Beyond School

It’s been a heck of a week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. So here are some updates about 1) attempting to inspire a visionary foundation in my students’ approach to blogging (via the “Campsite Seminars” in the woods around our school, as posted about earlier after watching Christian Long’s segment of Dean Shareski’s “Design Matters” K12 Online presentation); 2) shifting Project Global Cooling - our globally collaborative, never-ending “citizenship 2.0″ project - into second gear with a self-hosted website, a Ustream tv channel, and more; and 3) gearing up for the second annual 1001 Flat World Tales creative writing workshop with new classrooms from new countries joining this year.

In Dreams Begin Realities: Seeking a Vision for Blogging via the Walden 2.0 / Campsite Seminars

“Digital Natives” my bright white…board. My seniors have no idea about weblogs, connective writing, Technorati, embedding html, tagging, RSS, and so forth. It’s been a struggle teaching them these nuts and bolts, but those mechanical tasks are done. For the record, that was Stage One of my re-tooled attempt to integrate writing instruction via blogging in my high school (as the English department head, I was able to push through a four-year plan in which students would write from grade 9 to 12 on the same blog, and write a sort of biographical reflection their senior year based on the evidence in those blogs).

So to recap:

Stage One: “The Machine”

1. Create a blog on our hosted WordPress MU
2. Claim it on Technorati
3. Claim it on Clustrmaps
4. Claim it on Sitemeter
5. Install all these in your sidebar
6. Install the Oddiophile Technorati Tag Generator in your Firefox bookmarks toolbar, and tag all entries aplit and aplit07
7. Choose a theme (I’ve installed over 100 in our server)
8. Choose a name, tagline, etc
9. Write an “About” page introducing yourself to your readers and telling them what they can expect on your space
10. Create a Bloglines account
11. Create Bloglines folders for each category of reading you think a “well-rounded, cultured person” should do
12. Find at least three blogs in each category that you like, and subscribe to them
13. Embed your Bloglines blogroll in your sidebar

They’ve done all that, with a few digitally-challenged exceptions.

Next, I wrote a “Guide to Quality Weblogs” for students to use as a rubric to critique each others’ blogs. It addresed every trait I could think of that goes into a quality blog, from theme design to post design, from content on the levels of the whole blog to content of individual posts, from connectivism via links to conversationalism via invitational conclusions in posts, prompt responses to comments, and more. I assigned each student to critique three other students’ blogs using this rubric, and leave their critiques not in the comments - who wants a comment for all to see that says “Your theme is boring and so are your ideas”? - but as Diigo annotations that only members of our class Diigo group can see.

Again, “Digital Natives” my patootie: many students left good comments that rightly belonged in the “comments” section as Diigo stickynotes, again showing they have no idea of the very basics of this world. But they did it. We’ll keep returning to these criteria over the coming seven months.

I told the students that I will be grading their blogs only in the beginning, and only based on this criterion: “Are you writing regularly?” If they’re not, they’ve got trouble on their hands. Otherwise, any content is okay. After all, it took me a month or more to find my own feet in my own blog. Let them stumble about for a while, and trust in time. I’ll only grade them again at the end of the quarter, as a major writing project grade (this is AP Literature and Composition, after all.)

So: the machine is assembled. Now for the soul - “the Ghost”:

Stage Two: Putting the Ghost in the Machine by Dreaming Your Blog’s Future

I had four camcorders charged, tapes re-wound and ready for a shoot, when students entered the class today. The timing was perfect: both classes were after lunch, on a golden autumn afternoon. The woods around us were ablaze with color, as were the mountain ridges surrounding our horizon. Sunny, beautiful. Perfect temperature. A perfect day for “Walden 2.0″.

I assigned the poetry readings for the next class’ seminars and got that out of the way.

Then I gave them a handout and talked them through the rationale behind it: trying, for once in their schooly lives, to become visionary - to imagine where they want connective blog-writing to have taken them at the end of the next seven months. And to articulate that vision for a brief video interview that they will embed in their about page (if they want to extract the audio and only use that, or combine it with a slideshow or whatever, to protect their identity, etc, that’s okay too).

