Howard Rheingold in Second Life

Robin Good has a nice article with great illustrations about Howard Rheingold's presentation at the NMC Campus in Second Life, Participatory Media And The Pedagogy Of Civic Participation - The Transformation Of Education And Democracy. The article includes the audio from the presentation as well as screen shots and photos. Nicely done. Here's an abstract:

''Education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – is diverging from schooling.
Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn't looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves.

This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by point-and-click exploration might come naturally to today's student cohort, there's nothing innate about knowing how to apply their skills to the processes of democracy.''

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