Beyond School

[This is from an email I just sent to everybody who signed on, over the last several months, to participate in this year’s 1001 Flat World Tales world writing workshop.  I put it here as a “lessons learned” about “flat classroom” global collaboration projects.  Just in case anyone wants to learn from what I feel were my mistakes, last time around.

Because trust me: bells, whistles, and gushing geeky wows aside, flat classroom projects, like any other educational exercise, are as valuable - or as worthless - as their design and method make them.  They’re gaining popularity now, so more and more schools and teachers will be trying them. And it’s the nuts and bolts of these efforts that will sink or swim them - for teachers, administrators, and students alike.  Here’s my word to the wise: wipe the dazzle from your eyes, and try to think beneath the surface of these shiny new shindigs.  All that glitters is not worth the gold.  And remember the emperor’s new clothes.]

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One New Zealand, two Australia, three continental USA, one Hawaii, and one Korea school: that’s our roster at the moment for this year’s 2nd annual high school 1001 Flat World Tales world writing project.

Strangely enough, that Korea - my school - is tentative. I’m not teaching any classes that lend themselves to a creative writing unit this year, but two of my colleagues who are teaching such classes have expressed interest. We’re on Lunar New Year holiday right now, so I won’t hear from them a final yes or no for another week or so.

Regardless, I want to find an outside-of-the-box way to stay involved in the project anyway - perhaps as a commenting audience giving feedback or making appearances via Skype or other video-conference in different places to talk about writing and such. Something to talk about.

Australia and New Zealand in the current sunny South are just finishing their summer break and returning to school, so the late-February or early March time-frame sounds a good one to begin. (That doesn’t have to be set in stone, though.)

I’ve been thinking about the experience of the first 1001 Tales wiki workshop last year, and writing and podcasting pretty frequently about possible pitfalls and improvements for this year, so I hope you don’t mind if I bullet a few thoughts here:

Pitfalls / Solutions (?):

* Pitfall: massive time-zone differences in long-term collaborations
* Solution?: partner classrooms form by nearest time-zone for most stages of the peer feedback/revision process, and change partners for only one or two stages to have global feedback. Ex.: Assuming a Six Traits process, near-partners would give feedback for first two traits, global partners for trait 3, near partners for traits 4 and 5, global partners for trait 6.

* Pitfall: unmotivated students muck up the process by feeble or absent work
* Solution?: a couple of options seem worth considering: 1) make it voluntary only to students who like the idea; 2) develop a policy that eliminates students from the project who can’t be relied upon by their peer writers.

* Pitfall: Duration too long: last year, we spent a couple months on the project, devoting at least one week to each of the six traits, and having global peer feedback exchanges each week. It felt too long and too labor-intensive for teachers and students alike, I think (Chris Watson, do you agree from Honolulu?)
* Solution?: Shorten it, condensing two traits into a week for a 3-week project, for example; and/or reduce the frequency of peer feedback from partner classrooms, blending them with some weeks of in-class, local peer feedback.

* Pitfall: Global Student Publisher-Editor Staff: Last year, we hired students from within the classes (after formal interviews) to review and select the best stories for publication on the blog. This created conflicts of interest in which (surprise!) these students all selected each others’ works. Some of those works were not sterling.
* Solution?: “Hire” students from upper grades to be editors and publishers, and give them real-world credit for the experience on the blog.

* Pitfall: Quality of writing prompt: The “Alien King” frame story modeled after the Arabian Nights was a fun idea, and some sort of frame story, either the same or a new one makes no difference to me, seems desirable for giving the message that a storyteller has to tell a good story to “survive” and be published. But last year’s prompt - “Write a story that shows a critical insight about your specific culture” - seems in need of a very creative and more-inspired overhaul.
* Solution?: Decentralize it. Let each classroom determine its own prompt? Or keep it uniform, but give it more cutting teeth? (I fantasize about stories that show some critical insight about what it means to be a student in today’s educational system, and what it means to be “smart” and “educated,” from the students’ p.o.v. Call it “Students 2.0, the Fiction Version.” Tasty satire could come of that, and much catharsis from the students who finally are invited to express their views on schooliness. But that’s just me. I’m no dictator.)

* Pitfall: Text-only bias. Students only wrote (and some recited in podcasts) their stories last year. That automatically puts some students who are not verbally/writerly gifted at a disadvantage.
* Solution?: Open it up to multimedia. Digital storytelling mashups, films of interpretive dance, spoken word, photo-essays, musical compositions, whatever. Not a writing project as much as a multimedia variety show!

* Pitfall: Prose fiction/creative writing bias. We prescribed that last year.
* Solution?: Invite non-fiction as an option. (But this would make teaching the unit messier. As would, it occurs to me, allowing mutlimedia. Which isn’t necessarily insurmountable. We could invite adults with an interest in the different media to guest-mentor from the edublogosphere or other real-world communities, for example.)

* Pitfall: Assessment. Last year, we tried to assess each stage of wiki feedback and revision, and it was damned difficult to manage all of that.
* Solution?: Have students self-assess, keeping reflective records of their creative production, their feedback contributions, and their lessons learned. Have them use this reflective record to justify the grade they propose to the teachers that they receive.

That’s about it. Any thoughts?

Two parting creative ideas:

* Project movie trailer: For any of you who work in 1:1 Apple Laptop schools - Chris, Cindy, Tim? - promotional videos for the project would be a fun idea. One-minute trailers mashing up flying saucer and alien invasion footage from, for example, archive.org (I’ve downloaded gobs of footage of UFO sightings from there) could be intensely fun to edit into an “Alien King Invasion” trailer.

* Flat world teaching: It might be fun - I mentioned this above - for Cindy to video-skype into a Korean classroom to discuss how to brainstorm for a good idea, or for Chris to skype in to St. Louis to discuss the perils of excessive adverbs, etc. Without over-planning, such options should be sought for “Quick-in, Quick-out” guest-teaching to keep things interesting and explore new pedagogical possibilities.

Sorry to be so long. I’m done Anybody up for a skype conference call in the coming week or two? Any other suggestions?