The Social Networking Girl

One of my feeds (academhack) led me to this fantastic post about Classroom 2.0 and the use of twitter in class. I’m an avid user of twitter, but I must say that when I was first introduced to it I didn’t “get it”.  I gave it some time and when I came back, I realized that twitter did serve a purpose. Not only did it allow me to connect with and meet new friends, but it gave me the opportunity to hear perspectives from people that I’d never hear from otherwise.  I can follow along as the President visits Africa (thanks @newmediajim!) and I can read where Barack Obama’s headed next on his campaign.  This is what twitter does for *me* but you can make it work for you as well.

The blog post I was reading today talked about participatory learning and using twitter, YouTube and blogs in the classroom. I especially loved this section of the post:

“And then it struck me that since I was showing Howard Rheingold’s vlogpost, we might actually be able to FIND Howard on Twitter and, perhaps, use Twitter to allow the students to ask him about his video. To do so would, in my view, convey the immediacy of social and participatory media in a way that nothing else would.

To my delight, Howard was not only available but sent a message to our class! It was very cool to move from the recorded Howard to the live-virtual Howard. So I said to the class, “That was Howard Rheingold. And here he is in our Twitter! Do you have anything to ask him about that video we just watched - or about Twitter?” … a couple of the students took the plunge and Howard graciously replied (one had even read his Virtual Community book for a prior course). This was a very generous gift of time from a guy who is teaching three courses and functioning as a human server for a most inhuman volume of requests for time, insight and connection. Thank you Howard!”

I *love* this. This is exactly what makes Web 2.0 in the classroom and in education so exciting and amazing. To think that we still have our children sitting in front of textbooks reading things that were probably already outdated decades ago and yet we still continue to teach them in the same way, from the same materials.  When I think back on my days in middle school and high school I remember certain moments from my classes and any and all of them involved participatory learning. Whether it was making up my own version of the “12 Days of Christmas” that involved tossing Barbie Dolls off a filing cabinet, or acting out scenes from Hamlet in a Fisher-Price Little People Castle while “King For Just One Day” by the Thompson Twins blared in the background, they stuck with me - they had an impact.

I’m not saying that I think every teacher or every subject is best taught using Web 2.0 technologies, I just think that we’re doing a disservice to our students if we don’t at least learn about and try to incorporate participatory learning into our classes to make things a little more relevant.