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The Earth becomes a chalkboard, a spreadsheet, a presentation medium, where the thorny problems of global civilization and its discontents can be explored out in exquisite detail. In this sense, no problem, no matter how vast, no matter how global, will be seen as being beyond the reach of these children. They’ll learn this – not because of what teacher says, or what homework assignments they complete – through interaction with the technology itself.

We and our technological-materialist culture have fostered an environment of such tremendous novelty and variety that we have changed the equations of childhood.

As it turns out (and there are numerous examples to support this) a mobile handset is probably the most important tool someone can employ to improve their economic well-being. A farmer can call ahead to markets to find out which is paying the best price for his crop; the same goes for fishermen. Tradesmen can close deals without the hassle and lost time involved in travel; craftswomen can coordinate their creative resources with a few text messages. Each of these examples can be found in any Bangladeshi city or Africa village.

The sharing of information is an innate human behavior: since we learned to speak we’ve been talking to each other, warning each other of dangers, informing each other of opportunities, positing possibilities, and just generally reassuring each other with the sound of our voices. We’ve now extended that four-billion-fold, so that half of humanity is directly connected, one to another.

Everything we do, both within and outside the classroom, must be seen through this prism of sharing. Teenagers log onto video chat services such as Skype, and do their homework together, at a distance, sharing and comparing their results. Parents offer up their kindergartener’s presentations to other parents through Twitter – and those parents respond to the offer. All of this both amplifies and undermines the classroom. The classroom has not dealt with the phenomenal transformation in the connectivity of the broader culture, and is in danger of becoming obsolesced by it.

We already live in a time of disconnect, where the classroom has stopped reflecting the world outside its walls. The classroom is born of an industrial mode of thinking, where hierarchy and reproducibility were the order of the day. The world outside those walls is networked and highly heterogeneous. And where the classroom touches the world outside, sparks fly; the classroom can’t handle the currents generated by the culture of connectivity and sharing. This can not go on.

We must accept the reality of the 21st century, that, more than anything else, this is the networked era, and that this network has gifted us with new capabilities even as it presents us with new dangers. Both gifts and dangers are issues of potency; the network has made us incredibly powerful. The network is smarter, faster and more agile than the hierarchy; when the two collide – as they’re bound to, with increasing frequency – the network always wins.

A text message can unleash revolution, or land a teenager in jail on charges of peddling child pornography, or spark a riot on a Sydney beach; Wikipedia can drive Britannica, a quarter millennium-old reference text out of business; a outsider candidate can get himself elected president of the United States because his team masters the logic of the network. In truth, we already live in the age of digital citizenship, but so many of us don’t know the rules, and hence, are poor citizens.

before a child is given a computer – either at home or in school – it must be accompanied by instruction in the power of the network. A child may have a natural facility with the network without having any sense of the power of the network as an amplifier of capability. It’s that disconnect which digital citizenship must bridge.

Let us instead focus on how we will use technology in fifty years’ time. We can already see the shape of the future in one outstanding example – a website known as RateMyProfessors.com. Here, in a database of nine million reviews of one million teachers, lecturers and professors, students can learn which instructors bore, which grade easily, which excite the mind, and so forth. This simple site – which grew out of the power of sharing – has radically changed the balance of power on university campuses throughout the US and the UK.

Alongside the rise of RateMyProfessors.com, there has been an exponential increase in the amount of lecture material you can find online, whether on YouTube, or iTunes University, or any number of dedicated websites. Those lectures also have ratings, so it is already possible for a student to get to the best and most popular lectures on any subject, be it calculus or Mandarin or the medieval history of Europe.

As the university dissolves in the universal solvent of the network, the capacity to use the network for education increases geometrically; education will be available everywhere the network reaches. It already reaches half of humanity; in a few years it will cover three-quarters of the population of the planet. Certainly by 2060 network access will be thought of as a human right, much like food and clean water.

Educators will continue to collaborate, but without much of the physical infrastructure we currently associate with educational institutions. Classrooms will self-organize and disperse organically, driven by need, proximity, or interest, and the best instructors will find themselves constantly in demand. Life-long learning will no longer be a catch-phrase, but a reality for the billions of individuals all focusing on improving their effectiveness within an ever-more-competitive global market for talent.

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

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.

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.

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.

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