Earlier this year I joined the first group at Howard Rheingold’s MindAmplifiers course. It was a seminal learning experience that continues to this day, in the Alumni group that formed spontaneously after to explore and change how we learn on the Web.
Howard’s just announced a new course, called ‘Toward a New Literacy of Cooperation’, levering on much of his work of the past ten years, during which he worked with Institute for the Future to track the emergence of 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. You can check out Howard’s 2005 TED talk about this subject here.
The new six week Rheingold U course builds on the texts, videos, and other materials developed over the past ten years. Under Howard’s direction, co-learners will inquire, collaborate, discuss, co-construct knowledge about the building blocks and conceptual frames of a new literacy of cooperation. The course will run from September 30 – November 11. You can check out the syllabus here and there is a schedule of the live meetings run by Howard here.
If this is anything close to my experience with MindAmplifiers, this may be the best $300 you’ve ever spent on relevant, cutting edge education. You’ll need to commit some time – 3-4 hours OR MORE each week reading and contributing in forums and blogs. Places are limited to 35 per course, and you need to email Howard at howard@rheingold.com if you’d like to get on the list.
Expect Participative & Collaborative Learning and active participation in forums, blogs, blog comments, mindmaps, social bookmarks, Twitter and Google hangouts. And weekly, multi-modal live sessions with streaming audio, video, slides, text-chat and shared whiteboard. Each weekly live session is repeated twice — once at 9 or 10 AM Pacific and once at 5 or 6 PM Pacific.
Photo: Denise Krebs
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