Howard Rheingold was one of the first popular authors to write about the promises of online social networks, starting with his 1993 book, The Virtual Community. Now he’s bringing the latest online-community tools — wikis, videos, blogs, and the like — to the college classroom.
And what better way to encourage professors to use online community tools than to create an online community where professors can talk about the topic? That’s what Mr. Rheingold plans to do, along with putting together a set of how-to guides to help other professors use social-media tools, which are sometimes referred to collectively as “Web 2.0.”
The project is called the Social Media Virtual Classroom, and last week it won a $61,000 grant in the Digital Media and Learning Competition. The competition was sponsored by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, otherwise known as HASTAC.
Mr. Rheingold said in an interview that students need to be exposed to “participatory media” in order to become active citizens, since he believes that political activism has increasingly moved online.
“In the 21st century, civic education is participatory media literacy education,” he said. “The feeling of a citizen who only passively consumes what’s sold to them by broadcast media is very different from someone who has posted a blog item or who has posted a YouTube post, or who has commented on a newspaper article online.”
Other projects that won the digital-learning competition include an effort to use laptop computers as musical instruments and an online community for professors working on virtual worlds like Second Life. —Jeffrey R. Young
