Beyond School

hoefler » Research 2.0

• Eric Hoefler’s wiki for “research 2.0″–I haven’t checked it out closely, but Patrick Higgins at Chalkdust plugs it, which says something.
   - post by cburell

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I use the term blog-writer advisedly.

I’m catching up on responding to all my learners’ blogs, using Diigo to leave “teacher-y” comments on sticky-notes that only they can see–which also makes for a great collection of sentence-correction examples on my teacher Diigo bookmarks page–and I come across this post from Lynn:

Quiet Souls: the Living Dead

All Quiet on the Western Front, otherwise known as “the greatest war novel of all time,” is a notably bitter book. I found [myself] making sour smiles as I read–the book had hit the bull’s eye. All Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates the war from the soldiers’ point of view. The book shows how war can take out the souls of human beings and leave them only with their “animal instincts.”

“By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it….It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowing how. If it were no so, there would not be one man alive from Flandres to the Vosges” (56, Remarque).

This second instinct seems to be a key element for survival, but it is also destroying them as well. Men step away from their emotions and rely on their immediate needs, just as Muller does.

“They would fit me perfectly. In these boots I get blister after blister. Do you think he will last till tomorrow after drill? If he passes out in the night, we know where the boots–” (18, Remarque)

Muller, in this passage, sounds very cold hearted: he asks his friends when his comrade would probably die. But it is understandable, because civility is not a major concern in war. It is blind killing, without any reasons whatsoever, that matters; it is the soldiers’ paramount responsibility to simply kill the enemies. Thus, the soldiers becoming the living dead–a soul without a soul. They become completely senseless to what civilization has taught them. Instead, they listen to the inner primitive instincts: the strive for dominance, the strive for power, the strive to survive, and mostly, the strive to kill.

Ironically, the authorities glorify this tragedy into what is known as “essprit de corps (26, Remarque)”.

“We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough–and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training, most of us would certainly have gone mad….But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war–comradeship” (26,27, Remarque)

As these soldiers become empty shells with no souls, the war goes on. The post-war trauma, the in-war trauma is maybe just enough to take the life out of someone.

Image from Flickr

The quality of Lynn’s writing is obvious, but what isn’t obvious is how she has applied so much of the sentence styling that I’ve been urging my learners to experiment with–with predictably mixed results. (To see the also-mixed student-produced mini-lessons on the sentence patterns I’m trying to make them use, see this link on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki.)

I’m sharing this as an example of how student blogging can be used as a way to teach writing skills, a la the 6 Traits of Effective Writing and The Art of Styling Sentences, while still avoiding the “blogging as homework” pitfall that comes with assigning the content of the blog-posts. It’s part of the on-going quest to find that magical combination that transforms homework into authentic writing, while at the same time prevents that freedom from being sloppy, non-developmental free-writing.

Earlier in the year, I think I erred in giving students too much freedom to choose their topic. I’d hoped they would rise to my exhortations for them to find one idea from a week’s worth of schooling–in any subject area classroom–to write about and make meaningful. Most of them didn’t, which is a sad reflection on the relevance they find in the ideas at school–and on the students’ intellectual maturity level as well. But I don’t want to let this preference to “write about [the pop culture equivalent of] their cat, Fluffy” (to quote one of Chris Watson’s students in Honolulu) push me into assigning teacher-directed “answer my question” homework.

Starting the whole-class blog for my history class’ World War I to World War II unit, in which they were assigned to write about whatever topic from the week’s student lectures on a reflective, reader-response level, showed me the light. Their posts on this blog were instantly of a higher order of thought than my English classes’, in general, after four months of blogging.

So for the rest of the year (we end in about four weeks), I’m having my English students write about whatever scenes, passages, or lines from our novels that they want (though sometimes within thematic limits that I set). And I’m having them apply new skills–quotation integration and close reading commentary–in these posts.

Actually, come to think of it, Lynn’s post was in response to one of those more teacher-directed assignments. But still, she chose her passage, and she applied those skills.

Go to her blog, and judge for yourself whether her writing was better before I changed the rules and made her write about literature-related topics, or whether this post marks a leap in the general quality of her blog-writing. I’d be curious to hear what you think: could she handle freedom, or did the teacher limits help her grow?

And to “think-aloud” a bit more, I’ll add one more thing I’ve noticed as I’ve read my students’ blogs tonight: though they weren’t, as a rule, choosing to write about Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, or All Quiet on the Western Front, the few students who did write about these works unanimously found them enjoyable, and their sentiments were echoed in other students’ comments to these posts.

Which means two things to me: first, if they like what they’re reading in the English class, then assigning them to write about these works could be enjoyable for them–as long as I don’t kill that joy with stultifying requirements to write the dreaded 5-paragraph essay; and second, it’s really important to select readings that they will enjoy. I know this latter point sounds obvious, but I’ve seen too many teachers assign novels and plays that I can’t stand to teach any more than students can stand reading. But that’s a different topic. For what it’s worth, in any case, 15-year-olds in Korea–many of them fluent but first-generation English speakers–not only could handle Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and All Quiet on the Western Front; they also enjoyed handling them.