The handout is nothing special, but it’s linked here on Google docs, public, if you want to use it. This is what it says:

The Campsite Seminars

No. 1: Dreaming Your Future into Being

“In dreams begin realities.”

–anonymous

“Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.”

–Anais Nin (20th c. French writer, mistress of Henry Miller)

Directions: Real simple. Gather your thoughts about the following questions. Bullet points are best. You want to only glance at these as you talk spontaneously during your filming. (And don’t worry, we can always re-shoot. Just be you, and you’ll be fine.)

1. What I want you (my readers and visitors) to know about me is….
2. My thoughts and feelings — positive and negative — about connective writing via weblogs are….
3. If I were free to study or apprentice in anything in the world — to sit at the feet of the best talents in the field, and learn from them — they would be people in the field(s) of….
4. What you can expect to see me exploring on my blog — sharing what I’ve read, what I think, who I like who also explores this subject(s) — is the subject of …..
5. What I hope visitors to my web-log will do is …..
6. Beyond my wildest dreams, after seven more months of writing for, to, and in the world, my efforts will lead to these results (personally, socially, professionally)…..

I gave them ten minutes or so of quiet time to create that vision (oh, you factory school bell schedule), then gave them a quick lesson on how to frame shots in the camera with quality.

Then we went to the woods.

The groups of four filmed each other discussing their vision in this beautiful setting, while I laid down and watched the sky and trees for twenty minutes. Ochre, russet, azure, gold: an eyes-open power-nap. (And don’t we notice autumn differently as we age?) I heard snippets of their talks, and liked what I heard.

Then we returned to the brick walls, and called it a day.

I’m going to be late for school if I keep writing this, so I’ll stop here, after adding the Murphy’s Law postscript: I’m trying to capture the footage from our Canon ZR800’s into iMovie, and iMovie doesn’t recognize the camcorder. It did last week. I’ve spent hours troubleshooting with no luck. Pray for me.

I’ll have to save those 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling updates for a later post, probably today.

(I’m still having trouble padding images. Sorry. Working on it.)

For more on classroom blogging, see these posts:

Photo credits (via search.creativecommons.org):
Liquid Silver Melts the Surface by .supernova.
il mio punto di vista by fabrizio
Zero Gravity by [auro]ra

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Dean Shareski and Cindy Barnsley gave me valuable (though tactfully veiled) criticism for my original “Cutting the Crap (from Student Movies)” video. To paraphrase, “That first part was really good.” ;-)I took the hint. I’ve divided the original into two shorter efforts, and added end credits attributing the Flickr photos I used to model that for students.

So now, Episode One is simply about finding legal images and videos for mash-ups using Creative Commons Search (with a quick Zamzar-to-download-YouTubes, etc, thrown in). And Episode Two is a re-mix of the Ken Burns Effect lesson, with an added intro: an example of how bad the Ken Burns Effect can look if not done skillfully, in the form of one of my own “crappy” iMovies of late.

I’ve put them both on a new page on my new WordPress home entitled “Cut the Crap,” so you can always find them there. But here they are anyway:

Episode One: Keeping it Legal with Creative Commons Search

Episode Two: Still Photo Skills with the Ken Burns Effect

For more posts on digital storytelling, see:

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This post has been sitting in draft form for a couple weeks, and in that time I think I can condense my thoughts about David’s keynote into this brief list:

1. A True Southerner: I’m a USA Southerner (from Chattanooga, Tennessee), and recognized a fellow traveller in Dave. Yes, he likes to tell a story, and take his sweet time in the telling - a Southerner to the bone. I’m no different. So I actually enjoyed listening to him, overall. I’d always found Dave’s blog posts too long for my own time-strapped tastes, so the difference between reading Dave and watching/listening to him was pleasantly interesting to note. Maybe I’ll start listening to his podcasts on my drive to work.

