Beyond School

Who is the audience for this post? AudienceS is more accurate. They are people who are interested in:

1. Expanding the Global Cooling Project – I’ve never been so excited about anything, and an update is overdue;
2. Notes from the trenches of a teachergeek in his first weeks as tech coordinator at a new Apple 1:1 school (it’s been a hellish but fertile path so far);
3. Joining the second year of the 1001 Flat World Tales project (another overdue update);
4. How edublogger posts are stealthily replacing textbook readings in my AP Literature classroom.

In short, it’s a report from underneath the many different hats I’ve added to my wardrobe. I’m astonished by what my life has become after 7 short months of edublogging and edtech experimentation. I would never have predicted wearing any of these hats this time last year. So here goes:

1. Project Global Cooling / Citizenship 2.0: Real-world Learning without Grades or Homework – We’re Public

I think I learned a lesson about timing this summer: don’t try to generate collaborative ideas during vacation, because most people are very sensibly signing out for some downtime. And by the time they sign back in, all the blog posts will be buried in the archives.

In June and July, I wrote my way into a project idea that has taken root here in Seoul, and that wants to take root around the world as well. It’s more ambitious than the 1001 Flat World Tales – and far more relevant – but it’s also far less labor-intensive for teachers. Best of both worlds.

If you’re aware of the Live Earth Concerts that took place this summer in eight cities around the world, all web-hosted as the “festive” slice of the far more serious challenge of raising consciousness and creating sane lifestyle changes in response to the looming challenge of climate change and global warming, then the Project Global Cooling idea will make sense to you. Change the high-profile celebrities and professional web designers, computer graphics artists, journalists, filmmakers, etc to the young adults in our schools, and you have Project Global Cooling.

In a nutshell: around the world on Earth Day ‘08 (April 19, Saturday), student-organized “downtown music festivals” will take place. The performers will be local musicians – student bands, college bands, local bands. The concerts will be filmed, uploaded to YouTube or whatever, and embedded on the Project Global Cooling website, to form a gallery of world music featuring the next generation of world musicians.

Again, this is precisely what Live Earth did. Bands in the US, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia (?) performed on the same day. They filmed the concerts and streamed them on a central website – one that included MUCH MORE THAN MUSIC.

Our website will also feature much more: a collaborative blog authored by students involved in organizing this project in their locales around the world, documenting their successes and failures as they attempt to be taken seriously as citizens, not students; young adults, not children; community members, not disenfranchised “kids.”

It will also feature short, student-made promotional videos aimed at going “viral,” addressing Global Warming and the small things we can do to forestall it, with a style modeled after real-world videographers a la MTV, not “schooly” homework videos. Like the world music gallery, the PSA video gallery will accentuate the local culture while addressing the global problem. They’ll be as varied as the imaginations of our young contributors: comic, hip, sexy, ironic, brooding, whatever they decide. The goal, again, is to make videos so attractive that they become viral – with a purpose. My Seoul students have some great scripts already, aimed at projecting the Korean look and attitude onto the world stage.

Other categories on the website include (but are not limited to):

• “Student-powered”: gallery featuring the most remarkable accomplishments by students around the world in making this thing happen by April
• “Earth News”: student summaries and reflections on the latest updates from the scientific community about issues related to climate change
• “Green Entrepreneurship”: reports from the business-oriented about commercial opportunities to reap profit while at the same time benefiting society
• “Skeptic’s Corner”: a page devoted to any controversies about the science its challengers
• Podcasts and radio shows are obviously easy to include on any and all of these pages.

Finally, all banners, graphics, flash animations, slideshows, graphs, charts, etc, will be contributed by the students wanting to do more with the skills they learn in their computer classes than turn a product in to teacher for a grade.

The beauty: 28 students in my high school have signed up for this project as an activity block – a club – at school. There are no grades, no homework, no lesson plans involved. But there is much learning to come. Students at my school will be involved in real-world learning as they:

• propose to school administrators that the school adopt and adhere to a “Carbon-neutral Pledge,” with short- and long-term steps to reduce our school’s carbon footprint permanently. (Buying different lightbulbs, for example, is a simple, concrete, and consequential step the school can take. And it’s win-win: lower energy bills for the school, less emissions for the future from our school forevermore. Many more such steps are easy enough to take.)
• plan and execute proposals for corporate and community sponsorship, donation of a live music club’s performance space, etc.
• make films.
• coordinate and network with other students worldwide working toward the same goal.
• manage the funds using real-world accounting skills.
• promote the concert using real-world marketing and promotion skills.
• discover that you can “have fun doing good,” and that citizenship doesn’t have to be boring.
• learn real-world web 2.o power.
• make a documentary film of the whole year’s project.
• on and on.

