However, the class delivered though the wiki was very social, and offered lots of interaction. Classmates were able to contact other students through a variety of options and ask questions. It personalized the class and offered more interpersonal contact than even a traditional face-to-face classroom.

It will be interesting to see how higher ed classes begin to morph to meet the needs of students today and in the future. I am excited to see how the educational framework will change to encompass all of the benefits of Web 2.0. Universities typically lag so far behind the technology already offered in the outside world. Those that thrive will be the ones that buck the mantra, “But we’ve always done it this way before.” Here’s to the future and all of the changes to come!

Ultimately I think some sort of hybrid of both would be ideal. I would however love to give such a system a go in some of my classes and see how it goes.

What I don’t see you describing about the course is the process of assessment. By ‘assessment’ I mean something more far reaching and transformative than ‘grading,’ something more like ‘how is assessment a social process and how is it conducted in social media.’ Let me point at several ideas.

You say, “although a willingness to learn new media through 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 civil society, scientific or scholarly innovation, or economic production.” To talk about learning those skills, I refer you to Grant Wiggins’ Assessing Student Performance, Jossey-Bass, 1993, in Chapter 6 on Feedback. He differentiates ‘feedback’ from ‘guidance’ in several examples and defines feedback as “information that provides the performer with direct, usable insights into current performance, based on tangible differences between current performance and hoped-for performance.” I note the bulk of comments to your blog post, which are neither feedback nor guidance. I think your course is striving to help students learn to ask for and give more useful assessments – in order to move their collective work forward.

Stephen Downes in Open Source Assessment says, “When posed the question [about what] the ideal open online course would look like, my eventual response was that it would not look like a course at all, just the assessment.

“The reasoning was this: were students given the opportunity to attempt the assessment, without the requirement that they sit through lectures or otherwise proprietary forms of learning, then they would create their own learning resources.” Perhaps your course could similarly pose an assessment for successful use of social media.

At WSU’s Center for Teaching Learning and Technology, we have been exploring ePortfolios for learning using some case studies drawn from our recent ePortfolio contest. In particular, El Calaboz ePortfolio will interest you because the author is using social media to organize a resistance to the border wall being constructed between the US and Mexico. A recent outgrowth of our thinking about these ideas is a transformed (transformative) grade book. It would seem your course is well suited to be implemented using ideas from our first or second variation.

Howard says “I’ve become convinced that the [social] media themselves are best used in a pedagogy in which collaborative inquiry replaces the delivery of knowledge.” It could equally be said that LMS systems are best used in a pedagogy of collaborative inquiry. In fact, all the major LMS systems are adopting social media tools as part of their toolkit. We are already seeing class wikis (or at least, wiki pages) at Washington State University, where I work. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that collaborative inquiry is the core pedagogy; assessment is still at the heart of the issue. A class wiki does not necessarily exclude a multiple-choice final exam.

If technological tools can encourage rethinking of pedagogy, that’s very well. However, my experience over the past 15 years suggests that faculty (especially Ph.D. faculty) are expert at subverting systems for their own purposes. When those purposes focus on minimizing the amount that teaching distracts them from their research, Web 2.0 tools will not help.

Howard’s description of his class is inspiring less because of its use of social media and more because of its collaborative and collegial structure. While the tools can provide some logistical lubrication, it is Howard’s attitude toward his students that makes me wish I could take his course. I’m sure we’d learn a lot.