HASTAC welcomes Howard Rheingold for a discussion on participatory learning

I think part of the goal of projects like Howard's Social Media Classroom is to find a technology that is either intuitive enough or ubiquitious enough (ideally both) that is it not seen as an obstacle for the students to use. Arranging desks in an circle to better foster discussion has both - I may sometimes get students griping about it, but I've never had someone say they had never done it before. Other collaborative activities which are fairly commonplace, group presentations and projects etc, may be dismissed by some students because they don't like them, but you won't find students saying they dont' know how to do them.

I would agree that asking students unfamiliar with Second Life to craft an object as their final project is stretching a bit. It may also be the case that throwing many new modes of collaboration at them at once - wikis, blogs, twitter, backchanneling - may also be off putting. But individually each of these is doable, and as these modes of collaboration are also commonplace outside of the classroom it will become easier for students to accept them. The key may be not straying too far from the activities that they engage in voluntarily on a daily basis - or keep pushing these collaobrative technologies so that even if there are more complex and classroom specific uses of the technology it isn't unfamiliar to your average student. But that's part of the goal of things like HASTAC, no?

On the other hand perhaps a paradigm shift needs to take place in the way students approach learning. Rather than have a few specific ways of approaching classes - lectures, tests, discussions, etc - and being resistent to pedagogical styles outside of that, students could come to expect nothing from a course until they go into it. This puts the emphasis less on what the instructor knows and more on how the instructor teaches it.

Last semester, I had the opportunity to teach Second Life in an English course about "Literary Networks." Granted, I wasn't using the synthetic world to teach primarily
technical skills, so I didn't experience a mutiny (which might have
been productive in its own way). Nevertheless, this experience taught me a couple of interesting things:

First, during a class discussion that took place within a Second Life sim, I was able to call conversational dynamics to the forefront. In particular, I found that some students who were less likely to participate in our regular discussions in the classroom, were extremely vocal in the more anonymous textual/graphical setting of Second Life. After working through different facets of the world itself, we had an interesting conversation about identity, organization, and participation in online spaces. As Howard has been saying, in this case, technology became a way to experiment with and augment conversation: not to define it with particular tools. Certainly, the introduction of new mediums (including online worlds and blogs) helped us better understand our interactions and class chemistry, but the atmosphere of the course wasn't completely determined by technology.

Second, in my course, I was struck by the ways that new technologies and organizational modes helped students understand older modes. As most of my students were composing "traditional" papers about Second Life, they found it difficult to write about an online world. Up to that point in the semester, they had composed essays about novels and films. An entire world seemed too immense to grapple with in 10 pages. Interestingly, the problems they initially had with this assignment never came up when I had them write a paper about a Thomas Pynchon novel (an equally complex "world" in its own way). In any case, I was able to use their initial discomfort about using Second Life and writing about it to explore various differences between mediums. Even the fundamental difference between a "novel" and a "game" proved to be an extremely generative topic of conversation.

Patrick Jagoda

Hi Michael!

As an undergraduate, I was a creative writing major.  That meant that the classroom model you're describing -- the "paper showcase" with desks in a circle -- was the standard way of conducting class:  the creative writing workshop.   It's interesting that even with such closely related types of courses -- one teaching "academic" writing and rhetoric, and the other teaching fiction writing -- both students and teachers come in with different ideas about how, when, and to what extent to be collaborative, and how to go about doing that.  It seems to me that this circular (what I think of as a "workshop") arrangement facilitates that sort of collaboration in a much deeper and more productive way, as it seems you discovered in your class.  I found that in that environment -- when someone's more personal work was up for critique -- that, especially with eyes meeting eyes, students tended to stay much more focused, and be much more constructively critical in their engagement. I know, in retrospect, that my fiction writing developed much more quickly, as did my confidence about sharing it, and, consequently, my ability to EDIT it, thanks to that model.  I don't think my academic writing caught up (especially my ability to see my own flaws and edit, edit, edit) until I later had to write a thesis in a course that was also constructed as a workshop.

 So, there are two aspects of collaborative learning that you're bringing up in your example:  one is the what of sharing one's work in a collective environment (that is, making the personal public, and then using other people's comments in order to re-work one's thoughts, thus making the previously personal work "collaborative), and the other is the how of doing that in a "circle" or workshop environment.  Both seem to me to be especially valuable ways of encouraging collaborative work and developing individually by way of that collaborative involvement.  So it seems like you've hit on something really valuable!

