Social media have enormous potential value for learning, formal and informal. Our task is to find ways to make them work for us. This book presents our speculations on the implications of the changes shaped by the ever-increasing use of social media in distance learning and the various shifts that may or should occur across educational systems as a result. We offer a broad vision of a future in which parts that are now available might be fitted together to create a richer, more responsive, and more socially engaged culture, as well as a toolset for lifelong learning that is unfettered by path dependencies and academic structures and methods that date back to the Middle Ages. To help support such social learning we encourage you to visit http://teachingcrowds.ca, where you will find further opportunities to explore, discuss, and develop the ideas presented here, as well as other resources that we hope you will find useful. This book is about learning online with other people. Its title, Teaching Crowds, is deliberately ambiguous: the book is about how to teach crowds, but it is also about how crowds teach. What interests us are the ways in which people learn from and with one another in an online context while playing the roles of both learner and teacher—not always intentionally, and not always even as individuals. As we intend to show, there are ways in which the aggregated behaviours of crowds can teach.
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