As someone who went to teachers’ college, I’m always interested when the worlds of education and wikinomics overlap. Teaching has always been about finding, maximizing and sharing scarce resources. Applying some wikinomics to the equation can provide teachers (and their students) an opportunity to access and share resources anywhere in the world.

Enter the Social Media Classroom. The project, created by Howard Rheingold, describes itself as, “an invitation to grow a public resource of knowledge and relationships among all who are interested in the use of social media in learning.” The site is a series of Web 2.0 tools (it offers forums, wikis, blogs, chat, social bookmarking, microblogging, social video, curricular materials, resource repositories and an online community of practitioners – available as an install or SaaS) that help to facilitate collaborative, student-led learning across a distance. The value of this project is not simply the ability to slap a 2.0 paintjob on an existing system but rather as a means to enhance the learning process. Perhaps the website puts it best:

The greatest value that the SMC can add to a learning community is its ability to support a movement away from education as delivery of knowledge toward education as critical, collaborative inquiry—a student-centric pedagogy that engages students in actively constructing knowledge together, rather than passively absorbing it from texts, lectures, and discussions.

In an earlier post, Ian advocated the benefit of meeting the Net Generation where they live (and learn) by designing educational policies that allow for generational differences. Personally, I’m a big fan of whatever works to get kids learning. If social networking, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools form an effective component (yes, component – I happen to think there’s even a place for the old fashioned lecture), then let’s use these tools to make sure kids are learning the knowledge and the skills they need to be successful in the workplace of the future.

In education, there is a focus (and rightly so) on developing life-long learners. For me, this process is about developing a citizenry who are engaged and able enough to use the tools at their disposal to get the information the need to be a contributing member of society.