New Media and Learning Initiative

Two weeks ago I went to a meeting with campus leaders of the New Media Consortium. It was a delightful meeting, two words that seldom come together. I was interesting to see how they processed in information from the discussion. As Larry Johnson moderated Rachel Smith chronicled the discussion visually. It was a model of meeting that I will continue to contemplate. I wonder how one might bring that home. However, not everyone can listen to a discussion and then turn it into a word picture like Rachel did.
I was also taken with the initiatives of the New Media Consortium.
Convene – people around ideas
Catalyze – dialog and new ideas
Build community – engage people
Contribute – produce things

Reading in the Cloud

Last month I attended a workshop taught by Gardner Campbell director of the Academy for Teaching and Learning at Baylor University on Wikipedia and Teaching.
The big topic in the workshop turned out not to be Wikipedia but the idea of social reading. Now social reading need not be high tech. Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference observes that the Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood rose to best seller prominence is a slow cascading that began with a book signing in Greenwich Connecticut with seven people in the audience. From these readings at books stores Wells an actress as well as a playwright acted the book as much as she read Gladwell writes “and from the beginning. Ya-Ya was what publishers refer to as a “book group book.” (173) This is a type of social reading. Book clubs like classroom become the places where the power of context so necessary for a social movement, a tipping point.
Wells book grew from a face to face social reading but a web 2.0 world provides the opportunity to imagine a tele-presence social reading. Imagine a world of social reading that is reading a monograph together in the cloud. By the cloud I mean that the notes exist on a computer server that the participants have access. We could share our notes in fact we could annotate them.
Wikipedia is an example of social reading but probably not it’s most profound for teaching and learning. This online encyclopedia takes part of its name from the Hawaiian word wiki meaning easy. The proverb that drives this application is that it should be easy to fix a mistake and not hard to make one.” A core assumption of Wikipedia and social reading is that a learning community is invested in constructing knowledge. In this case that means that the community.
One should keep in mind that Wikipedia still keeps its feet in modernity at the same time it embraces a web 2.0 world. Hence the “neutral point of view” rule. (NPOV) However, there are aspects that betray web 2.0 perspectives such as the articles that are written as editors not authors. It is not the intellectual property of the writer. The Wikipedia contributor surrenders authorial control. What a concept?
Social reading and social writing provide an interesting sidelight on considerations about the future of the introduction to the Hebrew Bible Old Testament as a book and as a class. What if the introduction to the Hebrew Bible that we used for a text book was the course blog full of social reading of the various books, a wiki of key topics, as well as resources such a video podcast/lectures?