Best of all: like the 1001 Tales, this is an endless project, to be grown, improved, repeated annually. Picture the archives of the PGC website as more and more content is added to each of its galleries over the years. Picture the learning of each new year of students as they learn from the prior year’s successes, and improve upon its weaknesses. And picture, finally, the fact that world-changing habits of mind and action will be instituted in the culture of each school and community that joins this project. (And don’t forget to picture the proud fun when the music is playing on a fine April day, thanks to the power and energy of students who decided to branch out and become people too.)

If this isn’t enough, click the “world citizenship” label on this blog to see all the posts related to this project since its inception.

Many adults expressed interest when I announced this, so I’m hoping that they’ll remember, get in touch, and pass the project idea on to their student network locally. Any interested adults and students can join the PGC’s planning Ning at The Global Cooling Collective (http://globallycool.ning.com). I recently switched the Ning from private, members-only, to public. I hope that makes it easier to get involved.

And I’d like to link to the PGC blog itself – it’s already got some nice banners and graphics from my Seoul students, and credited to them. But I can’t make that link because….

2. My Techno Life is Cursed: On “Breaking” Skype, Ning, WordPressMU, Moodle, and Other Joys of a Noob Tech Coordinator

Westley Fields in Australia cracked me up in an email last week, the day after my 1:1 Parent Presentation with Google Earth and Skype crashed and burned with Skype’s global outage, 10 minutes before I presented.

“YOU BROKE SKYPE!” he wrote.

As it turns out, that was just a warm-up. Since then, I have broken:

Ning. Twice:

First, I was locked out of my AP Literature class Ning for two days. More bad timing (more of Somebody Up There’s wrath): on the same day I sent a support request to the folks at Ning, who are always stellar with prompt responses and fixes, they disabled their “support@ning.com” address to switch to a web-based help-ticket form on their site. So they didn’t see my help requests. And I didn’t read their auto-generated response to my email requests, because I figured they’d say the same old “Thanks we’ll be in contact soon.” Instead, they said (I discovered two hours ago), “WE WON’T READ THIS. GO TO THE NEW SUPPORT PAGE AND MAKE YOUR REQUEST THERE.”

So for three or four days, I sat on my hands, locked out of my own virtual classroom, waiting. My students, meanwhile, had full access to the site. They must have laughed at the idea of a teacher unable to enter his own class.

Anyway, Ning fixed it when I emailed Gina, and we discovered the breakdown. I love Ning.

Second, Ning recently upgraded their service so that network creators can switch private sites to public, and vice versa. I’d made the Global Cooling Collective private, but wanted to switch that for easier growth, so I pushed all the right buttons. A Ning bug, though, made it shut down the site altogether. So PGC visitors from this blog reached a “closed” message.

Ning fixed it today. We’re open now. (Check out the Seoul group. It’s active and interesting.)

Moodle and WordPressMU:

Short version: I tried to upgrade Moodle on our remote server. I still don’t speak PHP or MySQL database, am not a whiz at cPanel and WebHost Manager, and all this website admin biz. But I tried anyway. Failure. I dinked, deleting this file and that on the Moodle server, trusting instinct and vague hypotheses.

By the end, I’d screwed things up so royally, I just admitted defeat and sent a request to the server support to wipe the Moodle site clean. I had a back-up, so I would just reinstall the whole thing.

Pop quiz: Mr. Burell requested WHAT to be wiped clean?

If you answered “the Moodle site,” you’re a better reader than the server support guy (may he burn in hell).

He didn’t only nuke Moodle. He nuked my school’s entire WordPressMU site.

So I’m back where I started last year: a blank server.

Luckily, I backed up the school blogs a day or two earlier, so they’re not lost. I just don’t know how to put them back. The support staff for my server offered to reinstall for me, but dammit, I want to learn this stuff, so I said no. I’ll learn and succeed, or die trying. Once I have this down, the future is golden. How hard can it be to figure out how to change code in a PHP file, to create a MySQL database? Trained monkey stuff.

