Digital Sextant

Alex Reid offers a prompt for my teaching (and yours):

It’s odd, but I almost think it has nothing to do with the technology. If we were able to rethink learning as social, then the typical student would make use of social media to learn…. because using the technology is an integral part of being social today. On the other hand, as long as learning does not become social, it makes little sense to jam it into the technology.

Timeshifting lectures is fine, but that seems of little import to me unless sharing and discussing the media becomes a social activity. Plus we need to build on it. It can’t just be all chit-chat.

What kind of course could you imagine that would require students to be in daily contact with one another? It would probably be something that in the past would have seemed excessive and unfair, but all we are talking about today is following each other on Twitter or the like. What projects could only be successful through near-ubiquitous, often real-time, collaboration? We ask students to engage in such tasks regularly inside class when they do group work.

This approach seems particularly apt for my ARG class next fall.  I’ll be teaching an upper level professional writing course in which the students spend twelve weeks learning about and creating an Alternate Reality Game, then running it on campus.  I wonder how I could make it social…