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It’s only natural that the K12 Online Conference presentations feel uneven to some of us. Each presenter has a different background, level of experience, set of priorities, agenda, audience. Some hit me, some don’t.
Dean Shareski hit me on this biting Seoul Saturday morning. If a lot of the more tech-oriented presenters are the Henry Fords of this Digital Revolution, Dean is more of a William Morris. Aesthetics is the focus of his “Design Matters” presentation, and if you only watch one K12 presentation, this is the one I’d recommend. It puts the ghost back into the machine.
Dean asked for feedback from his viewers, so I gave the below on the comments section of his K12 Online presentation page. I’m pasting it here because it’s the beginning of a new project for me: The Campsite Seminars, I’m calling it for now. Or maybe I like this better:
Walden 2.0
Here’s the comment:
Dean asked for feedback as we watched, and I assume that means feedback here, though it’s strange to be first. Anyway, here’s mine.
I like Dean’s opening point: much classroom-created content (the majority?) 
suffers from poor design - “cheesiness” in the worst sense (think Kraftt).
(Warlick’s keynote touches on the same idea with his “competitive information products,” though the worker-drone connotations of “products” still irks me, as it focuses more than I would like on economics and money-making, more than on aesthetics and character, I would argue - but anyway….)
Christian Long’s interview suffered from poor audio quality, so I couldn’t understand much of it (we’ve all experienced the wrath of the techno gods, so I sympathize). I did catch, though, the exploitation of simple walking distance and space between buildings as a learning opportunity, and that resonated. Our own campus is very restricted by its hilltop, woods-surrounded setting, which is the opposite of the example Christian used of having to walk a mile between buildings: we’re too cramped. But WE DO HAVE THOSE SURROUNDING WOODS. That’s fascinating in this new light. I’m picturing possibilities of assigning students - in small groups, so the discussions are not diluted by too many voices and not enough time - to take voice or video recorders of whatever sort into the woods to record conversations in that setting - I can’t help but hope that the 
setting would influence the discussions in interesting and more thoughtful ways. Have them discuss a theme from our reading of King Lear, for example, or whatever topic might benefit from the meditative openness of a wooded setting. Recording these discussions - video seems more desirable, when I think about it - would allay most fears of “unsupervised” students in the woods. Take the footage back into the classroom and quick-edit these “campsite seminars” into short films. I’ll have to try this. It’s literally “Beyond School”
Dr. Schwier: “Does it work? Is it beautiful? Is it powerful? Is it inspiring?” This is refining my “campsite seminars” idea above. I said “quick-edit” those seminars just now. Why rush? That way Velveeta lies.
Why not assign them to be voice-overs for iMovie projects that add BEAUTY and FORCE via film, stills, music, titles? Yes, yes, yes: let’s aim for brie and camembert.
In fact, I’m seeing now that two or three class sessions of this new mode of “class discussion” - sitting on the pine needles under the autumn trees - might be best, to give students time to adapt to talking in natural surroundings, in “nature’s temple.” Talk about “educational architecture” - how about the dome of the sky over a canopy of
pine?
(I’m liking this very much, Dean. Thanks for this very innovative angle. Much of the K12 conference so far has been school-2.0-as-usual, if you get what I mean.)
At 12:00 now: Planning. I’ll play along with my Campsite Seminars whim above, and apply the rest of your presentation, when possible, to it. Consider this a “teacher think-aloud.”
So the Seminars - I think they’ll actually work better for something more relevant to my students than Shakespeaere (which they and I love). I think, instead, it will work for the classroom blogging “Capstone Project” I’m currently launching with them.
The idea of that project for my high school seniors - so close to the end of their 12 year sentence of infantilization in schools - is to help them learn about whatever their passion, and their possible future (a)vocation, is, by reading real-world bloggers who share their passion(s), and writing about what they read on their own blogs.
They’ve already created their blogs, and this weekend, are composing their “about” pages and searching for feeds about their passion(s)/interest(s) on Bloglines (I still haven’t found a better feed-searching engine than Bloglines’). They’ve claimed their blogs on Technorati, embedded Sitemeter and Clustrmaps. Now they’re ready to connect.
The problem I think I’m fighting, though, is that they don’t understand the magical potential this project offers them to make connections with people in the world of kindred passions. They’ve never linked to a writer in a blog post, and seen that writer turn up a day or two later in comments.
They’ve been too busy writing 5-paragraph essays - or homework-assignments-as-blog-posts, which is the New Abomination - about irrelevant subjects to tired teachers all their lives to write about what they love to real-world readers - so they just don’t get it. They don’t know how to dream, how to let themselves be visionary; and they don’t know how dreams and visions can become realities through connective writing.