Which strengthens my opinion that we deprive kids the experience of great literature because we insist they can’t handle it (or, if we’re moralists of the Puritanical stamp, shouldn’t handle it). And we teach them kiddie-literature instead.

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Militant ‘Mickey Mouse’ pulled off air - Yahoo! News

• Mickey Mouse preaches fundamentalist political agenda on children’s show.  Excellent supplement to “authority” and “education” themes of All Quiet on the Western Front, Animal Farm, and V for Vendetta.

   - post by cburell

TalkShoe™ - Featured Demo Videos

• This seems the most promising web-based podcasting service I’ve seen yet.  Definitely worth checking out for recording conference calls.  Skype-friendly and, so far, free.
   - post by cburell

Podcast Stations & Podcast Advertising :: Podango

• Another web-based podcasting site.  Free?
   - post by cburell

BlogTalkRadio

• One possible web 2.0 alternative to Skype conference call restrictions.  Web-based conference call recording.  Don’t know if it’s free.
   - post by cburell

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CriticalThinking.org - Critical Thinking Development: A Stage Theory

• Interesting paradigm for scaffolding metacognition about critical thinking in the classroom.
   - post by cburell

McREL: Mid-continent for Education and Learning, Content Knowledge Standards and Benchmark Database

• Good set of standards to guide the editors of the Broken World wiki.
   - post by cburell

Blogger & Podcaster, April 2007

• Interesting “flippable page” online magazine–with “talking ads.”  Lots of web-based podcasting sites advertised there.  Worth a look.
   - post by cburell

Main Page - Wikimedia Commons

• Wow.  This seems to rival Archive.org as a multimedia archive.
   - post by cburell

Wikibooks:Image use policy - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

• And this is a good resource to teach the etiquette of image use on wikis and blogs.
   - post by cburell

Wikibooks:Editing guideline - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

• This one’s essential for getting beyond individually authored pages to collaborative writing.  This will be interesting to watch unfold in the classroom.
   - post by cburell

Help:Welcome, newcomers - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

• More for the wiki textbook editors.
   - post by cburell

Help:How to start a book - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

• A good resource for the Broken World wiki textbook editors.
   - post by cburell

XplanaZine: Fast-Track Development of High-Quality Online Courses

• From the site’s intro:

  The following approach represents a way to fast-track the development
  of online courses by using an integrative approach to develop unique,
  high-quality courses that reflect the core values and vision of the
  institution while bringing together media assets, supplemental subject
  matter experts, and a highly effective online instructional strategy.
  This article was first written in 2003, but in reviewing it, it seems
  to be remarkably helpful, particularly as institutions are faced with
  creating courses and course content for new learning management systems
  and technologies
  
   - post by cburell

Behlendorf.mp3 (audio/mpeg Object)

• Edtechlive’s podcast interview with one of the creators of Apache. 
   - post by cburell

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor

• Did I just buy a $50 php manual unnecessarily>  The php website offers an introductory tutorial and online manual–d’oh!!!
   - post by cburell

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times

• Recipe for 1:1 initiative failure: buy PC’s instead of Macs; don’t train teachers and students; measure success by success on standardized state testing.
   - post by cburell

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Real quick, an itch to scratch:

While I laud the impulse behind the “Support Blogging” “links to school bloggers” wiki [update: link repaired], I think it might improve by being a bit less egalitarian and a bit more meritocratic–or, more accurately, a bit more student-centered. As Scott Schwister points out on a recent post, we’re no longer in 2004. Surely a few student bloggers have emerged over the past 3 years that deserve to join our ranks. Surely there are pioneers among them too.

What I mean is this: Every teacher knows that all students are not created equallydo not have equal writing skills and/or motivations. It follows that all student web-logs writers are likewise not equal.

So rather than (or maybe “in addition to”) promoting connections between classrooms that write on blogs, I think we should identify our exemplary student writers for individual attention. If the top student web-log writers world-wide had a resource–a wiki, for example–that alerted them to the existence of others like them, then a more authentic “learnerblogosphere” could come into being. Students could subscribe to their worldwide peers’ blogs on their feed readers and put them on their blogrolls. And they could begin enjoying the kind of community-of-interest connectivity that we adults do.

I almost started a new wiki to do that, but instead, just edited the Classroom Blogging wiki. I changed the heading “Student Blogs” to the more accurate “Classroom Blogs,” and I added an “Individual Student Blogs” section. I hope other teachers out there will add their deserving individual student blog-writers to this list. Not only would it separate the wheat from the chaff, it would also provide teachers a quick reference of ready exemplars to show what good student blog-writing looks like.

Right now on Support Blogging, there are a gazillion links to adult edublogs, and a gazillion more of whole class blogs. It’s time, I vote, to let the student writers have some of this space, and make it “student-centered.” Maybe we should even put their blogs on the top of the list.

If any of you out there have the power to add to this list, please do so. Let’s connect the real student bloggers out there. They might develop into a learning community that can teach us adults, since they’re experiencing all of this from the front lines.

[Post-script: What would happen if we educators encouraged volunteer students to create a niche of learner edubloggers? That could be enlightening indeed. I know a few students who would probably be interested. Anybody else? Chris? Jeff? Jeff? Bruce?]

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