howard-intro.txt

Paradigm Shift: From Teacher-Centrism to Peer Education
Howard Rheingold

Nine years ago, I started using forums, blogs, wikis, Twitter, and
social bookmarks to teach classes about social media issues (identity
and presentation of self, community, collective action, public sphere,
etc.) at UC Berkeley and Stanford. It made sense to use digital media
to discuss digital media. Although I had no training in class- room
teaching, I did have decades of experience using online media for
informal, self-organized, social learning. I wrote about the ways
people who had previously been strangers could use online media to
share knowledge in the first article I wrote about virtual communities
in 1987 [1]. I brought my enthusiasm for social media as a pedagogical
channel to my first classroom, and I also brought a syllabus that I
had aggregated during my own decades-long inquiries into the
authenticity of virtual community, the impact of digital media on
personality and society, the political implications of many-to-many
communication and other questions raised by the way so many people
were using new, Internet-based communication channels [2].

In the course of thirty years, my own online explorations and the
issues raised by critics, reviewers, and academics drew me to the
scholarly and scientific literature in search of answers. Back then,
there were no social scientists who studied the way people were
communicating through computer networks. Now there are departments of
cyberculture studies. I was eager to introduce students to the social
scientists, visionaries, and critics who had satisfied my hunger for
analysis and empirical exploration that went beyond armchair
philosophizing – and there was plenty of that in the early days of
social cyberspace, just as armchair pedagogy abounds now while online
media and traditional educational institutions begin to collide.

My students’ use of digital media to reflect on their own learning in
ways that conventional classes had not allowed and to communicate with
each other and with me beyond traditional schoolroom scripts
transformed my own teaching paradigm. I want to briefly describe some
aspects of my journey from teacher-centric to learner-centric
pedagogue, but need to start with a disclaimer: Right now, with fervor
over MOOCs and online learning offered as answers to the problems of
educational institutions, the air is thick with analysis and
punditry. I don’t pretend to be an expert on teaching or education as
a social institution.

1. Howard Rheingold, “Virtual Communities: Exchanging Ideas Through Computer Bulletin
Boards,” Whole Earth Review, Winter 1987, Web. 20 January 2013. http://journals.tdl.org/jvwr/
index.php/jvwr/article/view/293
2. Web. 20 January 2013. http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/vircom