I’m Amazed 1 (New Possibilities for 21st Century Students)

I can’t stop thinking of the new possibilities for learning that come through blogs, wikis, and teachers around the world who are using them in their classrooms. I’m obsessed with this brave new web–hooked.

You want evidence? How’s this? I just woke from a nice late Sunday morning sleep-in, toasty under the comforter in a cold January apartment, and my first waking thoughts before getting out of bed went something like this stream-of-consciousness (which I hope will get comments and responses from language arts teachers around the world who want to play):

Last Sunday before second semester starts. My Arabian Nights wiki creative writing idea isn’t solid yet, so I have to finish that unit overview today. Never done something like this before, and I feel stuck. How will it look? What did I want to do? Have students write an online book modeled on Arabian Nights, using wikis to revise and peer edit their individual creative writing stories that would all combine into the online “book.”

[Roll over and pull blanket over head] My “Cluster-Map” of readers of my Beyond School blog finally kicked in yesterday, showing the locations of my readers around the world. Unbelievable: in less than two weeks of blogging, readers have visited from several points in Europe, China, SE Asia, the US, Canada, and the Middle East. The world really is flat! (I’ve got to get my students to embed the Cluster Map widget on their blogs so they can experience this amazement. So motivating!) How many of those readers on my Cluster Map teach HS English? How many are assigning creative writing units this semester? How could their students and my students get connected and make an online anthology together?

How should the final “book” look? Dizzying possibilities. First, I thought a wiki containing all stories in one place was the only answer. But now I’m thinking about this “tag–you’re it” game making its way around the edublog world, where bloggers are “tagging” (choosing) other bloggers to write, on their own blogs, “5 Things Your Readers Don’t Know About You.” Each blogger who accepts writes his/her “5 Things,” then forwards the “tag” to five more people. Kind of like a chain mail.

So now I’m thinking: should the students use the wiki (open to participating classrooms around the world) to draft and revise their stories–the whole writing process thing, with peer editing, ideally from students in other countries in order to foster the global awareness and collaboration skills, leading to the final draft–but then post their final drafts on their own blogs–to be linked in the final “book” wiki (The Flat World Nights?)? That way, each “chapter” of the “book” would be located on each student writer’s blog–giving a larger audience to each student’s entire blog–and each chapter’s story would end with a link to the next chapter on the next student’s blog, “tag”-style.

I still like, and want to keep, the authentic publication element I came up with in an earlier post: just like Scheherezade’s story had to be good enough to keep the King’s interest, or else she would die, I want students to vote on whether each story is good enough to keep the readers’ interest in the online “tag-book.” That would mean including in the “writing process/drafting-revising wiki” a stage in which students would use the “discussion” tab on each student’s story page to vote on whether the story would “allow Scheherezade to live to tell another story, or bore the King and so end her life.” Along with the simple “thumbs-up or thumbs-down” vote, students would also critically explain why any “thumbs-down” drafts did not succeed–allowing the chance for the author to revise with this feedback in mind. (It’s also possible to let editors revise the story themselves to model for the less successful writers ways better writers would tell the story.)

Now think of the students’ experience: they’ve used the writing process to draft and multiply revise their stories on the “flat world wiki”; they’ve received peer feedback from “classmates” in other countries around the world; they’ve published their chapter of the “1001 Flat World Nights” on their own blog, and linked to the next student-storyteller’s chapter on that student’s blog….and seen their blog’s Cluster Map dot the world with readers who have visited their blog.

I’m sorry, but that is just powerful. Gutenberg is dying, and new literacy tools for the 21st century are making things possible for the first time in the entire history of literacy and classroom instruction.

It. Is. An. Exciting. Time. To. Be. A. Teacher!

Omigod, I need to get to my blog to write this idea and publish it before it disappears. [Gets out of bed, fires up blog, writes, posts, and waits hopefully for responses.]

1. Podcast: Three Schools Discover the 21st Century!
2. Back to the Students: Invitation to a Collaborative Flat World Writing Project (redux and update)
3. The Launch: First "21st Century Literacy Cadre" Meeting (Video part 1)
4. 21st Century College Work in the Cutting-Edge Humanities

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