Digitalnative. Fandom. Writing, Reading, and Social Media Literacy - Now, New, Next. By Howard Rheingold | 12:25 PM October 22, 2008 It’s time for social media literacy to enter mainstream education.
Learning to use online forums, be they social network services like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, or wikis is not a sexily contemporary add-on to the curriculum – it’s an essential part of the literacy today’s youth require for the world they inhabit. How do you find out anything you want to know by entering the right question into a search engine? Equally important – how do you determine whether the answer returned by a search engine is true? Only Connect. David Wiley asks “What would highly scalable learning look like if we invented it today…?”
To which I would respond with another question, Leigh Blackall ’s challenge to the flexible learning course’s online panel @8:49 “Is scalability even [an] appropriate way to be thinking about learning?” Are we, by talking of scalability simply perpetuating an industrial model of education? An outdated model based on scarcity and top-down allocation of resources when education is increasingly based on an abundance of resource allocated over the network.
My thinking of late has been influenced by Doug Rushkoff . On WMFU’s The Media Squat he comments @32:05 that “one trap to avoid is the idea that, this false premise, (and again it’s from industrial culture) that everything you do has to be scalable for everyone, everywhere else…”