. In this context, students don't "win" when they get an A in the class, but when real, tangible goals are met -- e.g. the Red Cross is able to convince the government of Honduras to give visas for 200 rather than 100 aid workers, or another NGO convinces the international bank to give X dollars to rebuild roads. I The PROCESS of convincing -- the skills of interpersonal communication across international and agency lines -- is as important as achieving the final goal.It seems to me that this mix of objectives -- some more clear and goal oriented, and some more vague, less immediately tangible, but equally valuable -- is one (among many!) exciting new way to encourage participatory learning a collective, media-infused environment.

ALSO, from a meta-level, as we were working on the project (not in a traditional a "classroom" type environment), frequently the primary way the teams interacted was across social networking sites (we used Ning). Working in that way allowed me to think a lot about how I will use various new media tools in my own teaching. What I really liked about working across the medium was that there was not only a transparency to the development of the project and the various aspects of it -- as it was all in forums open to the entire group -- but also an archive of the development of lines of thought to which we could return as new issues came up.

(And, as I'm having technical issues that are keeping me from embedding the link, I'll put the website for the project here: www.virtualpeace.org)

Thoughtful comments (via video thread) from B...
Posted on Aug 26, 2008-07:31pm by Joshua McVeigh-Schultz
Hi Bruno and welcome to the video thread! I'm not sure if you'll see this post so far down on the forum (I actually wish there was a way to organize the text comments in closer proximity to a video that they comment on). But I wanted to thank you for your really thoughtful comments and questions around alternatives to evaluation in classroom. You also might be interested in this link to a video post where Howard Rheingold discusses the Postman and Weingartner book that you brought up in your post. http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/07/25/does-the-use-of-social-media-necessi... Anyway, keep it coming! I'm excited to see how this dialogue has bridged questions of education theory and issues raised by social media.
Thanks for the link!
Posted on Aug 27, 2008-04:48am by Brunolondon
Brunolondon
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Hi Joshua,

thanks for the link, I wasn't aware of that other discussion. I'll check it out very soon!

Wow!!
Posted on Aug 28, 2008-03:08am by Mechelle
Mechelle
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I Like this quote

Hi Everybody! Greetings from Florida! Wow! My goodness, I don't even know where to begin. You all are awesome! I love listening and reading your comments and am learning so much. I don't know who and which subject to reply to fist...I'm still processing...This is such a great conversation and my meta skills haven't caught up yet. Indeed, dare I say, this conversation is much better than what I hear at most of my university classes.

This may sound quirky, but I sort of feel like I do when I attempt to double dutch jump rope. When I taught middle school in the mornings the kids would sometimes ask me to jump rope with them. I remember watching the ropes...trying to see the rhythm, pausing, and then jumping. I don't feel that jump rope feeling when I am in my classes at the university, so this is really refreshing. But I digress...

First off, I am a big fan of Postman. Though he wasn't for computers in the classroom, he has this great vibe...maybe it was his raspy voice...anyhow, I like that he really gets one to consider not just a utopian view of technology. I wish he were still around today. Here's a video of him for all the Postman fans: http://hastac.ning.com/video/video/show?id=1420034%3AVideo%3A13210

Lately, I've been asking myself the questions, 'Why do we participate online?' What need(s) does it fill? Then with Storm Fay and other circumstance, I think of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs..yes, Glasser is good too, but Maslow keeps traveling back in my mind. Anyhow, his needs as you know are: (1) Physiological, (2) Safety and Security, (3) Love and Belonging, (4) Esteem, and (5) Self Actualization. So, in thinking about participation, this may be a good framework to understand why we may feel the need to jump online. For example, lately, I've been looking at the flood zone sites on my cell phone. Some folks have contributed and shared with the community about which areas are safe to drive in etc. This is helpful to the community as a whole and falls in line with the Maslowian need of safety and security. Other times, I seek self actualization, mainly I seek that through my university system, but that doesn't happen too often...so I jump online to see if I can try and get a fix to help me feel a bit more actualized...well, you get the picture...anyhow, it's been rolling around in my mind and wondering about Maslow as a framework to help us understand various types of participation is various groups.

Also, I've been wondering about the idea of paricipation withdrawl...I wonder is there such a thing as participation withdrawl? By not being online as much, my sense of community is limited, and my place in my communities shifted...which affects my identity as well, I suppose. Anyhow, it seems like that is where I am at currently in some sort of particpation withdrawl...occasionally getting a cyber fix. Most of all it is affecting the way I teach. By day, I am a high school teacher and I don't have computers in my classroom this year. It's really weird. I'm used of teaching with computers and having my students particpate online...so it feels strange that my school for the most part is limited to the bricks and mortar. The school community is contained and I feel contained, so to speak. It's really hard to explain.

