Beyond School

Smarter people would have planned behind the scenes for a project like this. But being transparent and not caring about the dirty laundry littering the project floor has its merits too.

I like the way the “hey, anybody want to play?” approach has worked so far. New people and schools pop in all the time now, more and more. New connections, constant surprises, exponential growth. A snapshot in dates and places:

12 Feb 2007: “Open Invitation” to 1001teachers planning wiki posted. Classrooms added the same day:

Me, South Korea (HS)
Chad Ball, New Brunswick, Canada (MS) via Jeff Whipple
Terry Smith, Hannibal, Missouri, USA (ES)

13 Feb:

Michele Davis, Colorada, USA (HS)
Jeff Wasserman, Greenwich, Connecticut, USA (tentative) HS

14 Feb:

Ms. Cofino, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (MS for now, HS later?)

17 Feb:

Karl Fisch, Colorado, USA (IT Coordinator)

20 Feb:

Miss Profe, Connecticut, USA (MS/HS Spanish)

22 Feb:

Chris Watson, Hawaii, USA (HS)
Jeff Dungan, Dominican Republic (ES)

24 Feb:

Ms. Barnsley, New South Wales, Australia (HS)
Mirjana, Serbia (ES, MS, HS)
Seonia Swark, New South Wales, Australia (MS)

28 Feb:

Ed Kidd, Shanghai, China (HS)

This is what transparency has enabled in 16 days:

• Eight countries
• Four continents
• 14 teachers
• more classrooms
• 130 HS students currently writing together from Seoul, Colorado, and Hawaii
• a second HS workshop starting in March with (tentative) Australia, China, and Serbia

Sure, “learning is messy“–my all-time favorite edublog title–and Chris, Michele, our students, and I have hit bumps that have stretched our frustration tolerance skills at times.

But it’s happening. We’re problem-solving so it will happen more smoothly next month.

And we’re skyping, podcasting, emailing, blogging, and doing everything short of a global hokey-pokey as we go.

It’s been fascinating, playful hard work. It still is. But I like it. I like the people I’m meeting. And so do the students.

Have I mentioned that I’m amazed?

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[Cross-posted from 1001 Reflections]

From a Skype chat transcript with Cindy Barnsley of Australia, who is talking with Mira in Serbia and probably right now emailing Ed in Shanghai to start the next 1001 Tales workshop cycle for the high school level:

Tables in wikispaces are a bit annoying, but working without them would be worse still. Things to be aware of (they’re easy once you know):

1. To add a column or row, just click inside a cell adjacent to where you want to insert a new one.

You’ll see a one vertical, and one horizontal, circle with an X in it (meaning “delete), and on each side of that circle you’ll see left/right arrows (add column left/right) on the horizontal, and up/down arrows (add row above/below) on the vertical one. Use those to add or delete rows or columns.

2. IMPORTANT: I learned this the hard way. You CANNOT copy a row or column and paste its content into another row or column. It will foul up your table. Unfortunately, it seems you can only enter text into a cell one at a time.

3. IMPORTANT: Clicking “return” or “enter” to start a new line WITHIN a cell will not work in tables. So you have to make a new row every time you want to start a new line. Not a biggie, but best to know now instead of frustrate later.

4. GOOD STUFF: You CAN embed widgets (html stuff like podcasts, clocks) and files (photos, whatever) inside table cells. That can be handy.

That’s about it for tables.

Hope that helps. –Clay

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[Cross-posted from 1001 Reflections blog.]

Chris Watson, HS English teacher at Punahoe High School in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, and Clay Burell of Korea International School in Seoul, Rep. of Korea, discuss the following topics in relation to their cross-world classroom collaboration on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki world-wide writing workshop:

• Student publishing process
• Effective student blogging
• Diigo
• “This I Believe” podcast project
• Informal Prof Devt through Skype
• Using Library Thing for English classes

1001teachers: Chris Watson, part 2: Language Arts and the Read-Write Web

Click here to get your own player.

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[Note: This is a cross-post from the new 1001 Flat World Tales collaborating educators' blog, 1001 Reflections. Check it out to read, see, hear, and respond to reflections from educators exploring new literacy practices in our global, collaborative k-12 writing workshop. Contributors are from, as of today, Australia, Malaysia, Korea, Serbia, Canada, the Dominican Republic, and the USA and Hawaii. Feel free to add your school anytime. Schools from the Arab world would make our day!]

This is part one of a talk with Chris (more to follow). The following is from the iTunes podcast notes. Since this is an enhanced podcast, with timestamp and chapter headings, you may want to download it to your iTunes or other podcast aggregator. Happy listening!

Chris Watson, HS English/Language Arts teacher at Punahou High School in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, joins fellow 1001 Flat World Tales collaborator Clay Burell of Seoul, South Korea, for a discussion about how to improve the tact, quality, and confidence of students giving peer feedback to other student writers during writing workshops. The first of a two-part podcast with Chris on the 1001 Reflections podcast series. Produced by Clay Burell for Beyond School and the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki/blog/”blook” k-12 world writing workshop. See Chris’ excellent edublog, WatsonCommon, as well. Great stuff!

Click here to get your own player.

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The burn-out I mentioned in my last post showed in the sour title. Apologies for that (and shame on me–life’s too short for sourness). I did “breathe,” as Barbara advised in a comment, and sleep in Saturday. Mental hygiene seems about done; frustration tolerance, refueled.

Especially in light of the email I woke to from Bloglines this morning. I hope they won’t object to me posting it. It only seems fair to share this, since I didn’t spare them the “petulant frenzies,” to quote Zappa, of earlier posts.

Short version: Bloglines has done good. Here’s the message–quite gracious:

Hi
Thank you for your input in the [image feature] matter. We at Bloglines went
back and came up with a solution that I hope will still allow your
students to use Bloglines and not be exposed to adult content. Basically
we moved the [image feature] to a new domain [URL omitted] and
have contacted all the major 3rd party filter sites to add this domain
to their adult lists. More information can be found at
[URL omitted].

In either case, I’m sorry about how long it took for us to get matters
settled. I hope that this change may save you some of the hassle of
rebuilding your lesson plans, but I understand that your students do
come first. Thank you again for choosing Bloglines as your original
choice. I hope that you may come back to try our service as we roll out
new features in the future.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best
[dloc]

So thanks to Miguel and everybody else who read my post and took action by going to the Bloglines forum and/or their own edublogs, and expressing their views. And thanks to Bloglines for problem-solving.

I said it earlier, and still find it true: for finding RSS feeds, Bloglines so far seems vastly superior to Google Reader (though GR is still in Beta). Their “find similar feeds,” “search for posts/feeds,” and other features are unmatched by Google Reader and Netvibes. (I will say that I like GR’s “tagging” system, and hope Bloglines adds this.) So I don’t know….

I may bring my students back to Bloglines. I may let them choose what reader to use. Again, I don’t know. The focus is supposed to be on locating, evaluating, and managing information, not comparing different web 2.0 services. It’s the literacy, not the technology. And all of this teapot tempest has distracted me and my students from that vital point.

But good on Bloglines for their solution.

Wait. I haven’t really checked it out. Is it a solution? What do you think?

Final thought: it’s interesting what a few people with a few blogs can do these days. In the last month, both ePals and Bloglines have listened to us bloggers and actually problem-solved with us. Sort of gives you hope, it does.

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