Syllabus: Social Media Literacies
College/University Level
Seed Version Compiled By: Howard Rheingold
Note on using this syllabus:
As an instructor of undergraduate and graduate students at University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University, I created this syllabus for the benefit of other college/university level instructors. I am beginning to develop a high school version. (If you are a high school teacher, and want to work on making the syllabus more suitable for high school students, contact Howard Rheingold). Please feel free to use, modify, and share this syllabus. Reorder the modules, add or subtract required or recommended texts and learning activities. Use your own assessment methods. If you wish to help improve this seed document, contact howard@rheingold.com and I will add you as a commenter.
This syllabus is based on my 2012 book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, as a textbook. I wrote the book as an educational instrument aimed at the broader population as well as students. As I explain in the introductory chapter, (which is downloadable free of charge), I have concluded, after thirty years as an online participant, observer, learner and teacher, that social media literacies are a critical uncertainty in addressing the question of whether digital media improve or erode human individual capacities and collective culture. Literate populations are becoming the driving force that shape new media, just as they were the eras following the invention of the alphabet and printing press,. What broad populations know now, and the ways they put that knowledge into action, will shape the ways people use and misuse social media for decades to come.
I use “literacy” in the sense of a skill that includes not only the individual ability to decode and encode in a medium, but also the social ability to use the medium effectively in concert with others. I didn’t write the book as a syllabus, but as a logical ordering of the five social media literacies of attention, crap detection, participation, collaboration, and network awareness: attention is the starting place for all media use; crap detection is necessary for effective participation; knowledge of individual participation is by its nature enmeshed with collaborative communications that take place through networked publics.
When composing the syllabus, I duplicated much of this progression, but also chose texts that can offer analytic tools, explanatory frameworks, and competing perspectives -- the basic building blocks for teachers and learners to use. For example, Cliff Stoll and Cathy Davidson provide alternative views on questions about multitasking, furnishing solid starting places for critical inquiry and debate about the way people succeed and fail at media multitasking. Similarly, in the “Remix Culture” module, arguments for and against strong copyright protection provide a jumping-off point for debates about socio-technical issues that confront ordinary people in the course of our lives.
Course Description:
Today’s personal, social, political, economic worlds are all affected by digital media and networked publics. Viral videos, uprisings from Tahrir to #OWS, free search engines, abundant inaccuracy and sophisticated disinformation online, indelible and searchable digital footprints, laptops in lecture halls and smartphones at the dinner table, twenty-something social media billionaires, massive online university courses -- it’s hard to find an aspect of daily life around the world that is not being transformed by the tweets, blogs, wikis, apps, movements, memes, likes and plusses, tags, text messages, and comments two billion Internet users and six billion mobile phone subscribers emit. New individual and collaborative skills are emerging. This course introduces students to both the literature about and direct experience of these new literacies: research foundations and practical methods to control attention, attitudes and tools necessary for critical consumption of information, best practices of individual digital participation and collective participatory culture, the use of collaborative media and methodologies, and the application of network know-how to life online.
Learning Outcomes:
Diligent students will:
Ongoing Assignments
Select a mix of these as continuous activities. College students have been strongly socialized to do the homework for each class the night before it is due -- a method that doesn’t work when discourse, not a discrete product like a term paper, is the goal. The necessity for more frequent informal discourse through forums, blogs, comments, usually needs to be repeated and reinforced.
Online forums:
Students are expected to contribute at least one substantial post to the forum each week - and more than one post per week is encouraged. Good forum conversation is a communication art on its own. Be sure you know how to use the forum software, understand these guidelines to discussion board participation, and understand how forum posts will be evaluated. Reading each week’s texts precedes and is necessary for forum discussions , since the common theme of the online discussions will be the previous week's readings and in-class discussions. For examples of “substantial” comment threads, try this one about online identity or (perhaps ironically) this long thread commenting on Nicholas Carr’s article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” or this thread about “the dark side of digital backchannels.” This is a good example of a comment that disagrees with the author of the original post but respectfully adds a valid point that the original post did not consider.
Lexicon teams:
Each week, a team of students will edit a wiki to collaboratively identify and define key words and phrases from that week’s readings and class discussion. During the next class session, led by the lexicon team, the entire class will discuss, and if necessary, improve the definitions. Students will create an ongoing record of lexicon work on the course wiki. In addition, each week’s lexicon team will add words to a Wordnik list that is set up at the beginning of the term.
Key questions about readings:
At the beginning of each class meeting, each student will turn in a legibly signed 3 X 5 or 5 X 8 card with one substantial question that the student is prepared to address for each reading in the syllabus; Students are required to post their questions for each reading each week on their personal wiki notebook before the class meeting in which those questions are discussed.
Blog reflections on readings.
Each week, by 9 AM on the day of the class meeting, each student is a required to post a short (a few sentences or a short paragraph) synopsis of each reading in the student’s blog. Rather than a direct summary, students are requested to create a short dialog between the authors of each week’s texts, list ways in which the subject of the texts could affect the student’s life or society, and/or reflect on the implications of the texts for life online in the future, answer their own key questions from their own perspective, and/or that of the authors of the week’s texts..