Also, I've been thinking about the notion of anonymity and voice and the importance of that along with public and private voice. When I had my students blogging in 2005, I asked them to pick pen names for safety reasons because we were doing a virtual support blog and found that the anonymity provides another voice for students and another pedagogic space to explore. My students often commented that they could say thing online that they wouldn't say in the classroom. Moreover, each student didn't know each student's pen name, unless they chose to share. Therefore, cliquesand roles were erased a bit. Content mattered, rather than social status. Indeed, peer-to-peer they supported each other in a way I hadn't really seen in a 2f2 setting. The typical pecking order was shifted and it was really insightful. But I digress...

I think what you all pointed out about self evaluation and the role of digital media was really interesting. I used video a lot in my class as an evaluation tool. For example, I used video with students with autism in social skills activities. I would record a student and then have the student evaluate their own performance by watching several videos and progress was documented via the video. Then I could send the video clips home to families. It worked out great. Here's a couple examples:

(Part 1) http://lpcesc07.ning.com/video/video/show?id=683712%3AVideo%3A1566

(and Part 2) http://lpcesc07.ning.com/video/video/show?id=683712%3AVideo%3A1562

Oh, goodness...will write more later...I just realized how late it is and have to get up at 5:00 a.m. I hope what I wrote was somewhat coherent...as I have been ditzier than usual. Have a wonderful evening...and morning. Mechelle

Anonymity and Born Digital
Posted on Aug 28, 2008-11:33am by Cathy Davidson
Hi, Mechelle, Thanks for this interesting direction you're taking the participatory learning discussion. I was going to blog on this today on my own blog but maybe there are other readers of this incredible Howard Rheingold-inspired conversation who will be interested in taking up this anonymity issue and so I'll make my comment here today. I'm reading the new BORN DIGITAL book by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in terms of my own interest these days in cognition and really thinking about how profoundly different the concepts of "anonymity" and "f2f" are if a digital world is the only one you know. That is, I'm born into an analogue world and learn digitality so those distinctions matter to me. But do they matter to kids born after 1980? Do they matter the same way or differently? I watched an eight-year-old beaming with joy when his sixteen year old cousin sat in the same room with him, on the same couch, and played online video games with him for an afternoon. Is that f2f or virtual? They barely spoke. And I know people--born digital people even-- who spend their lives on line but would die rather than author even a blog entry under their own names. They feel vulnerable and exposed. Participatory learning has to take those different styles into account and needs to extend into and out of the classroom in multiple ways. For example, I love the interplay and inter-play of the words "participatory" and "anonymous" . . . THAT is fascinating in its historical status. Thanks for posting to this incredibly rich discussion. Best, Cathy
Smart Mobs & Voice
Posted on Aug 30, 2008-10:44am by Mechelle
Mechelle
Offline

 

Hi Everybody, I've been thinking about the notion of anonymity and voice and the importance of that along with public and private voice. When I had my students blogging in 2005, I asked them to pick pen names for safety reasons because we were doing a virtual support blog and found that the anonymity provides another voice for students and another pedagogic space to explore. My students often commented that they could say thing online that they wouldn't say in the classroom. Moreover, each student didn't know each student's pen name, unless they chose to share. Therefore, cliques and roles were erased a bit. Content mattered, rather than social status. Indeed, peer-to-peer they supported each other in a way I hadn't really seen in a f2f setting. The typical pecking order was shifted and it was really insightful.

But anyhow, I feel a bit out of sorts talking about technology, when many of us K-12 teachers can't do what we used to with technology. It's like talking about going to the moon without a spaceship. Indeed, I don' even have computers in my classroom this year. Indeed, I don't even have my own classroom this year. I am sharing with two other special education teachers and am a traveling teacher most of the day as an inclusion teacher, but it is not true inclusion. The regualar education teachers are considered lead teachers also called content teachers and special ed considered learnng specialist...yet special education teachers have no say.

Also, there is that assumption that special education teachers don't understand content. Just because one is a special education teacher doesn't mean they don't know how to do algebra. Anyhow, most of the teachers I work with are "Worksheet Kings" and well, it is dreadfully boring. I used to skip "worksheet classes" in high school myself.

Yet, special education teachers have no say and are often put in their place. I truly understand why 50% of special education teachers leave the profession within 3 years. I've been pushing myself beyond the 3 year mark and often feel as though I am never doing enough. Relating to technology, it seems as if school boards waste all this money on guest key note speakers also called "tech evangels" who give their speeches on all the things teachers are doing wrong to mess up America's educational system. Then we go back to our classrooms with old, broken, or no computers. Tax payers dollars at work.

