Episode 042 – Howard Rheingold

Show Notes This week Howard Rheingold joins Ken. Howard is an internet pioneer going back to the early 1980s and has written many books about his experiences and research. Last summer I had the privilege to participate in a online course with Howard and a wonderful group of co-learners. That course was titled “Augmented Collective […]

Show Notes

This week Howard Rheingold joins Ken. Howard is an internet pioneer going back to the early 1980s and has written many books about his experiences and research. Last summer I had the privilege to participate in a online course with Howard and a wonderful group of co-learners. That course was titled “Augmented Collective Intelligence” and you can find the details at http://bit.ly/augmentcourse

Much of my preparation for shifting to fully online delivery of most of my courses in October 2019 are taken from that course with Howard and my interviews with Chris Gilliard, Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel.

This episode was recorded on November 27, 2019.

If you would like to support The Flipped Learning Network which is a not-for-profit, we have added a full selection below.

About our Guest

Copied from Howard’s bio on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/howardrheingold :

I’ve written books about consciousness (Higher Creativity – 1984 and Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming – 1988), history of mind-amplifying technology (Tools for Thought – 1985 ), Virtual Reality (1991!), the birth of social media (The Virtual Community – 1993!), the social revolutions growing from the hybrid of mobile telephones, digital media, and the Internet (Smart Mobs – 2002!) and social media literacy (Net Smart — 2012). TED published my e-book about the psycho-social-technological facets of augmenting human intellect (Mind Amplifier — 2012) Note that two of my books, Tools for Thought and The Virtual Community, have been online for free since 1995. I gave a TED talk in 2005 about the need for an interdisciplinary understanding of cooperation — viewed more than a million times. Since that talk, I worked with Institute for the Future to provide resources for cooperation studies and have taught (six times) an online course on cooperation. I also created and facilitated online courses on mind amplifiers and thinking-knowledge tools. I taught (face to face) courses on digital journalism, social media literacies, and social media issues at Berkeley and Stanford for ten years. I instigated a community-created handbook for peer learning, published nearly 100 video interviews and blog posts about digital media and learning innovators, and helped organized a MOOC for connected educators. I’ve curated links publicly about my topics, and published interviews with curation experts. I’ve shared my paintings online since 1995. More recently, I’ve been making magical objects of paint and light, using wood, acrylics, and arduino-controlled LEDs. I was an extraterrestrial anthropologist on the streets of San Francisco in 1977, an investigative video documentary project I hope to continue in 2018. I’ve spent 30 years giving away my writing, facilitating online conversations, and sharing pointers to useful knowledge; now that I’m retired from teaching and writing books, a little income can help me create more ambitious works and further my learning of the crafts of woodworking and electronics. Thank you for supporting my ongoing journey!

You can connect with Howard on Twitter @hrheingold and read about his work at his website https://rheingold.com/about/

Questions

We did not address any questions from the community but we welcome more questions to add to our program. When sending a question, comment or reply, please include the episode number in the subject and/or body of your message as well as any contact information such as Twitter handle that you would like us to include. We will include your name in the text and audio unless you request otherwise.

Video version

We record the podcast using a video call (earlier Google Hangouts, recently with Zoom) but never publish the video. I like seeing my guest as I believe it creates a better interview environment but we agree that the recording is only for audio.

Howard asked to share the video for his Patreon supporters so this one went public on my YouTube channel back in November. Let me know if you like this and perhaps we will do this for other guests.

Support the Show and the FLN

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Transcript

I’ve been personally negligent in not pursuing an option to improve accessibility with transcripts of the show. I see the work that Bonni Stachowiak has done with her “Teaching in Higher Ed” podcast as well as the work of Deepak Shenoy on his podcast “Open Education Rising”. The trick here is cost and I don’t know the solution just yet. Producing about 90 minutes of podcasts per month would require about USD$100 per month. We would love to have a sponsor for that or perhaps link that as one of our goals on our Patreon Page.

Podcasters and Guests

We now have a stable crew of two podcast hosts on the network. I (Ken Bauer) will be hosting the bulk of the AskTheFLN episodes but we may have some other hosts popping in from time to time. Lately, Matthew Moore has been busy with his own podcast “The Teachers Lounge” which is also hosted here at the Flipped Learning Network. You should check out that podcast as well. I hope to personally keep a bi-weekly schedule going forward.

If you would like to join us as a guest on the podcast or would like to suggest someone to be a guest, please contact either Matthew or myself via Twitter.

I would also like to remind everyone that anyone contributing to the community that is the Flipped Learning Network actually *is* part of the Flipped Learning Network. We are a community and grow together by pooling our resources. See how you can contribute to this community through contributing blog posts, joining us on this podcast as well as participating in our Slack community.

Music Credit

The music (titled Aloft) clip at the start and end of the podcast is copyright by Kelly Walsh and used with permission.

Podcast Logo Credit

The image of a microphone used in the logo for our podcast is courtesy of Eric Harvey.

Featured Image Credit

“Ken and Howard Rheingold” flickr photo by kenbauer https://flickr.com/photos/ken_bauer/49679574701 shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license