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 [...]

[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 [...]

[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 [...]

[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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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

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 [...]