Back to the Students: Invitation to a Collaborative Flat World Writing Project (redux and update)

This is a revised email I just sent to Jeff Whipple in New Brunswick, Canada, and Karl Fisch in Colorado, about the Flat Classroom collaborative writing project I’ve been cooking up for the last few weeks. (Jeff has become a co-chef with a few fantastic suggestions, the most exciting of which is to invite students of more visual than verbal intelligence to submit their original illustrations for inclusion in the final project. Brilliant. And to take it further, there’s no reason to exclude podcasts of gifted oral interpretations of the published stories–and any other digital product showing any other of the “multiple intelligences.”)

My students decided to call the “blog-book” something fittingly new: a “blook.” (Rhymes with “book.”)

Here’s the update on the project (and see this post for more, including links to other posts and to the wiki itself)–which I’m trying to stall a bit so others can jump in (though it can still work if they jump in late, and actually has different benefits–namely, watching the story spread after we’ve finished in Korea):

Since each individual student’s story will serve as a “tale,” a la the Arabian Nights, told by a frame narrative, I had my students brainstorm for a frame narrative to tie all the individual tales together–the “Scheherazade and King Shahryar” element.

They’re doing that this weekend. There are some excellent ideas brewing.

Next week, they’ll seek personal stories (their own, or ones their parents or friends tell them) to write. As the Arabian Nights stories don’t only please the audience, but also inform it of Arab culture, our own stories will have to reveal insights into Korean culture while they delight. (Partner schools in other countries will, of course, reveal their own local culture in their stories, while delighting us all the while.)

We’ll use our class Wikispace for the writing / revising process for these stories. That writing workshop phase will probably last for a good week or two.

The next phase will be evaluation: students will evaluate each others’ stories, playing the role of King Shahryar to each storyteller-”Scheherazade”, and only nominate the high-quality stories to be published on their individual blogs. Each published story will link to the next one on the next student’s blog, ad infinitum.

But what about the students whose stories were denied publication in the blook? They can always seek student criticism on their stories’ “discussion” tabs on their wikipage, and revise and revise and revise. The wiki is like a Farm League–keep honing your skills there, and one day you may be called up to storytell with the Pro’s. On the blook.

This is where other students and classrooms around the world can still be included in the never-ending Flat World Nights. And if/when other students are promoted from the Flat World Wiki (where all students write) to the “blook,” the last student to be published will just add a hyperlink to the newly published storyteller’s blog. On and on. New classes can always join whenever they like–next week, month, year, or decade.

We’re hoping to top the original 1001 Nights.

That way, readership of each student blog is provided–more dots for each student’s ClustrMap, more sense of audience, more motivation to keep writing, and writing well.

I’m about to hit e-Pals with an announcement. It’s just so annoying to fill out forms when your address is Korean!

Photo credits: Arabian Nights illustration: Scheherazade Telling the Tales, by Kay Nielsen (1922) here; Friedman book cover here.

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