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?

[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

[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.

[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.

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.

The continuing saga:

If you’ve been reading the last week’s post, you know about the headaches Bloglines’ Image Wall has caused me and other educators who have trained our students in using feed aggregators for research. And you know that I decided to jump ship to Google Reader to avoid future headaches.

Many of you advised that Google Reader was better anyway. I self-taught crash-course in one long laptop session seemed to confirm this. So good: Bye-bye, Bloglines; Hello, Google Reader. No more headaches.

Such was the plan. But as a long-lost friend told me long ago,

The best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans.

(–her gender and metaphysical assumptions, not mine.)

The Google Reader headache came today and yesterday when I walked students through exporting their Bloglines subscriptions into Google Reader. Done. Easy.

Next step: “Now lets find more feeds in Google Reader. Easy….Say you want to find a feed on colonialism….”

So I enter that keyword, click “find,” and all I get is two pages of feeds on colonialism–and most of those from random “About.com” sites.

Short version: either I’m missing something, or Google Reader’s “find feeds” feature is pathetic.

So really, with endless “pleases” added–if anybody can teach me how to effectively search for feeds on Google Reader with the ease and power offered by Bloglines, I’ll owe you forever.

I think I’m burning out right now–heavy grading cycle–so I’m probably missing something simple. (Like, duh, del.icio.us tag-search subscriptions; but I wanted to introduce those a bit later. I guess now I can’t do that.)

Bah. Pfft. S.O.S. How could GOOGLE, of all things, make a product whose search feature stinks? (Please teach me that I’m missing something.)

I appreciated Bloglines’ attempt to listen and problem-solve, but didn’t have time to wait.

Helpful comments about Google Reader led me to explore it and Netvibes yesterday as alternatives to Bloglines and that unfortunate Image Wall.

Google Reader is slower than I’d like, and it possibly caused some crashes on my Firefox (though I’m sure I can go to some help forum and solve that problem). But it, unlike Netvibes, allows the “keep new” feature–in Google Reader it’s “star this” or something–that made me loathe to leave Bloglines.

So off we go to Google Reader. Students will groan–but I bet they change that to “wow, that was easy,” when they see how simple an OPML export-import of feeds from one reader to another is.

And really, when you start thinking about the whole Google package–Google Homepage, Blogger, and the whole Google universe–it seems lazy to stick with an old habit like Bloglines just because it’s a habit. Another addiction to kick.

Quick updates on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki world writing workshop:

1. We’ve set up a Coordination Schedule on the 1001teachers project planning wiki. It’s an at-a-glance chart showing what schools plan on entering the project when. I like the efficiency this affords: All interested teachers can now go there, enter their basic info on the table (school, location, age group, number of students, teacher contact info, projected entry and exit times, and language the writers will compose in)–and find other world classrooms of similar age groups and time-frames to connect to. So it’s self running, practically.
1. Chad Ball in Canada (thanks to Jeff Whipple for the hook-up) and Ms. Cofino in Malaysia are coordinating collaboration for their middle school writers.
2. Michele Davis in Denver (Arapahoe) and I in Seoul are in our first draft peer response stage. Several of my students have expressed how much they enjoy this novelty on their free blogs. Thanks again to Karl Fisch for hooking us up.
1. There has been one bump that we should learn from: we have to communicate better about students who don’t do the assignment before we assign cross-world peer teams. I had to re-do two hours work because a dozen students hadn’t done their “jobs” properly. (In the real world, they’d be reprimanded at best, fired at worst, for not meeting their deadline. Here, they just don’t get any connections with other students in other countries.)
3. Miss Profe (virtual “Get Well Soon” card wished your way here ) has pushed the project into the multi-lingual by entering her Spanish 1 and 2 classes (ages 14-16) in the project. Any other Spanish teachers out there want to connect with her? (Ms. Cofino in Malaysia is looking into this.)
2. Jeff Whipple, tech coordinator in New Brunswick, Canada, and I Skyped a few minutes ago and he expedited the embedding of world clock widgets on both the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki and the 1001teachers wiki. Julie Lindsay’s and Vicki Davis‘ project was the inspiration for that one (and so much more–theft is flattery ). So now all teachers and students can know what time it is for their counterparts.
3. Tom Barrett and I skyped yesterday, England to Korea, about several things, ranging from safe use policies to wiki alternatives to multimedia “digital storytelling” tools. I hope he can get some of his primary classes hooked up with Mr. Smith’s fourth graders in Hannibal, Missouri, USA on the 1001 Tales project. Right now Mr. Smith’s kids are waiting patiently for other primary classrooms to write and reflect with. Any helpers?
4. We teachers and coordinators are going to try to have a Skype conference call this weekend to just reflect on the road so far, get to know each other with voice, and play with ideas for the future. I’ll podcast highlights if all goes well.
   

Tom and I spoke about what’s at the heart of this project–writing and reflecting and improving as writers; making cross-world connections and learning through them; authentic publishing for only the best; and creating publishing opportunities through audio and visual media for students with intelligences other than the textual.

And we went back to why the “blook” idea is not some novelty (though it is that, too), but is instead a way to keep students writing, and gaining new audiences, on their blogs.

By publishing the successful stories on interlinked student blogs, each writer will see their real audience grow, in real time, every time they go to their blog. Simple widgets like Clustrmaps (Tom recommended GeoVisitors instead, which does sound cooler, so I’ll check it out), it bears repeating, are incredibly powerful writing motivators for students. [Update: Let's be honest: They're motivators for adult writers, too. Instant feedback from the world. Powerful.] So are reader comments, and the conversations and connections those lead to.

All of this proves, at a glance, that blogging ain’t just “writing for teacher.” And that good blogs–which means good writing–lead to rich connections with the world. All through authentic writing.

So yes, I’m excited. It’s been messy, but we’re going. More and more connections are being made. Teachers are learning that wikis are easy. Students are learning about other countries through them, and often making new relationships. And all of us are now just curious to see how this digital organism is going to grow.

Why am I thinking of kudzu?

Photo credit from Flickr.

Thanks to all who have weighed in at this Bloglines forum. There’s some good, constructive dialog going on. More input from us can only help, since Bloglines is doing its part.

I can’t wait until I satisfy my hunger on all of this 21st Century Literacy stuff. Don’t get me wrong: I love it. I love how it makes work these days a labor of love.

But when I read these other bloggers–English teachers all, I think–something stirs inside me. Some desire to take an RSS sabbatical, to cancel (almost) all edublogs subscriptions, and to return to the simple Gutenbergian pleasures of writing about literature.

So here’s a simple hat-tip some wonderfully reflective bloggers out there who make room in their blogs for poetry, drama, literature, philosophy–my first loves, and ones I hope to return to in future, less manic, stages of my blogging. They won’t disappoint:

• Bruce Schauble’s Throughlines
  
• Chris Watson’s WatsonCommon
• Dana Huff’s Huffenglish
• Eric Hoefler’s Sicheii Yazhi
• Jeff Wasserman’s When the Hurly-Burly’s Done