So, in short, I’m trying to introduce them to the world beyond school, but they’re so “studentified” they seem unable to see this as anything but homework because, after all, I’m a “teacher,” and they are “students,” and all of this is happening in a “school.”
Sheesh.
So I think these Campsite Seminars are better suited to serving as a “retreat from school” in both the spatial and the psychological senses. I want them to think - possibly for the first time, since so many of 
them are so constantly addled by the pressures of “schooliness,” the homework, the SAT’s, the college applications, the school spirit jive, on and on - about which world they want to enter when they leave school forever - in seven short months.
So back to you, Dean: How do I plan for these 70-minute retreats into the woods to bear fruit? [Clicks “play”….]
“What’s the purpose of your movie?”
–Hm. In an attempted nutshell, to figure out:
1. What makes you tick.
2. What you want to become.
3. Which is what you will read about on blogs and other sites.
4. And what you will write about…
5. For an audience you want to attract.
Okay, that’s about as far as I’m going to take this here. I see Dean asks for feedback on his blog, and on the wiki he made for this, etc, and suddenly feel like my students when they’re dealing with my tendency to have a million sites for classwork 
Dean, it was a very valuable presentation. You got beyond the tools and beyond the generic edublog talk.
Thanks for that.
For more on the quest for the student blogging grail, see these posts:
Photo credits:
Cheese Wrap by chrissam42
French Cheese by Zeetz Jones
Tokei-ji by Raiden256
Art Nouveau by Face It
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8 Comments
Hi Clay,
Very nice looking new blog.
Thanks for the tip on the conference. I’ve missed most of it and the long and rather tedious keynote did little to set my world on fire. I’ll check this one out.
C.
Good move.
I left blogger for wordpress mainly because I’d rather support free SaaS projects.
Gotcha in my RSS.
You two are in my commenter memories forever - the first to talk to me in my new home.
(A fitting comment for the “cheese” motif in the post
)
Now if I could just figure out why the padding around the images doesn’t work. I’m setting it in the editor, checking the code, even hacked the stylesheet. I need to take a sabbatical just to learn CSS and PHP once and for all.
Clay, sent you a suggestion for image padding via twitter. May or may not be the solution.
I like your playfully meandering reflections here.
It’s not an easy task, though, enticing students out of that insanely driven frame of mind - in an existence where everything is grade-rubric-homework-test-and so on ad infinitum with college as the only light at the end of the tunnel, it’s no wonder blogging and other potentially connected modes of communication just get sucked into the same schoolish frame of reference.
Will Richardson wrote yesterday about a conversation with HS students who, while they were very savvy about new tools, “didn’t really understand the potential of networks in terms of their own learning“. I guess it’s not surprising - in many classrooms, learning is never framed as something students can take charge of themselves, and so it doesn’t occur to them to use the tools consciously for anything to do with learning. I may be simplifying, though.
Nevertheless, this is about more than just tools - I’m sure many schools need to have a serious talk about what the essentials are and must take out a lot of extraneous stuff that’s been crammed into syllabi over the years. Otherwise, there’ll never be that room for quiet reflection.
Ståle
Welcome to your new home!
I thought you might be interested or your students might–in the Pangea project that I ran across on YouTube. Might be the perfect opportunity for your students to express what makes their world tick.
I blogged about it on our student blog–I’ll point you there, since I don’t have the link handy.
http://searchology.edublogs.org/2007/09/14/what-do-you-have-to-share-with-the-world/
I can’t wait to see Dean’s presentation, but will wait to read your commentary section until I get to watch it.
Also, it strikes me that some of what you are saying resonates with Clarence Fisher’s Classroom 2.0 presentation on k12 online.
Stale’s comment about schools reevaluating their content really resonated with some things in Clarence’s presentation.
Good to see your new site! Carolyn
Clay,
I love your new digs - and your new ideas (I confess, I haven’t progressed beyond Clarence Fisher’s Keynote yet; will be playing catch up this weekend).
Perhaps your students could make a physical journey the metaphor for Lear’s spiritual journey, with the environment mirroring his emotions and evolving self-awareness.
As far as the blogs go, wouldn’t it be fun to have them find a bloggers for different categories in their lives? I subscribe to “entertainment/cartoons”, baking, knitting, etc. blogs as well as ed-tech ones.
And, as they prepare to move Beyond School, a video essay of what “home” means to them, people, places, objects, might be funny, poetic, bittersweet.
