Digital backchannel for the classroom

I love it! A teacher subverting the formal classroom experience and making the informal result a learning experience! He's doing so by turning the classroom "backchannel" into a teaching tool (the backchannel is that age-old back-o'-the-classroom multi-directional chat the digital version of which looks like an instant-messaging window on the screen). Author and college instructor Ira Socol uses Today'sMeet (a software tool created by his son), which bring the backchannel forward - public - for all to see, he says in his blog. He checks it every few minutes to see if he needs to "adjust" the class discussion. "In a big class it gave me real access to far more students than I can possibly get by watching for raised hands. And it let me - and the class - hear from many who never raise their hands. Honestly, I could even judge, much more clearly than usual, what was connecting and what was missing. As an instructor - I loved it." Here's the coolest part (for reflexive critics who might wonder, "Why add another distraction from the lecture to all that those multitasking students have on their plates?"): The backchannel tech "began to overwhelm Facebook and email use in the room [amazing in itself]. The distraction technology became engagement technology [emphasis mine]." Atlanta-area high school teacher Vicki Davis, who I follow in Twitter, blogged about Socol's blog post, with photos. She picked up on 2 big pluses: The first in Socol's words, quoted in her post: "the ways this kind of technology supports the shy user, the user with speech issues, the user having trouble with the English Language, the user who'd rather be able to think through and even edit a statement or question before asking it." The second plus is hers: "It is also important to point out that archived backchannels give students the ability to take group notes and have the information later."

Early view of ed's future

Speaking as a parent and online-kids advocate, not an educator: Increasingly, education will have both online and offline components as it does now, only the online pieces will get more and more fluid, media-rich, and supportive of the P2P (person-to-person) offline part. In fact, online tools - such as Howard Rheingold's "collaboratory" - will make the classroom part more meaningful to teacher and students. School will actually become relevant to today's fluent young information "hunter-gatherers," as MIT professor Henry Jenkins describes them. Author and (Stanford and U. of Cal. Berkeley) professor Howard Rheingold has just launched his Social Media Classroom, a free, easy-to-use "browser-based environment" for digital and real-life collaboration that includes learning tools such as a wiki (for collective writing/editing), blog with commenting, forum (boards or many-to-many discussion), chat, microblog (like Twitter), RSS (newsfeed/online distribution), social bookmarks (collective bookmarking), photos, video, etc. All it needs is virtual-world avatars (like those in Lively or Second Life)! As the winner of a MacArthur Foundation HASTAC award, the Classroom's designed "to supplement, not replace, existing course and learning management systems" and - more importantly, I think, to help teachers go beyond teaching digital tools and skills to teaching history, literature, citizenship with the tools in a way that makes learning these subjects more immersive and compelling (because of the role-playing and collaboration the tools allow). Whew! That was a mouthful, but there is probably no more exciting prospect for education. Now we need to just move it all into a virtual world (or at least turn the chat feature into avatar chat in rooms as customizable as real-world classrooms). [Here is Rheingold's own video introduction of the Social Media Classroom, and here's info on the HASTAC competition (the acronym stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory).]