Beyond School

A snapshot from kwout of Younsuk’s self-assessment in the project-based PLN class. It’s interesting to me. Click to read it all, and feel free to comment to Younsuk. (He’s interesting, by the way: Korean, but grew up in Japan, which is fascinating to anybody who knows the modern historical relations between these two countries. Speaks Korean, Japanese, and English. And a great basketball player, while only a sophomore.)

PLN at KIS » Blog Archive » Super Honest Post; This Is What Was Happening In Me via kwout

 The class blog itself is nothing pretty, but feel free to snoop around and leave any comments. It’s just a place to plan. The actual projects will have their own homes, wherever the students put them.

[Coming soon: A podcast discussion of this class with Dean Shareski - who visited us today from Canada via a Skype video call. Projected on our classroom movie screen, he looked like the Wizard of Oz's grandson.]

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Background

to a class that might, in its own small way, move educational history forward into the 21st century:

Students

in a 1:1 Apple Laptop school take my Networked Learning elective. They all have Macbooks with iLife for easy podcasting, movie-making, photography, and multimedia blogging.

My open school network

allows access to Twitter, Skype, YouTube, and every other non-pornographic, non-gaming site imaginable. Social networking is seen as a tool for learning and creating. Fun is fine, as long as you can demonstrate purposive learning at the same time. (I mean, come on, that’s the way I behave on Twitter - playful learning and sharing, sometimes pure socializing, other times pure teamworking - so why be a Gradgrind teacher and prohibit the same playfulness for my students when they network?)

Global Personal Learning Networks in the classroom

are being formed by ten students. In my class, they have created Twitter and Skype accounts, and begun networking with willing k-university educators and others in my own Twitter network. (More on the psychology of adult-student relationships later, but a teaser: there’s a curious reluctance on the part of some adults, it seems, to welcome adolescents into their networks because of their “student” status. Reminds me of a colleague in Shanghai who accused me of being “inappropriate” for inviting a student to share our lunch table during a field trip.)

Real-World, Self-Selected Project-Based Learning for the Digital Age*

(*order the book here) The students have designed semester-long web-based projects to organically grow throughout the term, based on their own learning interests and goals.

Fail Big for an A+

The students will grade themselves - see the “Slam Assessment” podcast with Sean Law - and justify their marks with evidence of their attempts to succeed and risks taken. Failure can gain an “A”, if the work, vision, and inventiveness are there.

Beyond Curriculum and Rubrics to Learning by Reflective Doing

All projects are founded on non-schooly, non-teachery, non-unitized and -rubricized approaches to networked learning. They proceed via the same “Quick-in, Quick-out” methods we real-world adults use when we tweet, skype, blog, comment, collaborate, and otherwise connect.

Global Collaboration without an Early Grave

Key idea: no teachers required to labor over unit plans, no unwilling students invited to muck the process up, no willing students having the process mucked up by controlling teachers or unit plans. Pure, authentic, organic, “real-world project-based learning in the digital age.”

Toward “Classroom as Digital Guild” Model

Adult role (including mine as “teacher”) is merely to facilitate connecting, offer feedback on quality of products and technical issues. In essence, an apprenticeship model.  Examples:

• Hook @younsukchae and @jhlee23 up with a star basketball player from your school or region, and let them go at it for interviews, highlight videos, podcasts, whatever, for their future world basketball stars project
• Hook @kevinyi, @steph731, @jane20307, @jihyung up with photos and restaurateur contact info of your favorite local bar or restaurant for their world restaurant and bar design project
• Hook @wonsc, @pchoi9323, @michaellepark up with students who want to play “foreign TV news correspondent” for their Political Satire/Faux News YouTube series
• Hook@SeongminS up with anybody who wants to be interviewed or in any other way contribute to his site about racial stereotyping around the world

–and then, dear adults, we practice SUMO - “Shut Up and Move Over” - and guide the guild as necessary.

Twitter / cburell via kwout

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Early last December, I posted my excitement about Sean Law’s new blog, Slam Teaching.  Three weeks later, after many rounds of commenting on each others’ posts, we somehow went from Twitter to Skype one holiday weekend afternoon (in Seoul - it was around midnight for Sean in Denver), and talked for a good hour and a half.

Sean agreed to my podcasting parts of that talk that I found worth sharing (hint: most of it), so this is the first segment.  It’s about 15 minutes long.  I chose to start with this because it’s about that schooly abomination we call “grading.”  And about Sean’s thoughts on how to do it, slam-wise, by letting students give themselves their grades.

The conversation was timely. It spurred me to adapt the idea to my PLN / Networked Learning elective (an update on that soon).

We discuss two other topics as well:

1. connecting university students in teacher certification courses to connect with my 1:1 laptop school students to “learn 21st century teaching” possibilities (Alec Couros, Dean Shareski, Ferris Bueller, are you there?)

2. the differences and similarities of teaching online - Sean is the English department head and English professor of his state’s online college program -  versus teaching in a physical classroom.  I was surprised by much of what I learned about the world of online teaching.

So here it is.  As usual, it’s an enhanced podcast, with chapter markers for easy navigation in iTunes, and with links to all sites referenced, if you download it.

Or you can just click the player below (Quicktime required). You’ll still see links to click and follow if you’re so inclined.

