Social Media Club Education Connection (aka #SMCEDU) is a national initiative whose goal is to unite educators, students, and professionals to further the development of social media curriculum in our schools, enabling a wider network of learning and workforce preparedness.
#SMCEDU is a part of Social Media Club, a nonprofit organization that is working to promote media literacy and connect people to share what they are learning about social media.
If you haven't had a chance to check out SMCEDU-DC ambassador/University of MD grad student Andi Narvaez's live blog of the "Innovations in Teaching and Learning Conference," I'd recommend it…great speakers sharing mind-stirring experiences.
The keynote speaker was Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT. His keynote addressed Network Enabled Open Education.
Mr. Kumar spoke about his experience in India, "a country where 52% of the population will be 25 years old but where the traditional means of education cannot scale… colleges can't be built fast enough to educate all those who need education."
The solution (or at least one of them)? The National Programme of Technology Enhanced Learning. It's just one example of the educational resources available online, resources which include MIT OpenCourseware.
SMCEDU is building a curriculum to help educators and students incorporate and use social media in the classroom: to learn how specific professions will use it, and to learn how it can expand their educational experience. Some of the open education challenges mentioned by Mr. Kumar are directly related to our goal:
Content readiness
- To overcome this challenge, promote content discovery and reuse (link existing educational materials and aid in their discoverability), community and context, and create a core concept catalog
Recasting resources, relationships and roles
- We have to make different sense of this movement, think in non-traditional ways
- We have to order the digital disorder
There HAVE to be pedagogical shifts
- we have to stop thinking about learning as an individual activity and think of it as a collaborative, social learning kind of activity
- we have to co-develop knowledge WITH those who will be doing the learning
We need feedback while building this resource. What are some of your suggestions for this social media curriculum? What should it include? How should it be used? What format should it be in (video, podcasts, etc)?
We're taking your suggestions and putting it together. If you have any professors/classes you'd like to highlight, please let us know!
