Beyond School

Lesson one of semester two after a three-week holiday for both English and history classes consisted of this:

1. assigning semester-long laptops to students in each class
2. projecting this blog onto the LCD screen and discussing the phrase from its subtitle, “Gutenberg is dead,” with students
1. they just studied the Gutenberg Literacy Revolution last semester, so the sense of “living in an epochal moment in the history of reading and writing” was easy to impart by this analogy
1. this blog’s Cluster-Map widget, the instant and global readership, the connectedness, the reader-writer meaning-making via comments, the supplanting of the “expert writer” dominating the text by the writer-reader negotiations of meaning and truth via comments, the end of the commercial publishing monopoly, ad infinitum (literally)–the students got it, and the power that comes from producing with these new tools
2. projecting Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?”–just three minutes of it–as an example of how text, for the first time in history, now sings, moves, paces itself, replicates itself and multiplies, changes color and size, says more with less words, etc etc again ad infinitum
1. quick poll on how many students thought “Did You Know?” as text on a page would have the same impact to the reader as the slideshow did (results: zero percent)
   
3. installing Firefox and banishing Internet Explorer
1. introducing simple things:
1. ctrl + and ctrl - to enlarge and shrink font
2. showing auto-spell-check
3. showing tabbed browsing
4. exploiting a fortunate Firefox crash, while projected for demonstration of its strengths, by showing the “auto-return to pre-crash tabs” feature (class applause) [Note: Diigo's latest toolbar version, once installed, fixes this bug]
4. installing Diigo and creating Diigo accounts (for the millionth time, infinitely better, for academic purposes–research, annotation, highlighting, tagging, social bookmarking of websites–than Del.icio.us; and it forwards all bookmarks to your del.icio.us account anyway)
5. quick poll of “computer-haters” among students (about one eighth of the class), followed by a reasoned apology for my refusal to not insist anyway, supported by “Flat World” competition statistics bearing on students’ futures
6. closing rhapsody on how exciting it is to be a teacher of Language Arts at a new era of literacy.

Was there any content in any of these classes? Outside of a “Fishbowl Quiz” on The Arabian Nights for 20 minutes in English class, zilch.

Content can–must–wait. First, we’re souping up our computers for an entire semester of a different way of demonstrating understandings of that content.

And we’re not finished yet. We’ve still got to subscribe to Bloglines and make self-selected subscriptions, install Audacity, receive one microphone headset and mouse per laptop, subscribe to Flickr, get our heads around “RSS,” “feeds,” “aggregators,” “social bookmarking,” and “podcasts.” And, since we’re already blogging, we have to learn to drive our wikis.

Give us a couple more hours to enter the 21st century–it’s not too much to catch up on six years of revolutions in literacy.

Then we’ll get back to content–with a difference.

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