Group items tagged

Rheingold recounts how the development of communication technology has removed the power top transmit messages from a tiny elite, and had been a force for democratization. Following Benkler's idea of peer production he explains how the diffusion of many-to-many communication technologies enables new forms of collective action.

Howard Rheingold, who teaches at the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University, was an early adopter of Twitter and often turns to it for teaching advice. He explains to his digital journalism students how to use the site to establish a network of sources and, using tweets, how to entice those sources to follow them in return. In his social media course, he has his students employ Twitter for what he describes as "student-to-teacher-to-student ambient office hours."

Wiki:Social Networks

Teaching students to learn from and with each other is a wise acknowledgment that more and more, students are relying on their peers for information. Sixty-five percent of Americans aged 12-17 and 67 percent of those aged 18-32 use social networking sites, according to the Pew Research Center. Students' lives are infused with each other's viewpoints.\n\nTeachers and professors like Parry and Camplese are taking group work to the next logical step: incorporating social media into their classrooms. In lieu of fighting teens' use of networking sites, they are communicating with students in a language that they understand.