4Cs of social media: Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence

Collaboration can happen at three levels: conversation, co-creation and collective action

The third C, Community, refers to the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.

The great thing about collective intelligence is that it becomes easier to extract meaning from a community as the size and strength of the community grow.

This group illustrates what project-based learning can look like, especially when digital tools help students break free from the confines of teacher-driven and classroom-bound instruction.<br>

With access to the Internet, and with an understanding of how to create and navigate these online, social learning spaces, opportunities for learning widely and deeply reside in the connections that we make with other people who can teach or mentor us and/or collaboarate with us in the learning process. That, I think, is where we find 21st Century skills that are different and important. Sure, those connections require a well developed reading and writing literacy, and critical thinking and creativity and many of the others are skills inherent to the process. But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

To me, that’s what 21st Century Skills are all about, teaching our kids to navigate the world as they are experiencing it, not the world we experienced.

The idea behind "being yourself" is not that you have some sort of offline life (though you may). Rather, it's a recognition that your online life encompasses the many different facets of your life, and that it is important that these facets are all represented and work together.