HASTAC welcomes Howard Rheingold for a discussion on participatory learning
About the HASTAC Scholars Forum
The HASTAC Scholars fellowship program recognizes graduate and undergraduate students who are engaged in innovative work across the areas of technology, the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences. The HASTAC Scholars host regular discussion forums here featuring their own ground-breaking research and interests alongside those of leaders and innovators in the digital humanities, such as social networking pioneer Howard Rheingold, open source scholar Christopher Kelty, and Director of the Office of Digital Humanities for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brett Bobley.
Visit the HASTAC Scholars homepage
OfflineHoward 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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)."
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 new avenue 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 heard what I had to say was the instructor. I found that I gained a different sense of knowledge in the discussion based classroom. I now was able to hear my peers thoughts that for the longest time were supressed in the traditional classroom setting. I felt that my thoughts were challenged and ultimately strengthened more so by fellow classmates than that of my instructor. We became somewhat critical of eachothers thoughts, which in turn promoted a deeper, more insightful thinking amongst the class. This might not had been generated 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 as outside figure, but rather as participant. By the instructor participating in the discussion he/she can add a few comments here and there to keep the students on track. I wouldn't say that I would like to have every class as a discussion based class, but it is a nice change of pace from traditional learning.
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!
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:
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 :-)
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!
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 learners become the inspiring others!
Would your online version be available to view publicly?
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
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.
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
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...
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?
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 students across time and geographic distances too. Here at Stanford we're using real-time video connections and blogging in our writing classes (see http://ccr.stanford.edu) but so 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 post clips?
2. The multi-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 a visual narrative to support 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 me do 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
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.
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
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!
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 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!