Although not an educator by trade, I've been interested in the potential of online media for learning since I started exploring what I called "virtual communities" in the 1980s. In particular, I was attracted to the ways online media could facilitate collaborative knowledge sharing and exploration. In 1995, I designed a demonstration of a "university of the future" for NEC corporation. In 2006, I started teaching at UC Berkeley and Stanford. I was initially drawn to formal education because I perceived a need to introduce students to the issues of identity, privacy, collective action, public sphere, social capital raised by our increasing use of what are now called social media. It only made sense to use blogs, wikis, forums, chat, and social bookmarking when introducing these subjects. Contrary to popular beliefs about "digital natives," I soon learned that social media literacies are not uniformly understood by today's students. At the same time, by paying attention to what students were telling me about our encounters, I was led to forms of pedagogy that have existed at least since the time of John Dewey but which have not been practical until the advent of social media -- teaching and learning that is more collaborative and inquiry based and which extends beyond the face to face classroom. In addition to the blended learning I've facilitated at Stanford and Berkeley, I've also started a totally online set of courses: http://www.rheingold.com/university -- and I'm exploring the variety of peer-to-peer courses that are springing up online. I'll talk about how I've learned from my students, how we've learned to learn together, and how I am now experimenting with purely online teaching and learning. I'll touch upon the social media literacies that are the subject of my current book in progress: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection, and network awareness.
