Beyond 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.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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