Courses
How courses work:
(contact me via howard@rheingold.com if you want to get on a notification list.
Each cohort is limited to 35 students. Tuition is $300 for individuals, $500 if your employer reimburses, $250 if you have taken a previous RU course. Synchronous sessions involve streaming audio, video, text chat, slides. (View recording of live session during the first class of RU, giving an overview of Introduction to Mind Amplifiers.) Asynchronous discussion uses Social Media Classroom forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps. Courses take 5-6 weeks.
Currently Offered
Introduction to Mind Amplifiers
- Syllabus
Mind Amplifiers augments what you can do online. Do you want tools to funnel and filter thousands of bits of information daily into digestible pieces? Do you want to understand and control how your brain and body spends attention on information ("Infotention")? Understand how and why to tag, filter, and select information for yourself and others ("Curation")? Cultivate a PLN ("Personal Learning Networks")? Or conceptualize how we can use online networks to cooperate and collectively act in our best interest ("Cooperation Theory")? Do you wish to meet other curious, intelligent, vital people from around the world synchronously and asynchronously?
Toward a new literacy of cooperation
- Syllabus
For the past ten years, I've worked with Institute for the Future to track the emergence of a new story about how humans get things done together. The old story of survival of the fittest, competition, rational self-interest is changing as new knowledge comes to light about cooperative arrangements and complex interdependencies in cells, ecosystems, economies, and humans. In 2005, I delivered a TED talk about this subject; the video has been viewed more than 182,000 times. In the same year, I co-taught a seminar at Stanford with Andrea Saveri of Institute for the Future, "Toward a Literacy of Cooperation." This six week Rheingold U course builds on the texts, videos, and other materials developed over the past ten years. Under my direction, co-learners will inquire, collaborate, discuss, co-construct knowledge about the building blocks and conceptual frames of a new literacy of cooperation.
Think-Know Tools
- Syllabus
- Modules on Roots & Visions of Augmentation and The Extended Mind establish a basis for understanding and discussing both the origin and future of tools specifically devised to magnify thinking capabilities and group problem-solving capacity.
- Modules on Social Bookmarking, Concept Mapping, and Personal Knowledge Management introduce tools and practices for finding, storing, refining, sharing, exploring knowledge.
- Learning activities include group bookmarking as focused collective intelligence, concept map-making for understanding systems, construction of knowledge-plexes with Personal Brain.
- aka "Smart Mobs 101" -- Based on the course I've taught with Xiao Qiang at Berkeley: Syllabus for the Berkeley course (not exactly the same as Rheingold U syllabus)
- Based on the course I've taught and Berkeley and Stanford: Syllabus for the Stanford version (not exactly the same as Rheingold U syllabus)
- My network & social network literacy mini-course widget has been viewed more than 35,000 times. Here is a preliminary mindmap of what will be covered.
Think-know Tools dives into both the theoretical-historical background of intellect augmentation and the practical skills of personal knowledge management. Now that we have access to powerful mind-amplifying devices and self-evolving collective intelligence networks, we can benefit ourselves and improve the commons by learning how knowledge technologies work and how to work them:
As with other Rheingold U. courses, Think-Know Tools involves 6 weeks of weekly live audio-video-chat sessions and asysnchronous forums for conversation, wikis for collective knowledge construction, mindmaps and concept maps for lateral thinking, systemic thinking, and knowledge organizing, and blogs for reflection and exercising metacognition active co-learning -- learners share a commitment to growing a cooperative and collaborative learning community. Graduates of Introduction to Mind-Amplifiers can treat Think-Know Tools as an extension of what we covered before. Those who are new to Rheingold U. courses will experience the self-construction of a co-learning community and an intensive introduction to viewpoints, mindsets, and digital tools that can transform your approach to learning, knowledge, and online discourse. Learner missions involve learning activities that reinforce practical use of think-know tools such as Diigo and Delicious, cMap and VUE, and Personal Brain. The final week of live and asynchronous sessions are organized by the co-learners -- exercising the metaskill of co-learning in an ad-hoc online learning community.
Coming in The Future
Social Media For Educators
Video of one hour lecture delivered at Case Western Reserve University, April, 2010 on Social Media, Participative Pedagogy, and Digital Literacies
Participatory Media/Collective Action
Social Media Issues
Network & Social Network Literacy
Social Media Literacies: Attention, Participation, Collaboration, Crap Detection, and Network Awareness
The subject of my book for MIT Press: Net Smart: How to Thrive Online.
The syllabus for my Stanford course based on Net Smart.
Attention Skills in an Always-On World
March 27, 2014
Toward a Literacy of Cooperation ($300 individuals, $250 if you have taken a previous RU course, $500 if employer reimburses - limited to 30 learners; registration closes February 22, 2018)