Social Media and Peer Learning: From Mediated Pedagogy to Peeragogy
Howard Rheingold is an independent scholar and currently a guest lecturer at Stanford's Department of Communication. A writer and designer, he was among the first wave of creative thinkers who saw, in computers and then in the Internet, a way to form powerful new communities.
Howard Rheingold offers an abstract on what will be addressed in his UC Berkeley Regents Lecture: "My career-long compulsion has been to take new media to their limits. In the field of learning, this means developing a method of teaching and learning that amplifies the affordances of online media to depart from the millennia-old model of professor-lecture-texts-tests. The first stage of this evolution was the application of online media to classroom teaching. The second stage was the transformation of my teaching because of the affordances and biases of social media. The third stage was to move from blended learning that combines face to face classes and online engagement. The fourth stage was to deliver mini-courses that took place entirely online, with an emphasis on cultivating a community of co-learners. The next and most radical stage, which I hope to initiate with the Regent's lecture and accompanying master-class and seminar, is to use the same media for a purely peer-organized pedagogy."
His 2002 book "Smart Mobs", which presaged Web 2.0 in predicting collaborative ventures like Wikipedia, was the outgrowth of decades spent studying and living life online. An early and active member of the Well (he wrote about it in "The Virtual Community"), he went on to co-found HotWired and Electric Minds, two groundbreaking web communities, in the mid-1990s. He now teaches, writes and consults on social networking. His latest passion: teaching and workshopping participatory media literacy, to make sure we all know how to read and make the new media that we're all creating together.
UC Berkeley Regents' Lecture: Howard Rheingold (Presented by Berkeley Center for New Media) from Berkeley Center for New Media on Vimeo.
This lecture is presented by UC's Berkeley Center for New Media with support from the Regents' Professorships and Lectureships Program. Co-sponsored by UC Berkeley School of Information.