Beyond School

I wrote a few weeks ago about James Linzel’s sad jeremiad against “educating tomorrow’s conspicuous consumers.” I wrote about how I slapped together probably the most unplanned project assignment in my career in response to James’ post.

My ninth graders asked me to let that project become our final exam, and I partly relented. I created a wiki for The Yahoo Project (named after the disgusting human vermin infesting the horse utopia of Gulliver’s Travels, and whose descendants today form our project’s audience). I hunted for web 2.0 presentation and multimedia tools that delivered what they promised (Spresent, while strong in other ways, really screwed us up by advertising voice recording and Powerpoint uploads and conversions on the help page, but not actually offering it anymore; Splashcast was probably my favorite solution for this), and told the students to have their web-based presentations ready for unveiling by this morning.

If I keep writing now, I’m going to be late for work (as it is, I’ll arrive a bit ripe because I should be in the shower right now ). So I’ll just embed two of the students’ works. You’ve met them both before in these pages: Jessica and Lynn.

Jessica’s film is below, and it’s fine work. But it’s only the half of it. Go to her Yahoo Project wiki page to see how she has already taken web 2.0-based action to organize an international student tree-planting network using wikis and more. It’s a brilliant, fun, and do-able plan to make a real difference–and show her peers that 15-year-olds can have power today. But first, the video (and notice her figurative language; this was a language arts project, after all, and the one pedagogical feature I am proud of as a teacher was to have students first free-write about a world problem they wanted to improve upon, and then identify, in that first draft, any figurative language–metaphors, personifications, analogies, etc. Of course, most students had zilch of those in their first drafts, which is a good thing for them to notice. Then they had to write a second “script,” this time employing ten types of figurative language. And on their project page, they had to reflect on the difference this type of language made in the effectiveness of their project. Jessica is a born learner, as you’ll see when you read her metacognitive reflection about language on her page. The irony is, at the beginning of the school year, almost nine months ago, she was probably more strongly opposed to me and my web-based “messy” experiments than most other students. Now she’s blowing me away and making me want to learn from her how she did this or that thing. What a great way to end the year. Let me shut up, now, and give you her film:

Lynn did something completely different. She used her own literary talents to enhance the works of Flickr artists and photographers (I hope they allowed sharing….) by writing quite a sophisticated extended analogy. And she taught herself to use Splashcast in order to embed it. I’ll have to continue this later, but here’s her project:

Lynn’s blog, by the way, is here; and Jessica’s is here. They’re both worthy of introducing to the “born writers” in your own classrooms. I really wish my calls for teachers to join me in promoting a student edublogosphere with the same energy we promote our own adult ones would gain traction. What will it take to get students linking to each other’s blogs around the world? Teachers pointing them out. So when are we going to start spending more time on this, and less time on linking to each other?

Yours in student-centered edublogging~

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