Sam Rose on the Social Media Classroom

Drill bitLast week I shared a podcast with Howard Rheingold on the Social Media Classroom as part of  CPSquare’sConnected Futures” workshop. This week we have a podcast with Sam Rose, one of the key developers of the Drupal based Social Media Classroom.

Listen! A Conversation With Sam Rose on the Social Media Classroom

Some of the many fabulous observations from Sam that caught my ear include:

  • Sam’s observations about the iteration between the deployment of a tool, the community’s creative use of the tool and the subsequent develop and iteration of the tool echoes what we found in our work for Digital Habitats.
  • The thinking around the differences of a platform designed for delivery of a curriculum (i.e a Learning Management System or LMS) and a platform designed to support inquiry based learning.
  • The importance of an integrated starting place and then as social media literacy grows, the exploration outward to other tools.
  • How SMC thinks about forums as discussion starting places, blogs as individual reflection/note taking spaces and wikis as a place for crafting joint learning.
  • The role of affordances to make use easier.  (For example, the little  color coded toolbars in SMC). And how some of those affordances are subtle and benefit from some “showing” — but once you learn them how useful they are.
  • The trajectory of SMC towards becoming a place to integrate with other tools and content through APIs. (Lots of exciting things to come!)

Creative Commons License photo credit: EnergyTomorrow