One of these days, I’m going to make it to Educause. Until then, I will just have to enjoy the presentations I can find online. Sarah “Intellagirl” Robbins has a marvelous slide show (featuring an excellent use of presentation software) called “Social Media and Education: The Conflict between Technology and Institution Education, and the Future,” that’s well worth a look:

I was especially struck by her insights about the changing role of educators in an information society, “relating as more experienced co-creators rather than employers.” I see this in my own practice in a class I’m teaching now in which I, and all my students, are blogging. I’ve done this a couple of times before in different classes, and in those courses I’m very much a co-creator with them in that experience rather than an employer-professor-taskmaster.

There are some real challenges to this as a pedagogical strategy, however. If you’re working at anything but an elite educational environment with hyper-motivated and highly skilled students, it can be difficult to get students who are used to the professor-taskmaster model of education to engage with social media in a meaningful way. The dilemma is not the technology, per se, as much as it is the shift in pedagogical strategy. For students who are used to mass-produced textbooks and multiple-choice exams, the unboundedness of blogging and being in charge of their own educational process can be a little disorienting at first. I try to provide my students with some structure by giving them a “Blog Rubric” for how their blogs will be graded, but still, this can be a daunting task for some students. Even with these challenges, I think it’s worth the effort for those us in front of the classroom to figure out ways we might shift our pedagogical strategy so that we become a “guide at the side” rather than the traditional taskmaster-employer-professor.

This article, from Bryan Alexander, illustrates the way that the web, and particularly social media gets talked about in higher education. Bryan does a nice job deconstructing the – ooh~scarey! – image that the editors chose to run with the story. It’s ironic that this piece appears at just the time when the Pew Internet & American Life Project has just released a new study, co-authored by sociologist Barry Wellman, that addresses the talk the pervasiveness of social media in most households.  The study also points out the way that technology brings families together. Here’s a little from the Pew on this study:

Instead of driving people apart, mobile phones and the net are helping them maintain social ties, says the Pew Internet report.

Families are also among the keenest users of technology, the survey of 2,252 Americans revealed.

It found that using the net was often a social activity within families, with 51% of parents saying they browsed the web with their children.

“Some analysts have worried that new technologies hurt family togetherness, but we see that technology allows for new kinds of connectedness built around cell phones and the internet,” said Tracy Kennedy of the University of Toronto who helped to write the Networked Families report.”

Personally, I see a lot of fear and loathing of technology in higher education.   And, I also come from a family that’s not incredibly connected via social media.   Yet, my chosen-family and friends are mostly in the “always connected”  category.  I’m curious about what sorts of things people may be hearing and seeing unfold in their own institutions of higher learning and in their own families. Do you see the kind of disconnect that my juxtaposition of these two articles suggests?

My friend Howard Rheingold, (author of Virtual Community and Smart Mobs), has just launched the Social Media Classroom. The site includes an open-source (Drupal-based) web service for teachers and learners. It offers a whole bunch of stuff, generally referred to as “social media” (or, “digital media”) in an integrated platform. Courses using the SMC can select from a menu of social media, including integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets and video commenting. There’s also a “classroom” side to the platform that includes various bits of curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. And, possibly the best part, is that it’s all free. Or, as Howard puts it: It’s all free, as in both “freedom of speech” and “almost totally free beer.” Free is good.