Beyond School

I just left this comment on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog post entitled “How can we help shape teacher attitudes toward technology?”

Before you read it, don’t get me wrong. I think Ning is a great thing – but, at the risk of sounding like a prig and a purist, I don’t think it’s in the same ballpark as open blogging. And I worry that teachers who mistake these walled blogs (or social blogworks?) for “open range” blogging will never learn the crucial role that Technorati, tagging, hyperlinking, and such play as the “ligaments” of the connectivity that is real blogging. And thus never be able to introduce their students to that experience.

Ning and 21classes and so forth just seem isolated, and isolating, by comparison.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this. Our in-house staff development day is Wednesday – only four days away – and I’m not yet decided on how I’m going to run my mandatory training session. The Old School instinct says “Direct their learning, decide what they need to know, and make them learn it.” But another impulse says the idea to let them choose the pathway based on their own multiple intelligences, and toward the goal of unlocking their creativity, is the better way.

And a third voice says, “Maybe there’s a Middle Way.” (Can I really lose this opportunity to introduce them to RSS and social bookmarking?)

So here’s that comment:

This is a timely post for me to read, as we’re giving an in-house “Learning 2.0″ conference at my high school in Korea to present what four of us department heads learned at the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference.

Since I’m 1/4 teacher, 3/4 tech coordinator for the HS, all teachers have to attend my session. I’m leaning towards the WIIFM ["What's In It For Me?"] approach, but with this twist: I want to test the hypothesis that, if teachers discovered their own creativity, based on the strengths of their “multiple intelligences” profiles, by learning to express that creativity through some “digital art” they don’t know about with iLife or the read/write web, then my hope/hunch is this: their excitement at unlocking their own creativity will gradually trickle down into their instruction.

This is partly influenced by my own discovery of how easy it is, after 20 years of fantasizing about it, to actually do music composition using GarageBand (we just went 1:1 as an Apple Laptop School, so all teachers have MacBooks).

There is talk at my school of “assigning” all teachers to blog on Ning or 21classes, but I’m ambivalent about that. It treats teachers as “students” (or as mere “teachers” instead of humans with unlocked potential), it treats web 2.0 as “homework” (or simply “work”), and worse still, it treats forced blogging on a walled garden as the real thing (those of us who blog know that it goes beyond writing posts on Ning). It also forces writing, when there are so many other modes of expression that some teachers might be more comfortable with. All of that is a recipe for aversion, it seems to me.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, though I know you’re enjoying Manhattan right now.

I made a staff development wiki that sorts “digital arts” (activities) into separate “menus” based on the different multiple intelligences that is open to all for editing and using. I’d be curious, again, to hear any feedback on any of the above ramble

Enjoyed the post.

Thoughts? (And Patrick and Anthony, I’m particularly interested to hear your views.)

Photo: Eduardo Amorim

More from the previous posts. I’m having a lot of fun creating that staff development wiki. The “Digital Arts for Multiple Intelligences” pages are coming along nicely, but unevenly, so your input would be great (thanks, Patrick and Diane!).

I’ve also got a page called “Links to Real World Examples of 21st Century Educators.” I’ve added links myself, but…

…as my high-speed middle school colleague Anthony Armstrong suggests in his recent post, the best way to compile examples of 21st c. classrooms and educators is to invite you all to collaborate and share.

I updated the wiki to include the password (“welcome,” w/o quotation marks), so come on over and add your own classes (or favorite examples from others), and your favorite digital tools for the various multiple intelligences. (And while you’re there, why not take the Multiple Intelligences questionnaire and learn your alleged strengths? 40 quick questions and a cool little graphic is yours. I’d love to hear your profiles in comments

It’s good for all – drives traffic and readership to the classrooms that want them, and gives us all food for thought on how we might approach The Next Thing.

And while you’re at it: there are so many great staff development wikis already out there. Feel free to start a page and add your own, and/or others, for a master list. Why not?

Photo credit: Flickr Tag Network by toby maloy

UPDATE: The wiki password is: welcome

As promised in an earlier post tonight, I set up the staff development workshop wiki with pages dedicated to web 2.0 and other digital tools best suited to each of Gardner’s eight multiple intelligences.