Then, serendipity: I posted about Lyceum yesterday as a possible alternative to the slow WPMU (their support forums can be frustrating and unkind as well, depending on the day). Lyceum’s creator replied to that post, and I invited him to collaborate on a screencast demonstrating how to install Lyceum using WebHost Manager and cPanel. He’s going to talk me through the process on Skype tonight, using Vyew to see my Seoul desktop on his in New York, and we’ll have a screencast for all sorry bastards like me who can’t decipher the tech-head gobbledygook as they try to simply put a blogging software on a server.

So stay tuned on more about Lyceum for student blogging. Think “WordPress MU, but faster and nicer.”

Other errata as tech coordinator: Lessons learned:

1. Teachers don’t like being learners: I made screencasts for MacBook and Firefox setup before the teachers received their laptops. I anticipated every difficulty and need. I made a support blog for the teachers to see these screencasts. Two weeks later, almost none of them have taken the 20 minutes to save themselves a year of headaches. Instead, they’re emailing me requests for personal visits to “teach” them 1 on 1. “Did you watch the tutorial?” “No….”
2. IT Managers kill me: It’s really hard to get the IT Manager to allow the school server to be useful to teachers. Or to ask this teacher for input before making decisions that will affect all us teachers. For example, the student email setup: Here is an exhaustive list of all the family names in Korean society: Kim, Park, Choi, Hong, Lee, Kang. I may have left two or three out. When you’ve got ten Lees, Parks, and Chois at each grade level, and dozens 9-12, creating school email accounts using a familyname+first initial doesn’t cut it. I had to fight ten objections to simply adding a two-digit graduation year suffix to each name (lpark09) to at least tell teachers if this LPark was the freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior LPark. When that didn’t work, I told the principal. He pulled rank, so it’s happening. Lesson: be pushy and proactive. Probe the IT staff for any news on what they’re doing that will affect the classroom before they finish it. Don’t expect them to ask for your input; don’t expect to be happy if you don’t give that input while there’s time.

That’s enough for now.

3. 1001 Flat World Tales, Year 2:

I’m behind on contacting Dana, Cindy, Jo, somebody in Kazakhstan, Chris, Michele, and others about this year’s 1001 Flat World Tales – 2.0. I’ll be in touch soon. Lots of room for new ideas and synergy. I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this iteration.

Chris and Michele are working on the final touches for the website, eBook, “blook,” and paperback version of the first edition of published tales. Stay tuned.

4. Edublogs as Textbooks?

As for using edublogs to replace lessons in textbooks, I’ll only say this: I’ve assigned students to read Christian Long’s post about “what an A paper is,” and to watch Wes Fryer’s “Engage, Don’t Enthrall” video podcast, and will soon add Carolyn Foote’s post on how to search online smartly, all in the first three classes of the year. This is interesting to me. My Bloglines edublogs folders are morphing into textbook replacements.

Sorry for the length. I just wanted to get a few monkeys off my back.

Any Lyceum users out there? I just stumbled across it as a possible alternative to WordPress MU. Lyceum’s database structure seems configured to give faster loads (WPMU load time has always driven me crazy, though it’s probably my own fault as administrator), while at the same time using WordPress (not MU) as its blog platform. I think I even read that it’s not as restrictive as WP with Java and Flash embeds, and thus sounds like it might approach Blogger in terms of easy functionality.

Like WPMU, it’s a multi-user set-up. From its “about” page:

Stand-alone, multi-user blog services make a lots of sense to us, and to a lot of other people. Lyceum is ibiblio’s contribution to this growing collection of tools. At its core, Lyceum is a minimally-featured enhancement to WordPress. We let WordPress do what it does well; we simply added nice things like smart administrative controls, an easy-to-use installer, enterprise-oriented database architecture, support for load-balancing, all the while focusing on flexibility, security and usability.

Curious to hear anybody’s experience of it. We launch our blogging slice at school very soon, so I need to decide to either stay with WPMU or jump ship and install Lyceum quickly.

[Update: By the way, the student comments in the first panel are quoted from our class Ning. So are my comments in the following two panels. I'm not making this up.]