Mindmapping teams:
For each of the readings assigned for each week, a team of two students will present a mindmap toward the end of each class meeting, showing the most important top level, second level, and third level concepts and/or practices from that week’s readings. See this introduction to mindmapping to understand how it can be done.
This suggested exercise can be useful: Each member of the mindmapping team should write down (independently) on Post-it notes as many important points to remember about the readings that they can come up with in a few minutes. One idea, concept, issue, fact, per note. Put all the notes up on a wall, then try to cluster those that seem related. Then ask why they seem related. For clusters, see if you can come up for a descriptive name for the cluster in one or a few words. The descriptive name for the cluster becomes a top-level node in the mindmap and the notes in the cluster can orbit around it. If there is a strong hierarchical structure to the collection of notes, look at how to branch and sub-branch a tree -- what is the top level, the second level, the third level of the hierarchy? Most topics are not naturally strongly hierarchical, but are a mix of network-like lateral connections and hierarchical nodes that have subnodes that have subnodes. This exercise is meant to generate a sketch. The next step is to refine it.
Mindmaps can be hand-drawn and scanned, then projected, or constructed online with one of many available mindmapping applications and embedded then projected -- or they can be drawn on the whiteboard. The goal is to engage the entire class in trying to sketch a systemic map of each week’s subject matter. For example, these are mindmaps that student teams did of the entire set of readings for each class session of a Stanford course (http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/vircom): http://howardrheingoldsteachingnotes.posterous.com/student-mindmaps-from-social-mediavirtual-com
Real-time note-taking teams
During class sessions, teams of four take notes using a real-time note-taking service such as Hackpad ,Etherpad or PrimaryPad, handing off to another team every half hour, publishing their notes to the class wiki after the end of the class session.
Real-time Backchannel
During certain sessions, students will use Hotseat to engage in parallel, relevant online discussion in real time through the web, Facebook, Twitter, or Facebook.
E-book teams:
Each week, a team of four students works between meetings of class sessions to update an enhanced e-book that includes the Etherpad notes, lexicon entries, and mindmaps for that week, with graphics, text, and live links. In addition, e-book teams develop a wiki page on best practices and procedures.
Collaborative projects:
Using any combination of collaborative tools (social bookmarking, forums, blogs and comments, wikis, mindmapping or concept mapping), propose and agree upon a project that can be accomplished by 4 person project teams within the term of the course, to be presented on or after the last class meeting. Collaboration teams should agree upon and post a detailed outline of their project, an abstract that includes the problem they are trying to solve or issue they are trying to probe, a division of labor, a log of the conversation and decision-making that went into constructing and executing the project, and a final presentation. Each team should design its own assessment rubric by editing a wiki page to show all the features of an excellent project. 1. Find at least ten great examples of (a forum post, comment thread, use of Twitter, online collaboration or other examples of social objects that exhibit excellence); 2. Co-create list of the five most important features of the social object; 3. Define what qualifies as a 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 on a scale from 1-5 for each feature on a Google Spreadsheet.
Use your imagination, think big, and most of all, work on projects you find meaningful in relation to your own lives online - do not attempt methodologically complete research. Think of your projects as "probes." Ask a good question. See what you can find, make meaning of, and teach to others about your question. When making a presentation, you can use any interactive multimedia presentation medium OTHER than PowerPoint. Here is a list of interactive multimedia presentation resources and here is a list of mindmapping tools that can also be used for this purpose. Keep in mind that this is a collaboration in which you not only divide labor but help each other learn -- specify which team member is responsible for each part of the project, make clear how the parts fit together, and make a positive effort to make connections between the parts. An ideal collaboration is more than the sum of individual contributions. You need, therefore, to make your collaborative dialogue explicit. Use the comment thread attached to your project wiki page to explicitly make connections between parts and make clear how they fit together.
Expectations
Schedule/Texts
Texts:
Howard Rheingold, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, MIT Press, 2012.
Before Session One
Session One: Attention, Multitasking, Mindfulness, Metacognition
Required:
Recommended:
Session One Metacognition/Mindfulness Learning Activities
Session Two: Infotention
Required:
Session Two Infotention Learning Activities
Session Three: Crap Detection
Required:
Recommended:
Session Three Crap Detection Learning Activities
Session Four: The Power Law of Participation
Required
Recommended
Session Four Participation Learning Activities
Session Five: Curation
Session Five Curation Learning Activities
Session Six: Collective Intelligence and Crowdsourcing
Required
Recommended
Session Six: Collective Intelligence and Crowdsourcing learning activities
Session Seven: Virtual Community and Social Production
Session Seven: Virtual community and Social Production learning activities
Session Eight: Understanding Networks
Required:
Recommended:
Session Eight Understanding Networks learning activities
Session Nine: Smart Mobs
Required:
Recommended:
Session Nine Smart Mobs learning activities
Session Ten: Social Networks, Social Capital, Personal Learning Networks
Required
Recommended:
Session Ten: Social Networks, Social Capital, Personal Learning Networks learning activities
Session Eleven: Remix, Participatory Culture, and Ethics of Digital Use
Required
Recommended:
Session Eleven Learning Activities: Remix, Participatory Culture, and Ethics of Digital Use