I hope you’ll agree to two things:

1. This type of organization for web 2.0 / digital literacies and creativities will be useful for teachers and students alike; and
2. There’s no way I can do it better than we can. (C’mon – it’s a wiki. That means it’s open to collaboration!)

It’s straightforward enough: If you know any iLife (okay, or PC) or web-based tool that would be most attractive and fun for the eight multiple intelligences, click on the link for that intelligence and add it! I’ve already started with the Musical Intelligence page, but would love to see your additions to it and all the others.

Need a refresher on those intelligences? They are (with links to their wiki page):

1. Kinesthetic (Body Smart)
2. Logical (Number Smart)
3. Intrapersonal (Myself Smart)
4. Visual – Spatial (Picture Smart)
5. Linguistic (Word Smart)
6. Interpersonal (People Smart)
7. Musical (Music Smart)
8. Naturalistic (Nature Smart)

I really hope some of you will play here!

…the USA is so free?

More from Save the Internet dot com (and watch the comments for the corporate lobbyists’ responses – they’re apparently paid to find posts like this, hit reply, and leave a tossed salad of obfuscations, red herrings, and straw men. Logic and debate teachers, help yourself to this real-world example.

I’d apologize about being political, but gee, doesn’t democracy sort of demand it? Anyway, my future as a teacher using web 2.0 sort of requires that web 2.0 stays around. Free citizen radio didn’t a century ago – and corporate history is trying to repeat itself.

Here’s the latest from Save the Internet:

Dear Clay,

Tell Congress: Stop the Gatekeepers

You’ve probably heard that Verizon censored text messages sent by the pro-choice group NARAL. They claim it was a glitch. And they feel really, really bad about it.

Sorry, Verizon. That’s not good enough. This is just the latest example in the long list of phone company efforts to block, filter or interfere with the free flow of information over 21st century communications networks.

Take Action: Protect Free Speech Everywhere!

In August, AT&T censored a live webcast of a Pearl Jam concert just as lead singer Eddie Vedder criticized President Bush. AT&T said it was a glitch.

Both Verizon and AT&T illegally handed over private customer phone records to the National Security Agency. The phone companies first denied it and then started a secret campaign with the White House to gain immunity from any lawsuits.

This pattern of abuse shows that powerful phone companies cannot be trusted to safeguard our basic freedoms. The democratic principles of free speech and open communication are too important to be entrusted to corporate gatekeepers. Whether it’s liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, pro-choice or pro-gun, the phone companies can’t pick and choose what messages get through.

Censorship by AT&T and Verizon shows us what we can expect in a future where these network gatekeepers gain control over the free flow of information. Congress must reaffirm its commitment to free speech on the Internet, on cell phones, on our airwaves — everywhere!

Tell Congress: Stop the Gatekeepers

We’ve had it with phony apologies from phone companies. Congress must act now to protect free speech and the free flow of information.

Thank you for all that you do,

Josh Silver
Executive Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net

1. Spread the word. Tell your friends about this important campaign.

2. Support our work by contributing to the Free Press Action Fund today.

3. See what people are saying about Verizon’s recent efforts to block text messaging at the Free Press Action Network and SavetheInternet.com.

4. Read about AT&T’s efforts to cover its tracks after blocking a Pearl Jam live concert webcast and the latest on the phone companies’ secret campaign to stay above the law.

Tell your friends about this campaign at: www.action.freepress.net/campaign/verizon/forward

If you received this message from a friend, you can click here to become a Free Press activist.

That last post was supposed to report this:

1. Since those first two fragments I composed on GarageBand, I spent a couple or three hours watching Atomic Learning’s GarageBand screencast tutorials (paid subscription required), and they taught me a few things. Most importantly, they taught me how to change the key of different loops and parts of the song so you’re not stuck on one chord the whole time. (You can only go so far on the tonic.) Hint: “Tracks > Master Track.” That’s where you can take that C major tonic chord to the F sub-dominant (the “IV”) and the G dominant (“V”), and voila, instant blues or rock songs. You can do more than that, of course.

2. Wes Fryer showed us his midi keyboard, an M-Audio Axiom 29 model, in Shanghai. I found a dealer here in Seoul, chose to get the 5-octave Axiom 49 plus an Axiom SP-2 sustain pedal (total cost: USD $380 or so), and my soon-to-be better half helped me order it on the phone, and it’s going to be delivered tomorrow. That’s a picture of it, above. See those square black pads on the upper right? They can each be programmed as a different percussion instrument (probably other things too), and are touch-sensitive.

