Beyond School

I’m going to let the pictures speak. If you’re new to this blog, you have to know that I’m reporting from my 1:1 Apple Laptop classroom in Seoul, South Korea.

Natural “Un-Lesson” Planning (or, “Goodbye, Teachery Headaches”)

Type A personalities, you’d better sit down before reading further. This lesson planning consisted of little more than Minnesota’s Scott Schwister of the Higher Edison blog, and Missouri’s Elizabeth Helfant of the new Helcat’s Rants and Ramblings blog*, reading my previous blog posts and Twitter tweets about this class, and dashing off a less-than-140-character “lesson plan” that looked like this:

From there, we went to….

A Cup of Skype Tea with Scott at the World’s End

Here’s Scott visiting our Bar and Restaurant Design project group for our Networked Project-Based Learning elective in Seoul, Korea. Why did he visit? So he could spend a few minutes on Skype offering some photos and contact info for a bar in Minneapolis made famous by the Prince movie Purple Rain. (He also visited because he has a sense of fun - read his blog, folks, he’s one of my personal favorites and a writer whose shoes I don’t deserve to shine - and a sense of the magical possible.)

Our view of Scott, compliments of the magic of Skype, the free internet phone and video-conferencing service:

(That’s our classroom in the inset.)

Scott’s view of the project group he’s helping (@kevinyi and company on Twitter):

(Left to right: me, Jihyung, Kevin, and Stephanie.)

Project group’s view of Scott:

And how laborious was Scott’s role as “teacher” here? About as much as any other friendly offer to help. Here’s his email to the project group, after their 20 minute or so chat:

Stephanie (and Kevin, Jihyung, and Jane),

A pleasure to meet and speak with you. I hope I was able to contribute something useful, and I’m looking forward to hearing more about your bar design project. First Avenue is a gritty place full of stories and history. It’s the antithesis of glossy, but it does have its own kind of legendary glamor.

Some links and other information you might find useful:

Contact for [name], former owner: [deleted to protect privacy]

• First Ave website: http://www.first-avenue.com/
• YouTube trailer for “Hayday”, a documentary about First Ave. More about the music history than the venue. But then, the venue has always been about the music.
• Many more YouTube search results.

I’ll try to find some representative interior photos and send those in the next day or two.

Good night!

ss

Naming the Concept: Natural Global Collaboration

This is the beauty. That 20 minutes of interaction from only one person in my network has provided a good week of project-based, connected learning - researching, interviewing, analyzing photos, writing, possibly podcasting, revising and editing, and real-world publishing - for my class. Don’t tell me this is not a solid learning experience. All the traditional, schooly, “English class” skills are there. They’re just real-world, self-directed learnings. And I can’t wait to read, hear, see what they discover through Scott’s help on their project blog next week. I also can’t wait to get a Tweet from Kevin in five years, telling me he opened his first bar or restaurant, if things unfold that way - and that this learning helped him in that chosen future.

To underline how radically different this “Quick-in, Quick-Out” global collaboration model is from most of what I’ve seen: it’s not scripted. It’s not teacher-directed. It’s what, thanks to a Skype call with Dean Shareski a couple days ago (podcast almost edited), I’ve decided to label: Natural Global Collaboration. And it requires only a few minutes from one cool person out there who finds helping people (notice I didn’t say “kids” or even “students”) simply an enjoyable activity.

Another difference: These students are not doing schooly collaboration with other students. They’re doing it with that other “class” of humans “beyond school” that we call “real-world people” - people who happen, in this case, to be adults.

(Feel free to contact the Vatican for instant canonization of Saint Scott of Saint Paul How cool is he? And Scott, I’d love to read your take on all this in comments. I wasn’t there for your talk with my class.)

Meanwhile, in a separate group working on a “future basketball stars of the world” project profiling high school and college standouts from around the world….

Elizabeth Chats with Younsuk and Jaeho from the Snows of St. Louis

Those snows covered Elizabeth’s satellite dish, knocking any hope of video-conferencing to another day, so they chatted on Skype instead. (Note Elizabeth’s sure hand guiding the planning process for the hook-up with her high school’s former and present basketball stars :))

That chat pretty much speaks for itself. (And the Vatican needs to hear about Saint Elizabeth from Saint Louis, too.) But I’ll let two “kwouts” from our class reflective blog speak for how this all felt to the “networking/networked learners.”

Here’s Jaeho:

PLN at KIS via kwout

And here’s Younsuk - read that last sentence:

PLN at KIS via kwout

A Word on Method

If you’re curious, I’ll just share that I will be playing writing and digital literacies coach to these students. The plan is that they’ll post their drafts for their weekly products on the group blog, and I’ll use the comment section to give feedback for revision. Once revised, they’ll copy and paste all finished posts on their project blog for the world to see. Just FYI. (And you’re welcome to come in and comment on these posts too, if you’re the type who likes to help people improve. That’s wonderful.)

Parting Shot

I often feel like a bad teacher. I almost never give tests or quizzes. I give very little homework. I don’t cover student homework with the red ink that hasn’t worked to teach them for all the years before they hand their papers in to me. I don’t like reading their homework assignments and academic essays. I don’t like teaching academic writing. I don’t believe in the value of academic writing (unless an individual says, “I want to be a professor”). In short, I often feel like a bad teacher because I don’t believe in the kind of education a teacher is expected to deliver.

This class feels radically different to me. It’s not about technology, either. It’s about connections being made for the sake of learning what the students choose to learn. In the last month, my students have connected with a Vermont high schooler for one class, with Dean Shareski yesterday - Dean invited us all to skype conference into a university class he’s teaching in Saskatchewan, Canada next week - and with Scott and Elizabeth today. The connections have not been mere gadgety text things, either. They started in twitter - voiceless, cryptic, fragmented - then evolved into emails, chats, and finally living faces and voices, in real time, projected on walls or computer screens. I’m not sure how important it is that the physical flesh of those faces and voices was on the other side of the world. The relations felt human - and the learning felt real.

I don’t know where it’s all going, and I’m sure there will be problems requiring solutions as it goes there; but I’m also sure that this feels so like teaching and learning - far more than my “elite” AP Literature class does. I want to read this student writing, to help hone it, to water the imaginations, the strategies, the methods and means of connecting and learning and communicating. Like never before, this class makes me want to teach - because I believe in the learning it promises.

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*I also have Elizabeth to thank for leading me to enlist star student writer Anthony Chivetta to the Students 2.0 blog. I’m really lucky to have Elizabeth in my own friendly PLN!