Rheingold U: higher ed for happy mutants

Howard Rheingold sez, "Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my six years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. The first course, 'Introduction to Mind Amplifiers,' ran in two sessions in January, February, and March, 2011. Live sessions include streaming audio and video from me and from students, shared text chat and whiteboard, and my ability to push slides and lead tours of websites. Future classes will cover advanced use of personal knowledge tools, social media for educators, participatory media/collective action, social media issues, introduction to cooperation studies, network and social network literacy, social media literacies, attention skills in an always-on world."

• [AGC]

  Does anyone know of other online, free, Universities?

• [Sebatsien Marion]

  Howard’s truly fantastic, an inspiration to 10 of 1000s in the education community.

  Follow him on twitter (http://twitter.com/hrheingold), or take-in his Blip channel (http://bit.ly/fIjrRP) for a sample.

• [DrPretto]

  “In my thirty years of experience online”??
  There must be a mistake. I thought the internet was invented as we know it around 1990, unless he was using ARPANET?

• [McLuhanesque]

  @DrPretto, I can’t tell whether you’re being facetious or not, but the “Internet as we know it” (by which I think you might mean the World Wide Web) came about in the early 1990s, but the Internet itself got started in 1967 as Arpanet. Between then and now there were countless Bulletin Board Systems – online communities based on constructs that looked like online message boards – one of which was The WELL, the online locale that introduced Howard Rheingold to the interactivity of “virtual communities” in 1985. So thirty years, give or take, isn’t that much of an approximate stretch.

• [bmcraec]

  I’m MUCH more curious about the ability to get feedback from the future. Delivering a course next month takes advanced time management skills far beyond my abilities to imagine.

  Sign me up!

  • [holtt]

    bmcraec, I took the March 2011 course, and I’m really looking forward to it!

• [Sue Downing]

  This is a good read if learning, not credit, is what you want online – http://www.rd.com/money/how-to-go-to-college-for-free/

• [Shaka]

  Really like creative, new ideas for education. Checkout what these guys are doing… http://www.oneworldcollege.com