Thanks to Diane Cordell, librarian/educator and word- and image-smith extroardinaire, for inspiring me to take my first stab at ToonDo. True to my worst nature, it’s way too wordy. But damn, I have a lot to say about this: so many of my students hate poetry – because of school.

Did I ever mention I’m addicted to weekend blog think-alouds?

You might know that last week, Somebody Up There damned me with a colossal – and unheard-of – global Skype failure, ten minutes before my big Google Earth World Skype Tour with educator-experts from around the world.

I just re-discovered Google Lit Trips while reading Joe Wood’s blog (lots of people seemed to like that Screencast-o-matic teaching idea), and downloaded a .kmz Google Earth file that was a “literary tour” of one of my very favorite novels, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. It’s a very cool way to see the geography of literary works, and worth checking out on that score alone.

But it got me thinking about another way to do the Google Earth / Skypecast presentation, in an asynchronous way, using links to recordings of interviewees that are “pinned” to their location on Google Earth.

It would be a “best-of-both-worlds” thing to have interviewees record a “canned” comment on, say, Yackpack, and pin that recording to their location as a Plan B (and, come to think of it, as a permanent archive of the presentation when saved as a .kmz file), while at the same time having as many guests on Skype in real time for a synchronous, real-time conversation as Plan A.

Does that make sense?

This is all part of a bigger realization I’m having about what learning is. What I mean is this: The whole Google Earth Tour / Skypecast parent presentation was an idea I had, but did not know how to do. So, in terms of real-world pedagogy, I was a “student” under pretty ideal learning conditions: I had a project in my head that I was excited about pulling off; I had a problem to solve, because I didn’t know how in blazes to do it; I knew some tools that could do it, if I learned them; and I used the “bricolage” method – who was that French anthropologist who came up with that idea? Another dead college memory – to create knowledge out of the “found” things at hand: Google Earth’s help menu, people in my network, my blog to hyperlink “shout-outs” to my invitees, etc. There was no rule-book, and, but for an Act of God, it would have worked.

My point? It was all “real-world project-based learning.” Nobody taught me, nobody assigned me this, and there was no prescribed teacher checklist to get this thing done.

Better still: due to cosmically improbable hiccups, my first attempt failed. So. I. am. STILL. LEARNING. Moreover, I’m LEARNING HOW TO NOT QUIT IN THE FACE OF FAILURE.

Which brings me to this DEPRESSING QUESTION: How can I create real-world learning opportunities like this for “students” in the fake world of schools? Because of that effing institutional imperative to brand all student activity with a grade, schools teach “students” to avoid ambitious projects, and cling to the safe and easy, to escape having an “F” seared into their schooly hides.

It’s exactly the wrong learning for the future citizens in my classroom.

I don’t know Nick Senger, but just discovered his blog, Teen Literacy Tips: Working to Improve the Teaching of Literature, because he linked to my Screencast-o-matic for AP Lit post. (I just love how that works.)

Nick’s blog is a keeper for Language Arts teachers. Here’s a very simple, elegant poetry movie assignment he posted about – and modeled – on his blog. The timing is perfect, since I’d planned something similar, but typically more complex than necessary. Nick reduces the task to three easy steps.

And here’s his video showing his own success at the project:

There are many more great posts at his blog. Do yourself a favor, English teachers, and blogroll this guy! Another rising edublogger to learn from! [Update: "Rising" edublogger? Nick's been doing it waaay longer than I have. He's an old pro and award-winning teacher.]

Dana Huff tagged me for this Teaching Meme.