2. Dave as “Storyteller”: Warts and all, Dave still did a commendable job of attempting to create a complex design and structure in his presentation. The links to his keynote last year, the play with the same “modes of travel” motif, the three-generational personal anecdote structure: I enjoyed all of these things. Less talking head - perhaps less talking generally - and more imagery from the world would enhance Dave’s story (and I don’t buy his “I’m not good at visuals” excuse in his presentation - do your homework, Dave - you can learn and experiment ). And why so little music, etc?

3. Was there much new? I can’t say there was for me, but for others to whom “the story” is new, Dave’s telling of that story - with a bit of an edit, perhaps, of the Ender’s Game metaphor - might entertain as it edifies.

4. A Distressing Blind Spot: I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it: I find the omission of citizenship and pragmatic action in Dave’s thinking distressing. Whenever I check into his blog, I rarely see more than economic (workforce) and “informational” aspects of education as the focus. Since Dave has so much influence on our tribe, I wish this fetishism of knowledge and vocational training in Dave’s thinking (as I see it - please prove me wrong) would branch out into areas of citizenship and political engagement. Otherwise, what’s the point?

For the rest, here are my old notes:

For more on K12 Online Conference, check out these posts:

Many of the traditional boundaries - the walls, the textbooks, the desks in a straight row - these borders, these boundaries, are going away. And we’re in a position right now where we need to be resourcefully inventing, creating - along with our students - creating new boundaries, new places through which we can get traction…to move forward, to move in whatever direction we need to move in. (12.00)

Ender’s Game bit too long, yes.

Starbucks 13.00 - 16.50
What’s the point of Starbucks cities? Self-indulgent? Maybe - or maybe you have to understand Southerners in the USA. We also need to remember David’s “telling a new story” thrust - he’s trying to do this. The structure is more thoughtful on second watch than on first. 1.00 to get to “father getting ready for work” story. But he is setting up how different his job is from his father’s, through the Starbucks-as-office metaphor. Clerks in rows, etc: David’s future was not, as he and his father thought, “his father’s past.” Not new, not concise, but a good story. And only 4 minutes.

16.50-20.25

transition to basement office and job description: last generation message. Free agency. Yes, it’s in Did You Know, but it’s worth repeating.

20.25 - 27.50 Natives are networked
Back yard, children’s swingset. Native landscape is “not stable” - they’re adapting to the new constantly too. They’re shifting with the shifts too. Son’s video as hs jr. “He learned because he’s connected.” Can find people who can teach him to do what it is he wants to learn to do.

Redefining “digital divide” into networked and solitaries. “These kids aren’t human….” Magic. Social networks as “tentacles.” Classrooms chop them off. Great line about us not teaching the children who they are.

28.00 - Grollier’s as Information Landscape 1.0
Information flows and moves differently now: networked, digital, participatory, reader-directed, unmediated, no gate-keepers: critical to teach kids to find, evaluate, organize it into “personal digital libraries.”

Arithmetic: all numbers in digital world - how does that change math? Not sure I get this.

Producing “competitive information product” - information COMPETES now. (I still want to push beyond information, or hear more connection with non-informational activism to produce change, agency, citizenship in our young.) In fairness, David’s focus is literacy, not activism. I’ll keep playing Cassandra and warning that we have more urgent matters than digital library maintenance to educate our young about.

31.50 - 33.40
10 years from now. Personal physical health: an interesting aside. How many of us are laptop-potatoes now? Implicitly, a lot. I certainly am. But again, David, can’t we expand our concern beyond information and our own individual health to more citizenship-oriented foci?

33.40 - 35.43
how much info is independent of time and space. greenway. remixing space and time.

35.43
rambling? there is an order.
first: gravity in ’60s classrooms.
our classrooms are flat - 57% of students in US “are more literate, from the perspective of their literacy, than their teachers.”

