Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology
eLearning
'Socializing' the CMS
7/1/2008
Howard Rheingold, blogger and pioneer in the social implications of computer networking, uses Socialtext for his social media courses at UC-Berkeley. Via the software, his courses are basically streams of communications with his students that enable them to collaborate on course activities. Learners edit text, add comments, hold discussions, and link to other documents, graphics, or internet sites, with few constraints on structure.
According to Ross Mayfield, chairman and president of Socialtext (and well-known blogger), blogs and other Web 2.0 applications are powerful simply by dint of the openness created by their core structure. Mayfield stresses that blogs and wikis demonstrate the "power of mass productivity" for creating significant works that might otherwise never be created. He points out that Wikipedia, for one, is the result of harnessing the "bits and pieces" of willing volunteers. Today, in our higher education teaching and learning environments, the bits and pieces created by learners in support of their own learning can also encourage the conception of significant learning resources-- while supporting successful and desirable learning outcomes, too. In fact, a learning application that can not only support, but promote these types of creative outcomes would be a powerful and desirable learning tool!
Pedagogical Challenges of Attention
Another catalyst for designing a CMS around learner blogs (or something similar) might be the role of attention in learning. Rheingold, for one, has noted in a personal conversation that attention is a fundamental building block for learning. Yet attention is now a scarce commodity. In today's face-to-face classrooms, the "default" action, Rheingold maintains, is for students to have their laptops open and be multitasking, leaving little attention or mind space for the classroom activities. Observing these habits is part of what led him to conclude that students have a "strong sense of entitlement to put their attention where they want it to be." Translation: It's now more difficult than ever to get students to direct their attention where a faculty member thinks it should be.
What type of attention? Part of his challenge, Rheingold adds, is to create classroom events that are "at least as interesting as the rest of the internet." Similarly for the online environments, our challenge is to design systems that fit where students' minds are now and where we want to guide and support their learning toward. Rheingold also refers to the concepts of hyper-attention vs. deep attention discussed in work by K. N. Hayles. Hyperattention is the type of attention many of us exhibit while surfing the web or multitasking, while deep attention is required for sustained concentration and focus (for writing, creating, and complex problem-solving). Hayles' research suggests that it is critical for the new pedagogy to help students develop skills in both attention types, and to be aware of when these approaches might be most appropriate.
Recommended Reading
- Get Users on Board
- Greening IT
- It's a Zinch
- Meeting up Virtually
- Online Tutorials to the Rescue
Now's the time to use online tutorials to streamline professional development and help desk management.
- Retention Rx
