Let’s Talk ds106 #4life: An Interview with Howard Rheingold

DS106: An Open, Participatory, Student-centric, Community-focused Course on Digital Storytelling from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this interview with Howard Rheingold for the DML Central blog would be the beginning of—as well as the reason for—a richer relationship designing an open source learning environment for his Social Media Issues course at Stanford University this Fall. I’m really grateful for the opportunity. Howard is awesome to collaborate with because he’s not afraid to experiment wildy. What’s more, he’s championing alternatives to the hype-driven attention surrounding corporate MOOCs—and based on the work we’ve done over the last month he’s come to embody those alternative possibilities. He further bolsters my optimisim that what we’re doing matters, is accessible, and can anchor the experience of learning within a humanized vision of experience as easily online as off.

Add to all that the following passage from his post contextualizing the video which might be the most encouragng thing I have read about ds106 to date:

I’ve conducted more than 40 interviews for DMLcentral, and without a doubt, Jim Groom is the most excited and exciting educator I’ve talked to. If I had one wish regarding the way online education will happen in the future, it would be for the work of Groom and his colleagues Alan Levine, Martha Burtis, and Tom Woodward, the architects of ds106, to be as widely known and discussed as the work of Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, the architects of the “100,000 student classroom.” A future in which both approaches thrive is one that could work for me. There isn’t one kind of knowledge. Why should there be one kind of pedagogy?

If you will it, it is no dream!

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One Response to Let’s Talk ds106 #4life: An Interview with Howard Rheingold

  1. Alan Levine says:

    Howard brings it, he just might be #4life as he is showing the classic signs of ds106 infection.

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