I can’t wait to play with this baby. If any of you are fans of Leonard Cohen’s later works – say, I’m Your Man and on – you know that he has done some beautiful stuff setting voice and lyrics to very simple music tracks. I’d bet money that he didn’t use much more than GarageBand (or something as simple) and a keyboard like mine to make his Ten New Songs cd in 2001.

OMG. I hope the manual isn’t in Korean.

I posted recently about learning from Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop how easy it is to compose original music on Apple’s GarageBand. I posted my first two fragments (one funk, one trance), both of which I made in less than 20 minutes, and made in front of a student audience during a demo. More interestingly, that post includes what Jason, a teacher down the hall, strutted into my classroom the next day to show off – his own very first composition, a catchy little hip-hop piece.

Carolyn Foote put a tweet out on my Twitbin yesterday

If anyone wants to twitter “One trait of a good staff development workshop” for my teachers, that’d be great–doing this workshop all day!

Remembering Patrick Higgins‘ typically innovative approach a few weeks back of rounding up any edublogger volunteers to join his teachers in New Jersey on a Skypecast, in which teachers asked the questions and led us (Carolyn, Konrad Glogowski, and me) into discussions about classroom blogging – and remembering Will Richardson’s “unconference” approach to a workshop he led in Shanghai this month – I replied to Carolyn with this: “Interactive, unconference – let them guide (like Patrick’s Skype session with us and Konrad).”

Now, I know this requires a Mac with GarageBand, but I’m going to pass this little anecdote on, anyway, because you may be able to adapt it with cross-platform things. Here it is: I put an “allstaff” email out labeled something like “Be a Songwriter in 20 minutes with GarageBand.” In the email, I attached the mp3 of my first composition, and shared that anybody could learn to create a song on GarageBand in a flash. And I invited all-comers to let me know if they wanted me to show them how.

I got six replies (out of 30 teachers, not bad) the first day. And again, Jason had already started composing within 24 hours of seeing how easy it is now.

So my gut says – and I’m repeating my previous post here, because I think it bears repeating: Workshops that present technology as a teaching tool – something “schooly” – might be less effective, as Wes Fryer and Gary Stager would probably agree, than presenting it as a creativity tool.

We’ve read a million times (and should write it a million more) that teachers cannot understand blogging, much less use it effectively in their classrooms, if they haven’t experienced doing blogging themselves (and even that’s too simple, since they need to do more than just write online to really understand blogging – but that’s a later post). That’s a similar sermon to what I’m preaching here. But anybody who has tried to persuade teachers to begin blogging knows it’s an up-cliff battle almost all the time. All the teachers (and administrators) I’ve encouraged to begin blogging have resisted with such claims as, “But I don’t have time to write every day” (rebuttal: Moses included no Law saying “Thou Shalt Blog Daily”), or “I’m not a good writer” (a response worth its own post, later, or addressed sort of at the end of my last one), or “I don’t have anything to say” (a cause for weeping).

These are all responses we have to respect, because well, there they are: cold hard realities.

But the easy seduction of six teachers into creating their own music with GarageBand suggests that maybe we should remember that, like our students, our teachers and admin too possess multiple intelligences (and check out this great interview with Howard Gardner at Edge.com, my favorite science/philosophy/culture online mag).

And maybe we should approach Staff Development Workshops by having a menu of “digitally creative activities” grouped under headings for all those multiple intelligences.

So: a sketch of the process that I might try out next week for our own workshop:

Step One: Take a multiple intelligences inventory and discover your strongest intelligence.
Step Two: On the “Digital Arts” menu, select an activity you want to learn under your specific intelligence type.
Step Three: Alone or in groups, go at it, and ask for help whenever you need it.

Uh-oh. This calls for a wiki to host that menu.

Often when I have ideas, I tend to stall and falter, out of some perfectionistic strain that says, “Don’t commit to trying this until it’s perfect.” But somebody’s remark recently – Doug Noon’s, maybe? who has some great thoughts and comment-resources about staff development on this post, by the way – that learning and teaching are “always in beta” helps. I’ll make the wiki and invite all-comers to comment and contribute.

