Why Educators Must Teach Discussion

Hi, y'all,

Much better now. I slept upstairs last night for the first time since my bicycle accident. My sleep app, Sleep App, tells me that last night was the first really good night's sleep I've had in over a week, since I installed the pesky (but useful) thing. On the mend.

I actually "slept in" until nearly 7 a.m. this morning, a rarity for me. Once I carefully negotiated the stairs to the living room, I logged into my computer and of course went straight to Facebook, where I visited the ISTE Virtual Environments Network page (subscribe for updates on all things 3D and VR). That led me to our diva Mary Howard's post on medium.com, here:


which I find absolutely fascinating and motivating. Good job, Mary Mary! Somehow, and I am unable to retrace my steps, though I believe it was a recommendation on a sidebar at medium.com, I hit upon Howard Rheingold's fantastic article about student discussion, explicitly hosting them on discussion forums (remember them?) rather than on social media platforms, aka Facebook. Fascinating. Read it. Let it guide you to move into this arena for building students' thinking and communication skills.

Do you find yourself motivated to move toward this in your classrooms? Then go all the way with your time right now. Set aside a half hour or so to read the whole 21 page Edward Gallagher article Rheingold references at the end of his short piece, Teaching Students to Talk to Each Other: Improving the Discussion Board. I PROMISE your time will be well spent. Gallagher's metaphors and instructional design are completely, ineluctably, inspirational and practical! Do it. Do it now!

Attention to Attention

Twitter tweet Fleep Tuque (Chris Collins) shared this out at her own blogsite today and posted a link to it in Twitter, which I pursued: Fleep's the real deal when it comes to passion for teaching and learning and I like to see what she's seeing. What do ya know, it's another video from webpundit Howard Rheingold (aside: I'm reading Wagner James Au's The Making of Second Life and Rheingold was a fundamental consulting resource during SL's formative years--he reportedly saw the 3Di as promising fulfillment of some key predictions he had made for society's future), whom I featured here just a few posts ago.

Here's a great review of Au's book from Daniel Terdiman at cNet News.

At the risk of becoming a mirror site for Howard, I'm also sharesharing. This is good, ya'll, real good:

Howard Rheingold's New Collaboration Message

I follow Howard Rheingold nearly every day, each time I get a minute to log into Twitter, the 140-character-per-message personal networking tool that lets us "follow" social and professional "tweets" to collaborate by means of those short messages, learning from one another and sometimes just trading jibes or comments. Howard, a busy man, doesn't follow me, so our relationship is not mutual, at least not yet, but I do get to check his ongoing thoughts whenever he gets his own minute to twitter. At present I have 75 followers--many of them very prominent technology thinkers and innovators--and I follow 46, so there's some of that non-reciprocal tweeting going on with me, too. I'm a busy man in my own small ways.

Occasionally I check my followers and add a few of them to my "following" list and thereby enrich the conversation (perhaps our boy Howard will do the same with my contributions one day). If someone's thoughts don't enrich, I simply stop following them. The result is a constant montage of thinking and human activity.

All this is a long way of saying that twitter itself is a clear example of what Rheingold's talking about in the talk hosted at TED Talks, another place I learn.

Everybody knows I am a Web 2.0 junkie. Howard's talk helps explain why. It's about cooperation. The new collaborative technologies, I believe, will enable an age of human development and cooperation that we are only just beginning to envision. I'll join in with @hrheingold to ask you to help get the "Cooperation Project" going. Watch: