elearnspace

Howard Rheingold has been working on a project called Social Media Classroom to incorporate emerging technologies into classrooms. An instantiation of his platform is can be seen here for an upcoming course he is teaching. The software – SMC – pulls together wikis, blogs, tagging, media sharing, and other tools familiar to the read/write web crowd. This type of centralized tool set is important for introducing the next wave of adopters to distributed social media. I’m unsure at this stage whether Rheingold’s software allows for incorporation of learners blogs that exist outside of the software – i.e. if I have an existing blog, can I post there? Or do I have to use the course software exclusively? I’m of the mindset that developers of software, such as LMS’, need to design for two groups: the majority who are just starting to adopt social media and the minority who are well on the journey and want to keep their existing space and identity. Rheingold provides a short introduction to the software in this 8 minute presentation. Key quote: don’t worry about keeping up with the technologies so much as keeping up with the literacies the technologies enable.