Social Media Classroom

Using the SMC technically and pedagogically

To download and install, visit the download page.

To access all currently available instructional information visit the How To Page.

Intro to the SMC
Watch an eight minute intro screencast of the SMC, created by Howard Rheingold.

Participatory Pedagogy

The greatest value that the SMC can add to a learning community is its ability to support a movement away from education as delivery of knowledge toward education as critical, collaborative inquiry—a student-centric pedagogy that engages students in actively constructing knowledge together, rather than passively absorbing it from texts, lectures, and discussions. The social media collaboratory and classroom began when Howard Rheingold started teaching courses on virtual community and social media, digital journalism, and participatory media/collective action. This subject matter calls for hands-on use online communication media to augment texts, lectures, and classroom discussion. It is easier to understand and to feel engaged with theory about community, identity, collective action, public sphere, social capital, and other issues that arise from the use of Internet-mediated communication when the entire class uses the media they are studying. The first year of teaching the course, using an assortment of free Web 2.0 communication media, led to the conviction that an integrated set of tools would make it far easier to integrated multiple new communication modes into the learning process, and to the discovery that the use of these tools and collaborative inquiry hold the potential for engaging students more actively and passionately in learning, by making them responsible for formulating and pursuing questions, rather than for memorizing a body of knowledge. In regard to the Internet environment, the ability to engage with others in critical inquiry is an increasingly important skill, so this style of pedagogy is uniquely suited to the subject matter of cyberculture studies. However, interest in constructivism, constructionism, collaborative inquiry, and student-centric learning is not new. What is new is the intersection of these modes of learning, the affordances of social media, and the laptop-carrying, always-on media practices of 21st century students.