"Community Service and Rock Band 2.0"? Rocking the Teen World 2008….

More education. Less schooliness.

"Community Service and Rock Band 2.0"? Rocking the Teen World 2008….

This post is bizarre. I wanted to point out that students saw Wikispaces as “schooliness.” Then I realized I should see MySpace as potentially that way too. And I close with visions of a webcast student rock charity 2.0. A tangled, messy web, this post. But a good idea to spin over the summer. How could my student rockers not want to try this next year?

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Ninth grade “Missy” points to something I’ve been fearing for a while: that, in my students’ eyes, “Wikis are just a school tool” in response to this reflection question I asked on our Yahoo Project wiki:

What 21st century tools (yes, we’re talking “web 2.0″–wikis, blogs, YouTube, etc) do you think could help you to spread your message or idea to the world? How would you picture using these to increase your power to make a difference?

“Missy”: For us as students, there are not many opportunities or desire to surf Wikispaces and blogs to be informed how the world should change. We first should upload this where many people can see, and use (such as Myspace) advertising Wikispaces and gathering people to watch them. And we should put a lot of effort in, to impress them - remember, these are not “school” works; this is about the “World.”

It’s nice to see, though, that she implies an understanding that wikis do have real-world practical value in that comment. One of the desired outcomes of this whole project was for students to leave me this week with an enduring understanding that web 2.0 is real world stuff that can be used for real-world empowerment. (And this all goes back to James Linzel’s inspiring blog-post.)

I like Missy for reminding me that MySpace, even if it’s not useful for me in the “school world,” is also “real world web 2.0.” She makes a great point: exploit the natural audience size of MySpace and YouTube to “advertise” projects on Wikispaces. Food for thought. Hmm.

Really food for thought. To harness their existing social networks on MySpace for service-related school-y spaces…. How engaging would that sort of project approach be for students?

Note to self: remember this for next year. Maybe an international student charity rock concert, with student-created “advertisements” posted on student social networks, all organized and managed by students? Proceeds to help a global cause? That would show them their power–and web 2.0’s. Global citizenship and all of that. (Thanks, Diane, for planting that citizenship seed in your comment.)