Beyond School

[Series: Preface: The Seed--an Idea; Part 1: The Bud--a Concept; Part 2: The Blossom--a Project; Part 3: The Pollen--a Call; Part 4: The Honey--a Pedagogy; Part 5: The Bees--a Community]

Big ideas start small, and will grow unless you quit. And we’re not going to quit. To do so in the Web 2.0 Age (and the Age of Global Warming) would be too blind. It’s all too possible with the tools we have now.

My guest on this podcast: Suzie Boss, a founding director of the Learning Innovation and Technology Consortium, a nonprofit organization that promotes sustainable community change.

Ms. Boss is also the co-author of Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age (to be published by ISTE, November 2007).

The topic? Our “real-world project for the digital age”: a global “Concerts for Global Cooling 2008″ Earth Day campaign, organized, promoted, and executed by students around the world–and web-hosted with the best student rock bands all on the same website for “streaming concerts,” and student-produced digital works explaining global warming’s causes, challenges, and solutions. (Yes, I’m now totally willing to use “Live Earth” as a model. You should check out its website — and students should learn values, both human and digital, from it by imitation.)

The podcast is a 15-minute enhanced m4a file with “chapters” for easy navigation, images, and links to all the ideas and resources we discuss. These features only work if you download it to iTunes, and select “View > Artwork”. The images are shoddy, I admit, but I mainly did this at all to model enhanced podcasting for the students involved in this project, since they’ll all have MacBooks when we go 1:1 next fall. I want them to see some possibilities.

Many thanks to Ms. Boss for her permission to podcast this excerpt of our conversation. And read the subtitle of her forthcoming book again. Love it.

Click here to get your own player.