1. I am a good teacher because… (sez who???) if this is true, it would be because I’m an “anti-teacher.” I pity students for being stuck in school, for too often being treated like inmates, and having to sit through what they have to sit through for 12 critical years. I try to mitigate this by a) re-naming myself “learner,” and them “learner” too; b) trying to make them conscious that they’re young adults who deserve to be treated as such, despite the infantilization they’re subjected to by school, family, society, custom; c) not shying away from controversial issues; d) emphasizing problem-solving and frustration-tolerance as key real-world virtues; e) giving them an anonymous feedback forum year-round to criticize anything they don’t like in our classroom, and responding to it; f) replacing homework with relevant projects. (I really should get my students to address this question.)
2. If I weren’t a teacher I would be a… I have no idea. A starving filmmaker? Writer? Singer-songwriter? Founder of an unschool? Full-time blogger?
3. My teaching style is… relaxed, non-authoritarian, relevant, high-energy, philosophical, wonder-aimed, and encourages principled non-comformity and laughter.
4. My classroom is… a complete mess, with most of my favorite books from home on classroom shelves for students to check out, desks in different arrangements every day and, if I had my way, no desks at all.
5. My lesson plans are… open, loose, often thrown out the window in favor of spontaneous ideas, constant revisions, and/or student input. I’ve never understood how people can follow lesson plans made more than a couple days in advance. “The map is not the territory.” And I tend to get creative in the midst of units in ways I can’t when they’re at abstract distances.
6. One of my teaching goals is… to create space for self-discovery and self-direction in my classroom, so my learners may become writers, and find both themselves and a self-selected expertise through long-term classroom blogging.
7. The toughest part of teaching is… resisting institutional pressures. And resisting an all-consuming love for the world of “teaching.” I’m totally unbalanced, but love it. So it’s not a problem for me.
8. The thing I love about teaching is… my job is to share my love of literature, history, writing, learning, questioning young minds, and self-discovery. And to be teaching in the most revolutionary moment in the history of literacy since Gutenberg 500 years ago.
9. A common misconception about teaching is… that it’s easy. Another, possibly, is that it’s effective. I more and more wonder what young people would learn over 12 years if they were free to choose their own pathways in life, instead of being coercively incarcerated in schools. Schools are not natural, so they may not be healthy.
10. The most important thing I’ve learning since I started teaching is… without projects and creativity, learning is probably temporary. And to trust my nose: if it smells boring or schooly, it probably is.

You’re it: Anthony, Cindy, Jo, Vivek, Doug, James, Christian. (And no hard feelings if you opt out. This one’s tough, the timing is tougher, and I wonder how much I’ll agree with what I wrote when I read it tomorrow

I really love Screencast-o-matic (SOM), the free, web-based screencast creator. I’ve been using it to make short edtech tutorials for teachers (who aren’t using them, of course) for the last week. But this Saturday morning, I used it for my students in AP Literature.

A few days ago, I had them do a timed writing of an old AP Lit essay question under exam conditions–40 minutes to read a challenging poem and write an essay that could make or break their opportunity to get college credit for our course.

Many students had a hard time with it. Many didn’t manage to write more than half a page, hand-written–two small paragraphs–for the assignment. (The poetry essays are apparently always what they do worst on in the real AP exam, which is why we’re starting the year with six weeks of poetry.) So I did the assignment myself, with headphones and mic on, talking through each stage of my own approach to taking timed essay exams on poetry.

I’ll share their feedback on the value of this as a learning tool as soon as possible. Here’s how it looks (but you really should take a glimpse at the AP Lit channel on SOM itself, because it allows comments, time-stamped notes, downloads, and more. It’s awesome!) :

Part 1: Attacking the question, annotating the poem:

Part 2: Writing the essay (part 1)

Part 3: Writing the essay (part 2)

First, I tidied up the horrible formatting and added the links I neglected to add in the last post.

Second, I have to add that the night was wonderful anyway. It’s not often you begin a new stage in your career as an educator by addressing your school’s parents onstage, and asking them to raise their hands if they remember anything from high school – and then informing them that you, yourself, don’t.

The night got even better after the event. My two principals, the Apple presenter, and the Korean Apple distributors all went out for “a” beverage at a local Irish pub. Funny thing about Korean culture – they like their late-night socializing after work, and succeeded in persuading us occidentals to eat and drink more.

The conversation was fun, the paper-assessing didn’t get done, and life this morning was good, if rumpled

We expect my presentation to start around 7.30 p.m. That would make it:

• Thursday 11 a.m. in London
• Thursday 12.30 a.m. (ouch) in Hawaii (sorry, Chris! I owe you! Or you can send me a YackPack voice message?)
• Thursday 4.30 a.m. (carrumba) in Denver (Karl, how about a YackPack message?)
• Thursday 5.30 p.m. in Bangkok
• Thursday 8.30 p.m. in NSW, Australia
• Thursday 6.30 a.m. in New Jersey
• Hey Vivek in India – you game?

The actual Skype talk itself would probably come about 15 minutes later, but I’ll give you a heads-up call at the times above. Please confirm I got your times right?