Tuesday, July 7, 2015 at 12:00 pm
The past decade has seen a dramatic decline in user agency all across the Web, but especially in education. The Aughts saw the budding of a golden age of user-produced media on the Web. But these buds never fully flowered, over-shadowed by the development of proprietary platforms like Facebook in the social sector and learning management systems in the educational sector. Thinkers like Anil Dash have lamented "The Web We Lost," and groups like the Indieweb movement and the Reclaim Innovation movements are working to revitalize a user-owned and user-produced Web.
In this talk, Justin Reich will highlight some of the exciting innovations within education that seek to put students and learners in charge of their online lives. Experiments are taking place in scattered courses and across entire colleges to raise a generation of learners ready to stake out their own claims on the Web, and to take back the means of production and sharing.
About Justin
Justin Reich is an educational researcher broadly interested in the future of learning in a networked world. His professional work is motivated by a desire to transform the architecture of education away from centralized, hierarchical models of teaching and towards distributed, networked models of learning. He studies, designs, and advocates for learning systems that shift education from something done to learners to something done with learners, from channels of dissemination to webs of sharing.
Justin is the Richard L. Menschel HarvardX Research Fellow, based in the Office of the President and Provost at Harvard University, where he explores the possibilities and limits of open online learning. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a visiting lecturer in MIT’s Scheller Teacher Education program. He is also the co-founder of EdTechTeacher, a professional learning consultancy devoted to helping teachers leverage technology to create student-centered, inquiry-based learning environments.He earned his doctorate from Harvard University, where he led the Distributed Collaborative Learning Communities project, a Hewlett Foundation funded initiative to examine how social media are used in K-12 classrooms. His dissertation, The State of Wiki Usage in U.S. K-12 Schools, drew upon a population of 180,000 education-related wikis as well as over 100 interviews and observations with wiki-using teachers to measure the degree to which wikis supported deeper learning in classrooms across the United States.
Justin is a co-author of Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology: A Practical Guide for Teachers by Teachers, and his academic work has been published in Educational Researcher, Social Education, Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, and other venues. His opinion writings have been published in the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor, The Providence Journal, and other publications. He blogs for Education Week at EdTechResearcher.
Justin has taught in a wide variety of settings. He was a camp counselor and trip leader at Camp Chewonki, a lifeguard and CPR instructor with the American Red Cross, a search and rescue instructor with the Blue Ridge Mountain Rescue Group, a wilderness medicine instructor with Stonehearth Open Learning Opportunities, and an international expedition leader with World Challenge Expeditions. He taught at the Shackleton school, an expedition-based school, and he taught freshman world history and electives for seniors at the Noble and Greenough School, where he also coached wrestling and co-led the outdoor activities group.
Justin served as Outstanding Educator in Residence for the Academy of Singapore Teachers, a Digital Media and Learning Summer Fellow with the MacArthur Foundation, and a member of the 2012 class of Emerging Leaders for the International Society for Technology in Education. He is a member of the Digital Learning Advisory Council for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and serves on the advisory boards of the Chewonki Foundation and the Fay School.