3 converging conditions: can become new boundaries to “gain traction’”

1. Info-savvy students: “they know how to play the information, but they don’t know how to _work_ it. They need us to help them learn to work the information.” But their info-experience is far richer, deeper, more personal than what we can duplicate in the classroom. It has an energy we need to tap into, since “gravity-driven curriculum” is arguably obsolete. That energy requires:
a. Responsive information environments
b. Communication and sharing of personal experiences and identities
c. form and participate in communities
d ask questions, accomplish things, invest themselves
e. safely make mistakes
f. to EARN AUDIENCE AND ATTENTION

2. New Information Landscape:
overwhelming
networked
participatory
flows, unflows, connects, unconnects
opportunities to create energy in the classroom

3. Unpredictable future:
best to teach them how to teach themselves

Close:
“We are not afraid” blog.
anyone can publish to it.
asked for pictures.
got 2,500 in first 3 days, from all over the world - when, in history, has this been possible?

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My 20 Korean won regarding the K-12 Online Conference presentations I’ve watched or listened to so far.

General Impressions:

1. The Need for Classification of Presentations into a “Beginners - Advanced” Continuum

That heading pretty much says it all. K12O has a wildly diverse audience, and apparently an equally diverse group of presenters. Some of the presentations offered little that was new for me, but surely useful for others. A “101 / 201 / 301 / 401 / Post-graduate” type classification scheme might help us navigate more efficiently.

2. A Focus on Creativity in Presentations

I’m as guilty of screencasts and talking-head/endless voiceover as the next person, so this is aimed at me as well as anybody else. (And Dean’s to blame for this wish ) Simply put, it would be nice if we all aimed for more design, style, and production values in our presentations. Since we’re all marching into this new territory together, and since the tools are all new, it’s understandable that we’re trying them all out - screencasts, Voicethreads, Ustreams, Slideshares, video podcasts, whatever. But it would be nice if we elevated the creative aspects of presentation to a higher level of priority, and aimed to entertain as much as to inform. I’m talking structure, visuals, audio, the whole shebang. And again, I’m as guilty as the next guy. You have to agree, don’t you, that more artistry would make us all happier, yes?

Introductory

If All My Classes Did This:

Using Toondo and other comics-making and graphic organizer websites in the classroom.

Learn to Blog: Blog to Learn: Anne Davis

Anne nicely identifies her audience in her first sentence: “This is for those new to the world of blogging.” Like Karen Richardson, Anne also keeps her video short, and simply gives an overview of the companion wiki for this presentation. Well done, Anne!

Intermediate

Crossing the Copyright Boundaries: Karen Richardson

A nice, short overview of a more elaborate wiki walking teachers and students through the current copyright minefield. Looks good, and nice and short - 5 minutes!

Sustained Blogging in the Classroom: Jeff Utecht

Getting beyond the “I have a blog” stage. Similar to Dean’s focus on quality. Jeff argues against blogs as journals (posting about “my cat fluffy,” as one of the Hawaii students said in a Skype talk last year during the 1001 Tales). Jeff and I are on the same page here. I’m setting up my high school English students, school-wide. But Jeff and I differ on this: he focuses on students and teachers conversing on the blogs, while I’m hooking my high school students into claiming their blogs on Technorati, subscribing to real-world blogs based on their interests, and linking to them - with full expectations that those real-world, “open range” bloggers will follow the trackbacks to student blogs, and start connected conversations with the world.

Jeff doesn’t specify what grade levels he has in mind, so maybe he’s not thinking of the secondary level - high school - as I am.

Jeff shares Mark Ahlness’ grade 4 classrooms reading each others’ blogs (and in some cases, adult edublogs!) as Sustained Silent Reading time, and encouraging students to reply. Bravo to Mark for allowing blog-reading during SSR. I’m still pushing that in our own SSR time in the high school.

Jeff moves to discuss Clarence’s redesigning of classroom space to create physical conversation places, but I’m unclear how that connects to sustaining blogging.

The last half of Jeff’s presentation keeps its focus on the elementary level, so I scanned across it. It contains solid ideas for setting up conversational blogging networks globally.