I send you a virtual loaf of banana nut bread as a blog-warming gift!
“Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”-Oliver Wendell Holmes
“He that has a house to put’s head in has a good head-piece.”-William Shakespeare, King Lear
Maybe that cheese poster has thrown me off track here, but your post has me thinking about some projects I have run across/discussed lately and a few that I have worked on in the past.
First, here’s my food related reference. I made a comment on a post entitled “A curriculum of smells and tastes” on Artichoke’s blog which, by the way, is always thought provoking. My comment refers to the Slow Food organization and it’s publication for schools entitled Dire fare gustare (Saying, doing, tasting). The book is a curriculum intended to give students a look at long neglected subjects that historically were well covered outside of school, but that have since been pushed aside by society’s shift towards fast food. If you are interested, click over to that comment for relevant links.
Next is an amazing project from Christian Nold called Sensory Deprivation Mapping. It involves getting the participants to focus on their three lesser-used senses; smell, touch, and taste. I found that one through Core 77’s blog coverage of this weekend’s Poptech Conference. This sort of data collection might be incorporated into your Campsite Seminars.
With mapping in mind, I began to think about a project I introduced at the school I left in June. Several years ago, I began taking fifth graders on tours of the LA metropolitan area using only foot power and public transportation. The tours evolved over the years and in their final iteration before my departure, they involved small groups (five or six students and one chaperone) planning three day-long excursions into the city. The only documentation available online right now is this letter describing the 2003-2004 version of the trip (Please note that I am not fond of the report that was assigned, but that was not my contribution.) and photos from the 2003-2004, 2002-2003, 2001-2002, and 2000-2001 school years. All of those links may not work for much longer as the site is no longer under my control. (I do have it all copied to disc though.)
If I were to continue leading those Metro trips or introduce them into another school, I would likely incorporate some sort of annotative technology to add greater context and texture to the trips. In essence the students could leave a trail behind for their classmates and others to find to stumble upon. At minimum, they could create a media-rich map of what they have experienced. Some of these technologies require mobile phones, others can be accessed when a student is back at a computer: think Flickr geotagging and wayfaring.com. I have bookmarked many of these services, experiments and examples if you care to dig further. A few to start with are Mscape, Mudlarking in Deptford, Create-A-Scape Yellow Arrow, Grafedia, and WayMakr.
Finally, here are a few thoughts regarding your Capstone Project. I think these observations you make about your students are accurate:
“they don’t understand the magical potential this project offers them…They’ve been too busy writing 5-paragraph essays - or homework-assignments-as-blog-posts, which is the New Abomination - about irrelevant subjects to tired teachers all their lives to write about what they love to real-world readers - so they just don’t get it. They don’t know how to dream, how to let themselves be visionary; and they don’t know how dreams and visions can become realities through connective writing…they’re so “studentified” they seem unable to see this as anything but homework because, after all, I’m a “teacher,” and they are “students,” and all of this is happening in a “school.””
They need to be deschooled a bit. It sometimes took my fifth grade students almost a full semester to become comfortable with the unstructured project time that I would give them at the end of the school day. After so many years of being shuffled back in line, learning to follow specific instructions, and give expected answers, it is difficult (but not impossible) for students to trust that their teacher is sincere about giving them freedom, and to trust their own ability to self-direct and formulate a product.
As far as the form of the projects, maybe expecting a video is too specific, especially if the idea is for the students to explore their own interests and whims. While making a video is different than most of what they have done in school, it still may not be the medium of choice for most students. This reminds me of another project I did with fifth graders. I called it the Sesame Street Project. The topics were generally open and I tried to allow students to express themselves in whichever way was most natural to them. Then again, I also used the Sesame Street Report with a more defined goal, building a model for a city planning project that we collaborated on as a class. In both cases, these projects were completed when students did not each have their own laptops. With students in a 1:1 program, the scrapbook could be their blog, wiki, etc.; and all of the references including video, sound, etc. can be found online (although they wouldn’t have to be). And, if I understand your capstone project correctly, there might not need to be a final product - the blog is likely enough.
I probably need to finally get a blog of my own. This comment is a bit overdone, but at least it should give your new blog’s commenting system a good test - you know, for industrial strength.
Clay,
Blogspot finally got unblocked in China but you movedto WordPress, so it doesn’t matter anymore.
Great new site. I think you’ll like publishing with WordPress and hanging with the WP community.
Keep striving for the visionary learners. You won’t be disappointed.
Cheers,
Tod