Social Campus Wiki
It is interesting who inspires you to do things, or start on a project or start on a task. One of the main things I do is teach, I teach at college, and trying to take four years now of social media (started blogging for real in 2004, started social networking soon after) and to see how colleges and education can use social media to make college education richer.
The fortunate part is that I work at a progressive college that is very open to many ideas. Some friends and friends of friends have started a new wiki called Social Campus out at Wet Paint to see if we can take our collective wisdom and turn it into resources, sources, and information that other progressively minded educators, teachers, and directors can use to help them reach their students.
We all know about the standard 400 person freshman classes, not many thrive in that kind of environment. We also know all about on line classes that end up being little more than “I like it” answers that do not really engage in the experience of the students in what they know. We are not reaching younger students where they live and how they live. Overall the state of education is not meeting the students where they live, which is on line.
I have Beth Kanter to thank for this as well, a write up on Beth is coming in the next few days, but the idea of having like minded people get together and share their collective experience, or desires to make education better, reach students better using Podcasts, bookmarking sites, Facebook, or just being available where the students are means something. It means changing things for the better and bringing about positive change in an educational system that is still mired in the paper memo in many ways.
We are here to teach people what we know, or what we think they need to know to solve the problems of tomorrow. That is the goal, that should be the reason of a college education. There is a reason that the students are there, they want something, either they have personalized it as something good for them, they are doing it for others because they love them, or they are doing it because it is something they need to do to further their career.
Trust me, there is nothing better than hearing “way to go mom!” when someone is getting their diploma at graduation. We need to hear more of that, meaning we need to better engage students, and social networking, audio, video, wiki’s, and other technologies are the way to do this, or are going to be the way to do this.
That is what social campus is all about, providing, discussing, and working on how to use tools, social media tools, software, and technology to further the reach and richness within a class. While this is a Utopian idealized goal, the idea that there are instructors out there (and we have 9 members now) that wants to learn, grow, and teach students better is a good start. Given that it has only been 48 hours that it has been in existence.
The idea of using a wiki for this was to make it so that everyone could contribute to the idea stream, and not have to worry about hosting, or other stuff that we don’t have the time for, or the desire to upkeep. Better to use a social tool like a wiki that is relatively free (thanks wet paint!) to see if we can get the synergy going on this project. I will follow up with this but also want to put the call out.
If you are an instructor, developer, program manager, director, dean, or play a role in teaching students, we (all 9 of us) would like you to join in and contribute what you know, what you do, and how you do it. The more the better on this one, the more ideas, the more knowledge, the more we can extend social tools into the social campus.
Tags: social campus, wet paint, wiki, web 2.0, education, classroom, experience, teacher, teaching, change
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