Something I wish we would try more of is not peer-to-peer blog conversations - students reading and writing with their own age group - but more vertical designs. The idea of each age reading the blogs of those one year older, and writing about what they learn on their elders’ blogs to an imaginary audience of readers one year younger, creates a continuous chain of Vygotskian reading in the “zone of proximal development,” and writing-to-teach that produces the best learning. My head is not there right now, but it seems a very pedagogically powerful way to design K-12 blogging.

On a side note, check out the YoungWriters07 wiki “New Zealand Chrissy” and I put up a couple of weeks ago for a currently active and already quite large list of links to blogging classrooms of all ages and grades. Korean, Kiwi, Aussie, Thai, American, and Canadian classrooms (and only my best Korean bloggers, not the whole class - more of Dean Shareski’s influence on quality) are there for the connecting. List your own bloggers there too. It’s open.

Then Jeff shares some blogging rubrics and assessment strategies. Worth a watch for those wanting to get beyond “just blogging.”

Advanced

Design Matters: Dean Shareski

Vital. The focus is not about tools, mercifully, but about standards of aesthetic and conceptual quality. I’ve already written about this in other posts, and haven’t stopped thinking about it in my own daily rounds as teacher, tech integration specialist, and English department head.

Brian Lamb, Alan Levine, and d’Arcy Norman’s “More Than Cool Tools.”

I’ll just say that Brian Lamb’s “remix” section beginning at 22.23 and following was particularly “deep” for me. The companion wiki seems unfinished, unless I missed something. It would be nice if it linked to the avalanche of tools and resources in this presentation.

Highlights for me: Google Co-op: embedding its search window (around 23 minutes)
OER Commons: filters searches for k12 domains (around 27 minutes)

Assessment and Evaluation in the Age of Networked Learning: Konrad Glogowski (focus on blogging)

When Konrad speaks about classroom blogging, the world should listen. He’s one of my guiding lights in my own experiments in Seoul. Highly recommended for his quest, like mine, to remove the “schooliness” from blogging-as-homework and make it an authentic, conversational, connective, writerly experience for our youths.

“Cellphones as Learning Tools” by Liz Kolb:

The Cellphone podcasting section had great ideas if you’re not an American abroad in a non-English-speaking country. But that’s my problem. (Well, I suppose our Korean-speaking students could find local services that allow web-based cellphone recording.) Liz has a great series of project ideas for any interested teachers. See 21 minutes and following.

The Cellphone Photoblogging section is also unexplored territory for me, but again, I need to learn if this is free in Korea. Take photos and send them to Flickr, Blogger, or Bubbleshare. Confession time: I don’t know how to send emails with my cellphone. But it’s a Korean model, so it’s all harder than Greek to me. Is it as simple as entering an email address and hitting “send”?

Video Recording with Cell Phone: eyespot.com, jumpcut.com, youtube.com allow free posting and editing of cellphone videos. Nice set of project ideas for this at 35.18.

• General Project Ideas:
  • Content-related Ringtones: phonezoo.com
  • Logos and Wallpapers for Cellphones: pix2fone.com, pixdrop.com
  • Text Messages: textforfree.com, txtdrop.com, reactee.com
  • More project ideas for Ringtones, Logos, Text Messaging. Some good stuff here at 52.19.

  Cellphones as a Research Tool:

  • See ready.mobi.com to see what websites are accessible from cellphones
  • Flickr, Wikipedia, Yahoo are accessible to find info on the fly.
  • Free reference tools: Google.com/intl/en_us/mobile/sms will answer research questions with text messages?! Text a Librarian at selu.edu/library/askref/index.html is similar. Wow.
  • Plusmo sends RSS feeds to your cellphone.
  • Mobilequery.com free spellcheck, dictionaries software.
  • Mobile-friendly Websites: homeworknow.com (fee), zinadoo.com, winksite.com, mob5.com. Great for homes with no access.

