Howard Rheingold – Social Media and Peer Learning: From Mediated Pedagogy to Peeragogy

Discover how giving students more responsibility in shaping their own curriculum can lead to more active participation.

Key Questions and Comments:

• (24:05) What connections [do] you see to the experiments that Howard has been describing for us and some of the work that you’re engaged in?
• (24:22) To what extent, Howard, do you see people finding and locating and bringing in knowledge and to what extent are they creating and developing new knowledge?
• (28:42) How do all of these different texts and conversations and issues and debates we’re having–how do they connect, what do they mean?
• (30:10) [Regarding] these principles that Howard’s describing for what he calls “motivated self-learners,” what are the opportunities and challenges for trying to do it in the K-12 context?
• (30:36) How can we help teachers shift from controlling the flow of learning to becoming an “esteemed co-learner”?
• (35:05) What does it take to move from that transformative experience to actual shifts in practice?
• (37:45) Howard, can you talk a little about the influence of Illich’s “Deschooling Society” on your thinking?
• (40:05) Are students just curating/posting old knowledge or reconstructing/remixing old knowledge/new ideas to create a “new” form of thinking?
• (48:27) The communities that you are essentially convening, will they be able to hold different truths that really go in different directions? Is that a worthy goal, or is that really a freaky, scary outcome?

View the Conversation
During the broadcast, the conversation also took place on Twitter using the hashtag #connectedlearning.

Guests for this webinar included:

• Bronwyn Stuckey
• George Couros
• John David Smith
• Sylvia Martinez
• Howard Rheingold: Howard Rheingold currently teaches at Stanford University, Communication Department. He is the author of: Tools for Thought http://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/. The Virtual Community http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/. Smart Mobs http://www.smartmobs.com. Net Smart http://www.rheingold.com/netsmart
• Mimi Ito

Resources for this webinar:

• Rheingold.com
• Rheingold University: series of five-week courses on topics such as personal knowledge tools and social media literacy
• Howard’s DMLcentral post “Toward Peeragogy”
• International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning Abstract for “Heutagogy and lifelong learning”
• Cathy Davidson’s “21st Century Literacies” syllabus, assignments, calendar
• Example of student-created “mindmap” from one of Howard’s classes
• David Warlick’s “Are they Students or are they Learners?”
• Monika Hardy’s adaptation of Michael Wesch’s “How we run our class”
• Kickstarter project: “Don’t Go Back to School: A handbook for learning anything”
• HourSchool: “Social school” centered around peer teaching/learning
• Youth Voices: School-based social network where youth share their thoughts on a wide range of topics
• Massively Minecraft: Learning community exploring how to live, work and play in Minecraft
• Deborah Frieze illustrates the “Two Loops” theory of change [Video]
• Bud Hunt’s plpnetwork.com post, “Inquiring About Teacher Inquiry”
• Howard’s DMLcentral post “Pop-Up University”
• Bud Hunt’s budtheteacher.com post “In Search of Agency”
• Chad Sansing’s Digital IS post, “On hacking public education”