The Pedagogy of Civic Participation

Education – the means by which young people learn the skills necessary to succeed in their place and time – is diverging from schooling. Media-literacy-wise, education is happening now after school and on weekends and when the teacher isn't looking, in the SMS messages, MySpace pages, blog posts, podcasts, videoblogs that technology-equipped digital natives exchange among themselves. This population is both self-guided and in need of guidance, and although a willingness to learn new media by 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 democracy.

We have an opportunity today to make use of the natural enthusiasm of today's young digital natives for cultural production as well as consumption, to help them learn to use the media production and distribution technologies now available to them to develop a public voice about issues they care about. By showing students how to use Web-based tools and channels to inform publics, advocate positions, contest claims, and organize action around issues that they truly care about, participatory media education can draw them into positive early experiences with citizenship that could influence their civic behavior throughout their lives.

About Howard Rheingold:

Howard Rheingold, internationally syndicated author of the weekly Tomorrow column, author of best-sellers Virtual Reality and The Virtual Community, editor of best-seller The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, takes audiences on a journey through the human side of the technology-shaped future.

In earlier years, his interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connections (1986) with Howard Levine Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and phrases (1988).

He ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology, via the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers, and wrote Tools for Thought (1984) Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled his odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.

He's been in on the Web since the beginning, and long before. In 1985, he became involved in the WELL, a computer conferencing system. He started writing about life in his virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community (1993). He is credited with inventing the term "virtual community." He served as the editor of The Whole Earth Review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994). In 1994, He was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired. In 1996, he founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds was named one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazine and was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997.
                                                                             
His 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was widely acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book has become one of the top 200 of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati, and won Utne Magazine's Independent Press Award in 2003. In 2005, he taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that he has undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of his ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action.