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I read a recent post from the Edina School District (wherever that is ) called Student Blogging that brings up Will Richardson’s recent post requesting examples of a certain type of student blogging he wants to use, presumably, as a (or is it “the”? That’s a key question) model. Here’s Will:

Maybe I’m asking too much here, but I’m still surprised at how difficult it is to find K-12 students using their blogs to really try to connect with their readers around the topics that they are reading and writing about. To do more than reflect, but to really articulate new thinking or understanding in the writing.

After trying to generate this type of connective, self-directed learning in my Visionary Student Blogging project, I have to say that I think Will is asking too much. I think he’s looking for something that will always be the exception in “unschooly” blogging: scholarly student blogging.

The Edina School District post (by Michael Walker) adds this observation to the mix:

[District teacher] Tim K’s response regarding his students attitude about blogging at school brings up an interesting point, “some suggested writing about movies they see outside class (definitely makes it seem less “schoolish,” which seems like a problem with blogging assignments in general). “

Do blogging assignments seem too “schoolish”? How can we make them more authentic, and less busywork? I’d love to hear your comments.

(Somebody should tell these folks the correct word is “schooly” )

I’m a language arts teacher, and after experimenting with different approaches over the past year with several high school grade levels, Tim’s question above resonates. I currently take this position:

I want students to fall in love with writing and self-publishing. (And by “writing,” I mean digital”communiciation,” more accurately, via whatever multimedia expression best suits your individual intelligence: if your strength is speaking or music, I want podcasts; if it’s acting or drama writing or filmmaking, I want movies; if it’s photography, so be it; etc.)

If they’re going to fall in love with regular “writing,” to return to it voluntarily and become habituated to an expressive, communicative (digital) life, it’s certainly not going to be so because I’m assigning them schooly homework. I don’t want my students to become English professors. I want them to become self-directed communicators of whatever their passions and interests are.

And I trust in time. Let them go through the movie stage - and let’s not forget that we can encourage quality film criticism if they want to stay in that stage. Many people make their living writing about movies, and some of them surely enjoy it at the same time, so it’s no crime.

I also can’t forget that some students will never take to voluntary expressive arts, period. I could force all students to write about a schooly thing (which could be a “good” topic, but the very act of it being teacher-prescribed still makes it schooly by definition), and try to force blood that way from the unwilling student turnips. But the cost of that? I’m quite likely forcing those who do have an authentic writer in them away from their authentic writing desires.

Maybe I get Will wrong here, but he strikes me as wanting to find student bloggers who blog like he and other (edu)blogging adults do.

While I think that’s a worthy goal, I just feel that the first order of business is detoxifying the acts of writing and thinking for students. Schooliness has so poisoned those acts for them by the last years of their school sentence.

(I have to add that my situation in the very toxic Korean educational culture - where education is so stressed it creates a nation of edu-aversive stressed-out youths - makes my case unique, perhaps. Or perhaps not.)

By allowing students the freedom to write about whatever they want, in whatever medium piques their interest - while at the same time only requiring that they do so a couple or three times a week - I hope to help with that detox treatment.

At least then, colleges will get students whose writing has improved in fluency and voice and, in the best cases, ideas and logic, via the sheer act of regular writing - engaged writing. And I don’t care how good the teacher, using blogs for teacher-assigned writing prompts is a recipe for disaster, in the long view, because there is no guarantee that this year’s engaging teacher will not be followed by next year’s bloodless drudge. (It occurs to me that my thoughts on blogging-as-homework haven’t changed much since my summer series on “saving blogging from teaching.”)

I’ll let the professors try to turn these writers into scholars.

Me? I don’t read scholars. They’re typically horrible writers, often writing about things only relevant to a few other people trying to make tenure.

Photos:
How Well I Could Write if I were not Here by Esther G
Homework Sucks Day 4 by Chaparral [Kendra]

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Tuna’s Aquarium via kwout

Christina Kang is a senior in my AP Literature class, a leader of Project Global Cooling, a Flixn star of a summer post (see her discuss a David Sedaris short story in a video embed here), and one wonderfully creative and natural student blogger.

I want to introduce her blog to anybody who enjoys reading sharp, creative, pleasant young writers. Christina started “Tuna’s Aquarium” as part of the “Visionary Student Blogging” AP Literature project in October/November, and in the three months since then has climbed to my list of favorites.

The email I just sent to my colleagues at my school gives an idea of why she’s worth showing, in my view, as a model of authentic (”unschooly”) classroom blogging:

Senior Christina Kang’s blog is four-months old and comfy as your favorite childhood treehouse.

Check out what she does:

• links to blogs she reads out of shared interest (medicine, art and design, computer graphics, more) - which will surely lead to a personal network and relationships with many of these people
• posts her own artwork as illustrations for her posts
• shows she’s ‘cultured’ by writing about literature she’s reading (not for school, thank god)
• posts original film-making experiments she’s created
• posts podcasts of original songs she’s recorded with her classmate on Garageband (she sings backup)
• posts radio-show type podcasts
• writes wonderfully well - strong voice, relaxed, smart, witty, natural
• shows a good sense of visual design in choice of blog theme

If your students (or you!) need a good model of multimedia blogging, it doesn’t get any better.  You should subscribe to Christina’s blog - you’ll love getting updates of her new content.

I’ll be sharing more exemplary student work in the coming weeks. As Konrad Glogowski also knows, it takes time to help students “grow” a blog.  After four months, some of my student blogs are ready for the harvest.

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