Hi Bruno,

This is a very interesting idea and I appreciate you sharing it!  It sounds a little "speed dating" applied to education - "speed learning" perhaps?  I'm finding it a little difficult to picture it working just like this in a college classroom (if for no other reason than to return to the sad fact that most university classrooms are just ill equipped for this kind of movement), but you've gotten me thinking about what it would mean to let go of my authority as the instructor so completely.  After all, even when students are generating the discussion, when there is one centralized discussion, intervening to redirect is still possible (and you still have some sense of the quality or effectiveness of the conversation).  Allowing discussions to happen so simultaneously, and shifting context so frequently, seems to offer an environment more like the one students enter every day when they multitask with IM and social networking sites and more traditional media all at once.  Perhaps this sort of discussion might actually be more fitting with the ways our attention is trained in our digital age?  Something I will think about... Thanks for sharing!

I love the mosaic idea, Howard. It would also be a great way for a visual person (moi) who has never been able to get a name right to have a great visual for an entire class, maybe everyone mugging and saying their name and a little about themselves. It would be a fantastic performance piece with which to begin my "How We Know the World" class that I'll be teaching next winter. Thanks for the suggestion!

I've used del.icio.us in two of my courses and it's work reasonably well. I haven't had the opportunity to teach either of those two courses again, but that's a great idea having it carry over. It's a good way to keep the archive current and relevant. I'll be sure to do it!

Overview of the Learning Record

The Learning Record provides an architecture and process for documenting
student progress and achievement, based on interviews, observations over
time, samples of students' naturally-occurring work, and well-supported
interpretations of learning across five dimensions. It is an evidence-based assessment
with a deep foundation in learning theory and research. An 8-page print
form (The Primary Language Record) was originally developed by London teachers
and researchers to facilitate the process, gather information, and present
it consistently. This information is collected and organized using a simple
Word or RTF document that links to a selection of student work, prepared
over the course of a semester or school year.

The Learning Record provides
a way of accounting for learning that is richer and more meaningful than
standardized testing, yet offers much more consistency and comparability
across student populations than conventional portfolio assessment. It can
serve as the sole record of students' achievement, or it can be used to
inform and support conventional grading. The Learning Record seamlessly
integrates student evaluation, research, program assessment, professional
development, and teaching and learning practices. This is accomplished
through the naturally-occurring activities and artifacts of the course,
rather than artificial tasks, templates, ?frameworks,? and
research protocols. Teachers and students work together to document and
interpret evidence of student learning, based on criteria and standards
established by the teacher and reflecting the collective understanding
of what disciplines, fields of study, and departments believe students
should know and know how to do. In this way we can discover whether and
how students develop the habits of mind, practices, knowledge, and skills
we hope to cultivate, and how our teaching can better serve this development.

Research and development of the Learning Record has been a cooperative
project of UT's Computer Writing and
Research Lab;
the Institute for Teaching and Learning, and the College of Liberal
Arts; Dick Richardson, professor of biological sciences, University of
Texas at Austin; the Center for Language in Learning, San Diego,
California; and the Center for Language in Primary Education, London,
England.

In 2001, the President of the University of California criticized standardized
testing as a destructive force in education and sought to end the use of
the SAT test in UC college admissions (NY Times, Feb. 17, 2001, page 1).
He argued that standardized tests are "not compatible with the American
view on how merit should be defined and opportunities distributed." After
observing classrooms where 12-year-olds were being drilled on analogies
in preparation for the SAT's, he wrote, "The time involved was not
aimed at developing the students' reading and writing abilities but rather
their test-taking skills. What I saw was disturbing and prompted me to
spend time taking sample SAT tests and reviewing the literature. I concluded
what many others have concluded?that America's overemphasis on the
SAT is compromisng our educational system." He recommended that the
university move away from admission processes that use quantitative formulas
and instead adopt evaluative procedures that look at applicants in a comprehensive,
holistic way.

We applaud President Atkinson's leadership in taking this bold initiative.
In the years since this article was published, the situation with standardized
testing in schools has not improved; indeed, it is markedly worse. The
evidence mounts that we are doing irremediable damage to our children and
our culture and deepening the inequities among schools. See, for example,
the April 8, 2007 article in the Washington Post, by second-grade teacher
David Keyes, "Classroom
Caste System."