[tt] CHE: Rheingold) Why Professors Ought to Teach Blogging and Podcasting

[Premise Checker]

Why Professors Ought to Teach Blogging and Podcasting
The Chronicle of Higher Education  Information Technology
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i31/31a02202.htm
From the issue dated April 11, 2008

LINKED IN WITH...
Howard Rheingold, who studies the impact of the Internet on society and 
argues that more professors need to teach blogging and podcasting to 
students.

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Mr. Rheingold is teaching a course at the University of California at 
Berkeley on virtual communities and social media. He contends that 
students need to use various Web 2.0 tools to be good citizens because 
those modes of communication are increasingly the way political discourse 
and activism take place.

Q. Are professors using Web 2.0 tools in their classrooms?

A. Universities are knowledge factories. You're rewarded for creating 
knowledge. But there's no incentive or reward for innovation in teaching, 
at least at research universities. People are there to publish or perish. 

 There's a real gap between what students need to know and the way 
they're learning in school.

Q. What is an example of a way you're using these technologies in your 
classes?

A. I have a wiki I'm maintaining on participatory media and education 
(http://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy).

Q. Your students are also learning to use Twitter, the microblogging 
service, right?

A. There are huge possibilities for Twitter. I'm trying to get students to 
use it.

Q. Why do students need to know about things like Twitter or wikis?

A. The feeling of a citizen who only passively consumes what's sold to 
them by broadcast media is very different from someone who has posted a 
blog item, or who has posted a YouTube video, or who has commented on a 
newspaper article online. That's central to the public sphere today. In 
the 21st century, civic education is participatory media-literacy 
education.

Q. Don't students already know how to use all these Web 2.0 technologies?

A. There's a bit of a myth about the "digital natives." Yes, kids know how 
to learn any kind of software without reading the manual and just clicking 
around. But that does not mean they can sort through that information in 
useful ways.

If we can get them to start using these tools for issues that they care 
about — such as knowing how to use a wiki to advocate for a cause — I 
think that would be a huge boost in civic engagement.