There is a divide from what the higher ups know and what the people in the field actually do. Also, yes, there are some lucky few teachers who are technology teachers and that is their content area...they don't have to prep for reading and mathematics...but technology classes are cut from most students with special needs because they are required to do more reading and math. Many of the higher ups don't see that computers will help students in subject areas as well. This is especially frustrating because even as a kid myself I learn geometric principals on the school computer in the 1980s...also we learned through art. Hence, because I learned differently, I teach differently...and am having a hard time conforming my teaching into "prescriptive teaching"...

Anyhow, relating to Smart Mobs, teachers for the most part are a Smart Mob that is censored. We can't say much online and when we do, we have to limit ourselves in soooooooo many ways as to keep our jobs. Often times we try and find other folks on the internet who say what we want to say, but don't have their jobs at stake (e.g. videos of former teachers etc.) Indeed, I had to sign something at the beginnning of the year that I would not say anything "bad" about my school. So, I'm trying to be good....teachers are expected to be Mary Poppins at all time and take it all with a spoon full of sugar, until they leave the profession...but what good does this do for our country? for international relations when teachers really have no say? Indeed, recently the Supreme Court ruled that teachers exchange their Free Speech for their salaries. So, how do K-12 teachers (who are not technology content teachers) get around this to advocate for their students and for the profession as a whole before they get too burnt out to even make a whisper?

Voice
Posted on Aug 30, 2008-10:53am by Mechelle
Mechelle
Offline

 

Hi Everybody, I've been thinking about the notion of anonymity and voice and the importance of that along with public and private voice. When I had my students blogging in 2005, I asked them to pick pen names for safety reasons because we were doing a virtual support blog and found that the anonymity provides another voice for students and another pedagogic space to explore. My students often commented that they could say thing online that they wouldn't say in the classroom. Moreover, each student didn't know each student's pen name, unless they chose to share. Therefore, cliques and roles were erased a bit. Content mattered, rather than social status. Indeed, peer-to-peer they supported each other in a way I hadn't really seen in a f2f setting. The typical pecking order was shifted and it was really insightful.

Like talking about going to the moon without a spaceship, I feel a bit out of sorts talking about technology, when many of us K-12 teachers can't do what we used to with technology. It's like talking about going to the moon without a spaceship. Indeed, I don' even have computers in my classroom this year. Indeed, I don't even have my own classroom this year. I am sharing with two other special education teachers and am a traveling teacher most of the day as an inclusion teacher, but it is not true inclusion. The regualar education teachers are considered lead teachers also called content teachers and special ed considered learnng specialist...yet special education teachers have no say. Also, there is that assumption that special education teachers don't understand content. Just because one is a special education teacher doesn't mean they don't know how to do algebra. Anyhow, most of the teachers I work with are "Worksheet Kings" and well, it is dreadfully boring. Yet, special education teachers have no say and are often put in their place. I truly understand why 50% of special education teachers leave the profession within 3 years. I've been pushing myself beyond the 3 year mark and often feel as though I am never doing enough.

Relating to technology, it seems as if school boards waste all this money on guest key note speakers also called "tech evangels" who give their speeches on all the things teachers are doing wrong to mess up America's educational system. Then we go back to our classrooms with old, broken, or no computers. Tax payers dollars at work. There is a divide from what the higher ups know and what the people in the field actually do. Also, yes, there are some lucky few teachers who are technology teachers and that is their content area...they don't have to prep for reading and mathematics...but technology classes are cut from most students with special needs because they are required to do more reading and math. Many of the higher ups don't see that computers will help students in subject areas as well.

This is especially frustrating because even as a kid myself I learn geometric principals on the school computer in the 1980s...also we learned through the arts. Hence, because I learned differently, I teach differently...and am having a hard time conforming my teaching into "prescriptive teaching"...

Anyhow, relating to Smart Mobs, teachers for the most part are a Smart Mob that is censored. We can't say much online and when we do, we have to limit ourselves in soooooooo many ways as to keep our jobs. Indeed, I had to sign something at the beginnning of the year that I would not say anything "bad" about my school. So, I'm trying to be good....teachers are expected to be Mary Poppins at all time and take it all with a spoon full of sugar, until they leave the profession...but what good does this do for our country? for international relations when teachers really have no say? Indeed, recently the Supreme Court ruled that teachers exchange their Freedom of Speech for their salaries. So, how do teachers get around this to advocate for their students and their profession before they become so burnt out they can?t even manage a whisper?