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