Although the Colab was created specifically to teach social media theory by the use of social media, and the Social Media Classroom includes resource lists, syllabi, and , lesson plans focused on that specific subject, it was intended from the beginning to serve as an all-purpose tool for educators who seek to use social media in pursuit of a more participative pedagogy. That’s where the community of practice comes in. We’re devoting an instance of the Colab to converations among educational practitioners that we hope to grow into a self-sustaining community around the use of social software in pedagogy in the broadest sense—any subject, any age level, any institution. We welcome participants who want to learn more, share best practices, meet others who share an interest in social media in education. The hope of those who created the initial Colab and accompanying curricular and support material is that this effort, and the tools we provide, will inspire others to vastly expand and deepen our resource repository, add their syllabi and lesson plans, discuss with and learn from others. We’ll start with Forums, where the early participants can meet and discuss what we’d like to do together, and the wiki, where we’ve seeded some fundamental resources and invite others to add new ones. If there is interest, we can add blogs, chat, RSS, social bookmarking, microblogging and video. The Colab is based on Drupal, a free and open source Content Management System, and we hope to grow ties with others in that community who are interested in working with educators to co-develop new tools and improve existing ones.
To join the community click here
"The Slate authors and Macnamara et al. dismiss the 10K hour rule too lightly, and their explanation of genetic/innate basis for expertise is too simple. Practice is not the same as deliberate practice, or practice with a teacher. Expertise is learned, and we start learning at birth with expertise developing sometimes in ways not directly connected to the later activity. The important part is that we are able to learn to overcome some genetic/innate disparities with good teaching. We shouldn't be giving up on developing expertise because we don't have the genes. We should be thinking about how we can teach in order to develop expertise."