Has anyone else tried the “personal creativity” intro, instead of the “classroom tool” one, for staff workshops? Anybody have anything to report on that?

Because I can’t help but say it: Even if we love our jobs, the word “job” is still aversive – especially in comparison with the word “creativity.” Don’t we all have creative yearnings? And isn’t satisfying them more possible now than ever before?

And wouldn’t discovering that possibility by unlocking your own creativity be a much more powerful motivator than being told you’re expected to use this stuff in your class?

I can’t help but think that, once teachers find themselves making music, films, photo-collages, whatever, creatively, then the creative classroom use of these tools will follow.

Photo Credits:
Photos 1 and 3 by Darwin Bell
Photo 2 by Auntie P
Photo 4 by Robby Garbett
Photo 5 by urban penguin

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 – share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer – a waste of time, mostly – but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning – through – failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

–

*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school – and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog

I couldn’t resist grabbing this screenshot of the Answers Firefox add-on defining the word “grok” in this context: beneath OED lexicographer and “Dictionary Evangelist” Erin McKean’s TED talk on 21st C. lexicography, and above Graham, who rightly asked in one of two funny comments what the hell I was trying to say in one of the many embarrassing sentences I bang out on these pages.

So sue me. I get exuberant.

But cereal, folks: look at that picture: it even sources this bit of slang back to Heinlein’s originating coinage. When I was a kid, I had to walk through the snows of the school hallways ten miles uphill backwards to get that kind of info in the library. Kids these days don’t know how easy they have it.

Do you grok it now, Graham?

I’m catching up on grading and assessing on my AP Literature Ning – that’s where most assignments are posted, so student-people can see each others’ work, and my replies to everybody, not just to them – and was wowed by JungHee.

How? I assigned Keats‘ stunning last sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were Stedfast as Thou Art,” as a four-stage response exercise. Those stages were in four forums:

1. Read the poem and journal your first impressions.
2. Draw the poem’s imagery, then journal how your first impression changed.
3. Record and upload an mp3 of yourself reciting the poem – and read it as well as you can.
4. Journal how reciting and listening to your recital further changed your impressions of the poem.

In short: read it with the switched-off laziness that is par for the course with homework; SEE the imagery (and if you’re really sharp, discover that you can touch those images, hear them, smell them, taste them, too); sing the poem’s sounds (albeit atonally); and connect those sounds to the sense of the poem by hearing them.*

I’m really enjoying reading and replying to these forums. The reflections are so revealing of each student’s level of accomplishment in savoring poetry.

But JungHee threw me for a loop. He recorded his mp3 on a music editor, noticed the patterns of the “p” phonemes in his reading, and seemed to be able to notice sound more by seeing it in the digital soundwaves – doing a spectrographic analysis, basically – than by hearing it unaided by technology. So he shared by uploading his discovery, which I do here as well:

Here’s what JungHee said in his forum about this:

What I noticed in my sound wave was that there were frequent “high peaks”.
I posted the picture of this as attachment below for clarification..
All the “mountain looking” ones are the places where the “P” sound made the air go into the mic with too much force. So we can tell that there were some… “edged” words throughout the poem (?)

I don’t know what to make of this, but thought it was interesting to share.

Back to branding my student-people with tattoos for their permanent records….(*grrrr…*)

–

*This is all based on the conviction that one drawback of our multimedia age is that it has led to the atrophying of that mental muscle we call the imagination. That is not a good thing for our experience of the sublime and beautiful. And I love my student-people too much to deprive them of the opportunity to make the ascent to that plane.

This TED Talk [update: about "Redefining the Dictionary"] is a must-watch for 20th Century Students (there are more of them than we realize) who are as reactionary as their parents about Why 2.0:

And Graham Wegner’s presentation about Personal Learning Environments makes great use of metaphors to sketch out the bewildering shape of our attempts to transform Learning 2.0. I found his critiques of e-portfolio’s particularly interesting: too much work for teachers, not enough audience for students. In Shanghai recently, I was asking about the value of online student work without actual (as opposed to theoretically possible) audiences. (Non-Aussies and Kiwis, are you grokking my drumbeat about the value of Antipodean perspectives on education yet?)