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.
During Monday’s #SMCEDU chat, we brainstormed ideas for our online curriculum.
As one of Social Media Club Education Connection’s primary goals, it’s our wish for this resource to include both the latest innovations in the classroom, and trusted, credible introductions for newbies.
I envision a two-pronged approach:
1. Live workshops for educators that are interested in learning more about how technology is being used in the classroom
2. An online curriculum that includes SMCEDU-produced content and a guided reference to the plethora of existing content on the Web
We’re working on live workshops for this summer, and hope to package the resulting instructions and feedback for use by other SMCEDU groups around the country in the near-future.
As for the online curriculum, it might be more accurate to say that it will be both a curriculum and content library, available to be contributed to, and edited by, the SMCEDU community.
At a recent event at the University of MD, keynote speaker Vijay Kumar, Senior Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director of the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology at MIT, spoke about the challenges of open education projects.
Some of the challenges he spoke of directly relate to our effort, including:
- Promoting content discovery and reuse by linking existing educational material and aiding in their discoverability
- Creating a core concept catalog
- Creating order out of the digital disorder
- Thinking about learning as a collaborative, social activity rather than an individual activity
- Co-developing knowledge WITH those who will be doing the learning
The above list articulates some of the issues, but there are others. Although the opinions were varied, I reailize that the best way to go about this is to start cataloging existing content.
I’d love for educators to add their names to our national directory of social media educators. This includes any teachers that use social media in their lessons (examples include class blogs, wikis, Twitter usage, Facebook groups, etc).
We also have a place for educators to share their curricula. By showing other educators the material they’re covering, we’re hoping others can learn and from their lesson plans.
And finally, we’d love for any lessons, whether in the form of Web pages, videos, social networking sites, wikis, podcasts, or any other material, to be contributed to the wiki. It’s a community effort and a community reserve; we’re open to ideas about navigation and order, but for now, we’re looking to build a repository of resources.
We hope you can contribute to this effort and its growth…we want this to be a living, updated reserve of information. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments.
