Keynote Session – Social Media, Co-learning, and Peeragogy

I started teaching about social media issues ten years ago because I was concerned that higher education was not dealing in a scholarly or scientific way with the issues that arise from the widespread use of social media — something that affects students, faculty, and the rest of the world within and outside our institutional settings at work, study, and personal life. It only made sense to use social media — forums, blogs, wikis, and social bookmarking — in our study of social media.

Through my face-to-face and online conversations with learners, I became aware of the student-centric, inquiry-based, peer-supported, openly networked pedagogy that is now called “connected learning.” As I turned more power and responsibility over to my students and encouraged them to help me redesign the syllabus, we all began to learn the power of what I now call “co-learning.”

I will talk about my experiences at UC Berkeley, Stanford, in my own purely online courses, and in the voluntary peer-learning group I organized. For more about this philosophy: http://connectedcourses.net and http://rheingold.com/learning