Howard Rheingold Social Media Extraordinaire

If you have read my blog before you may have seen my post on writing objectives. The only reason I bring it up is that BA the coworker that I spoke about actually pointed me in the direction of Howard Rheingold by providing me this link. After reading the blog listed before I became interested in Howard's Social media classroom as seen below and decided to do a bit more research.

There is not much that I can write about Howard that he or someone else has not already written. So instead here is a link to his profile where you will find loads of info about what he has done and the books he has written. If you watched the video above you will see some basic info about Social Media classroom. This is what hooked be because with all the WEB 2.0 tools around and the lack of consistency and no one place to view it all Howard is working to produce that solution.

If you have not been able to tell from his profile or his general involvements Howard is quite the busy individual. So through some conviniantly timed instant messages I was able to get a bit more detail about Howard and that transcript is below.

Greg: Hey Greg again you think you may have time to answer random questions for my school project via IM?

Howard: Sure.

Greg: cool

Howard: Now is good

Greg: Tell me about what you do?

Howard: I explore, understand, and communicate about the individual, social, political, economic meanings of communication technology revolutions.

Greg: How did you get to where you are at in your career?

Howard: I have been a freelance writer since I was 23. In the early 1980s, I sought information about computers because I had heard you could use them instead of typewriters. I found my way to Xerox PARC and wrote Tools for Thought, which is on my website. That was a 1985 look at where people and PCs would be in 2000. The entire book is online. You can look back at my prediction of the future from the future I predicted. In the process of writing that book, I got online.

That led to writing "Virtual Communities" for Whole Earth Review in 1987 -- the first use of that word. That book is online as well. Both at rheingold.com.

Greg: Great info

How do you keep up with trends and keep yourself on the cutting edge?

Why elearning and distance education?

Howard: That's such an interesting question that I made a series of videos about how I spend my time online. I haven't finished the series, but you can find the first of them in the archives at http://vlog.rheingold.com

Education because I believe the answer to "are digital media and networks good for individuals, communities, democracies," is "it depends on who knows what about how to use available media . So I'm teaching. I'm not so much interested in distance education -- although that is one of my interests -- as in the use of social media to teach social media theory.

Gotta get back to work now.

Greg: thanks I will email the last 2 questions and look up the rest

Continued on 9/29/2008

Greg: Howard I wanted to check again just to make sure that I have your permission to use our conversation in print? I also wanted to make sure you got the email that I would like to partipate in the COP?

Howard: Yes, you have my permission. I don't have access to the list, but if you emailed and asked to participate, I saved your email.

Greg: perfect thanks

So back to the title "Social Instruction Extraordinaire" back in 1993 Howard was credited with creating the term virtual community. To me he was way ahead of his time or at least had the ability to come to the realization how important socialization is to learning. Currently I have been working on a project at work to start to integrate WEB 2.0 tools into our instructional workflow. Due to this research I have tested many tools that have been great and many that our bad. It is my hope that when Social Media classroom launches it will be as revolutionary as some of the work that Howard has already produced.