Podcasts, a Wiki, and Teacher Communities

 

 Teachers 2.0 Podcast: Podcasts, a Wiki, and Teacher Communities [8:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (816)

Teachers 2.0 podcast for Saturday, May 3rd, 2008. In this episode I’ll be encouraging others to make their own Teachers 2.0 podcasts, introducing the new Teachers 2.0 wiki and my pitch for forming teacher communities in online social environments, with a focus on video games.

Hello and welcome to one of our irregularly recorded podcasts! And when I say “our” instead of “my,” I mean it.

Allow me to explain. Teachers 2.0 is a group that consists of educators who want to learn and/or help others learn more about technology and how it can be used in educational ways. This naturally is best done through two way communication, as someone who knows a lot about a topic might not intuitively guess what others feel are pertinent questions.

That’s why we have a Twitter account and a Ning site, and that’s why anyone can register to be an author on the Teachers 2.0 blog. Your first post will be moderated, but that’s just a necessary evil to keep out the spammers. After that posting is approved, anything you publish will go “live” right way.

And that includes podcasts! If you’re writing a new post and scroll down you’ll see a box labeled “Podcasting.” If your podcast is hosted on another server all you have to do is copy and paste the link to the file right in there. If you want it hosted on our server, well, we can do that too. Click on the music note above your post and you’ll be able to upload an mp3 file so long as it isn’t more than 7 MB. Then copy and paste the link to that file into the podcasting box that I described before.

Next item of business, we have a new wiki at Teachers20.wikispaces.com. This is an all purpose wiki to hold anything Teachers 2.0 members might feel is important. I envision tutorials, event planning, and more taking place at that address.

Which brings me to my third and final topic for this episode: Teacher communities in online social environments. I’m referring here to things like Facebook and other social networking environments where people can get together and form their own little cliques of like-minded individuals. Among these, Second Life is becoming much more popular. It’s a virtual world with really no objectives that you haven’t made for yourself, and that has made this game-that-isn’t-a-game quite popular with digital citizens everywhere - both immigrants and natives.

I remember a while back when educators first started exploring Second Life and wondering how it could be used as a learning environment. Big names in the edublogosphere like Steve Dembo, Kathy Schrock, and David Warlick, just to name a few, created their own digital likenesses (known as “avatars”) and started experimenting in a media that was in a sense an entire world.

I formed my own opinions on Second Life a while back, and while I’m still not convinced it’s the best place to bring your students on a virtual field trip, I do see its uses.

I myself gravitated away from Second Life to an online world that most definitely is a game - World of Warcraft. What I gave up in the way of infinite customization and the ability to play for free as long as I wanted I made up for in some achievable goals and quite a lot of stress relief. There’s been some research done that analyzes the different kinds of mindsets that enjoy different types of games, but what’s important to this conversation I think is that there are different mindsets that prefer different environments.

Facebook is not for everyone. Neither is Second Life, World of Warcraft, or even Twitter. (MySpace shouldn’t be for anyone, but I am horribly, horribly biased against it from a strictly aesthetic perspective.) But I do think that while not every teacher should be using all of these, most teachers should be using at least one of them.

Here’s why:

1. It can be and often is loads of fun.
2. It’s another way to have some social interaction.
3. There are opportunities for learning experiences. Already there are people half my age capturing video from these worlds and remixing it to create some really fantastic stuff. Some people are even making a living doing just that now.
4. One of the biggest gaps in education is the generational one between the teachers and the students. My kids are still shocked when I can name all of the ninja turtles. I’m not proposing we use Second Life or Warcraft to interact directly with our students, but I think it will help us understand them a little bit more if we know the types of environments they’re using themselves.
5. It’s another way to have a virtual teacher’s lounge. When I refered to this category I called it “Teacher” communities instead of “Teaching” communities for a reason. Just like in a real teacher’s lounge, talking shop and talking about other things are both acceptable.

At least, those are my thoughts on the mater. If you have additional thoughts or questions you can add them as comments to this post or write a whole new one yourself! (Remember what I said at the beginning of this episode?)

And if you’re interested in forming a group like I just described, why not head over to that wiki I mentioned before also? I think it would be fun to play some games and unwind with other educators after school every now and then, don’t you?