  Digital Assignment Notebook: use alerts, voice recording, etc.

• Math site: Math4mobile software for cellphones: stats, geometry, can replace graphing calculators?
• The future: Cellphones as LCD projectors? Scanners? Zip drives? Solar? Coming soon….!

Release the Hounds: Chris Harbeck on ePortfolios and “Unprojects”

Chris is a middle school math teacher trying some very comprehensive, ambitious stuff by setting up ePortfolios for his students. He ties them into Parent-Student-Teacher conferences.

I wonder as I watch why Chris says an ePortfolio is not a “snapshot” of a learner’s learning, but a narrative of that learning across an entire year. James Linzel, my old colleague at Shanghai American School, spurred the idea of exploding the school-year boundaries by making ePortfolios continuous across the years, not within them. That’s something we’re attempting with our blogging Capstone Project, where students will maintain and sustain their blogs from grades 9 to 12, culminating in their last months in their graduating year with a “My Learning Journey” type summative project reflecting on their four year record of who they have become.

I imagine Chris is in a school without the faculty buy-in to keep his students on the paths he creates for them after they leave them. If it’s true, that’s a shame. Another prophet unknown in his own home.

Interesting use of a student’s individual wiki as an ePortfolio. See Video 1, 2.22 timestamp. Students create math portfolios to teach their parents.

Chris is re-tooling his approach for this year. He links to his releasethehounds wikispace for more on this.

Chris’ third of four short videos had no sound in my iTunes, so I was your typical lazy-fingered browser: I skipped to number four (we bloggers know how rare our readers use their click-muscles by the paucity of outgoing clicks listed in our sitemeters - so I’m no different).

Number four, on “unprojects,” is great, must-watch stuff. It seems Chris used parts one through three as build-ups to what seems to have been a pedagogical epiphany for him. The structure was effective, but if you have no time to watch all four videos, be sure to at least watch number four.

And kudos to Chris for a well-designed presentation. More than screenshots, nice graphics, and one of the most interesting speaking styles - a soft, but at the same time almost breathless, sort of barely-restrained excitement pulses throughout. Really interesting and very effective delivery. Different, original.

For more posts on K12 online, see:

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Every week is interesting when you’re launching an all-Apple Laptop high school. This week was no exception.

I run a 40-minute Web 2.0 activity club every Thursday. (That experience, by the way, makes me weep for teachers who teach classes of less than an hour’s duration. I have time for almost nothing in 40 minutes and will, I swear, have a heart attack from the adrenal rush of trying to reach my objectives in that eyeblink of instructional time. We have 77 minute class blocks at my school, which feels just right.)

Last week, our IT Manager configured a Mac Server for class drop-box folders, shared resource folders, and private student folders. We needed to get all 240 students registered on the server - and, oh yeah, their teachers too.

Then some other teachers started asking for a way to train the students in iMovie - everybody and their dog is suddenly using iMovie in the classroom, which raises its own issues. A couple asked me to pull that off.

But the question was, how? How train an entire faculty and student body in the server network, iLife software, and more?

The answer seems wonderful: My Thursday Web 2.0 Club has 23 students. We have our weekly Homeroom during each Friday’s club time - and we have 22 homerooms. You see it: one student is available to teach each homeroom in a weekly cycle. Here’s how it looks on Bubbl.us* (thanks to Patrick Higgins for the Twitter tip about this tool):

[bubbl]http://bubbl.us/view.php?sid=49550&pw=yaVWC.w6Lr12UMzJlY3ladE5ZSFBQLg;500;400;Tech Training;100[/bubbl]

Today was our first run-through, and by all accounts, the students did a great job. Next week they’ll walk through the first “Cutting the Crap from Student Movies” video.

I think we’ve found our system here. And a way to give students experience as presenters and trainers. Pretty cool.

*WordPress users: Bubbl.us requires a WordPress Plugin. I installed it here on WP 2.3, and it works fine.

For more on staff technology development, see these articles:

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