In A Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism, Jay Rosen of NYU’s Journalism programme defines citizen media as
‘When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.’
That got me thinking as always as to how this insight about the media might be applied to education. So we could reframe it to say
‘When the people formerly known as the students employ the research tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen educators.’
The parallels between media and education are striking; both are seeing a massive shift in their role from monolithic providers of knowledge from on high to just one possible source of material competing with many others. Michael Wesch’s experiments with his social anthropology class, particularly in things like his class collectively taking notes on his lectures and then putting them together as a wiki resource for future and current classmates is a great example of how he classroom can be turned inside out, so that the traditional one way route from lecturer to audience is reversed, and the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ of the students is enhanced. There are countless more ways that social media could help with this flow reversal, from graduate students helping undergrads as mentors using blogs and wikis, social networking sites to enhance cross faculty and course collaborations, and sites like delicious and diig to share and collaboratively build databases of links relevant to an area of research or practice that would take an individual researcher years to compile.
Apply this too to the professional world, and you can harness the experience of senior players to the enthusiasm and contemporary knowledge of their juniors, and build research and learning environments to enhance the knowledge of the whole organisation. The parallel with academia is again relevant, think of switching the focus from training to research, and then develop activities that combine both together, so that the training that is delivered produces a real world benefit in terms of a new piece of information or understanding for the institution. That way the learning is enhanced by being mare more experiential and relevant, and the research is enhanced by being embedded into the staff development of the company.
