Beyond School

I’ve been a Diigo user for two years come July. Seems like everybody and their grannies have adopted it in a Twitter-induced stampede over the last two days (I think Will had something to do with it).

As I said on Twitter, the flood of emails requesting “friendship” on Diigo sort of shocked me (I despise email), since I wasn’t in the loop when the stampede started. I’m not sure I want to go Facebook with Diigo any more than I want to go Facebook with Facebook - I’m a fairly quiet person who tends to be happy roaming solo in his own flow, as taboo as that confession may be in these share-happy times (and it’s funny how manically I can twitter, and yet still feel uninvaded and uncrowded). So all these emails (which I’ve since turned off) make me feel my little secret reading cafe became trendy overnight, and too loud now to read in peace. Maybe I’ll come around to the social benefits in time.

That being said, I’ve been evangelizing Diigo on these pages since day one, as you’ll see in this compendium of three old posts showing how I used Diigo in the classroom over the last year and a half.

A caveat: for my own research, I love Diigo. It allows me to annotate, bookmark (and share automatically to del.icio.us), and highlight clips - all tagged, too. But just as I’ve had little luck getting students or colleagues to use feed aggregators, I’ve had no better luck getting them to switch on to the power of Diigo. So if you use any of these methods in your own classroom - or use Diigo in any other way with your students - I advise you to build in part of the assessment to be weighted toward demonstrated regular use of the tool. Schooliness is Web 1.0 (if it’s web at all), and our students seem to prefer schooliness over anything new every bit as much as their teachers do. A word to the wise.

That being said, here you go: Three uses of Diigo in the history and English classroom:

Screencast: Using Diigo on Student Scribe Blogs as Test Review “Sheets” (20 September 2007)

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works on permalinks, not on main blog pages) with the kisAP07 group. They use that as “test reviw.”

Here it is:

From Red Pen to Invisible Ink: Assessing Student Blogs with Diigo Groups (23 March 2007)

You are a young writer trying to experience what being a real writer is, because…your teacher is making you: sore spot one (but I can live with this one, for obvious reasons).

You are a young writer trying to have that experience by writing on a web-log (I’ve decided to outlaw the term “blogging” with students, and substitute the correct, grand old word: “Writing”), so that you can experience real audience, real feedback, real conversation based on your writing: blessing one.

You are a young writer who sees that someone has left a comment on one or your writings on your web-log (the word “blog” is a blighted thing as well, in the Language Arts classroom. From now on, we use “web-log”). What a delight–and a new one. You click the link, curious and expectant–how is the world responding to me as a writer?

But you see this:

You misspelled “frustrated.”
Is this a strong introduction?
Nice use of the appositive in Sentence Pattern 4, but your compound sentence in SP 3 is a comma splice because you forgot to include a coordinating conjunction after the comma.
B+.Your teacher.

“Well,” you say, “It was interesting. Thanks, but no thanks. Back to MySpace for some real conversation.”

Luckily, Chris Watson sparked an idea in one of our podcasted conversations about this problem: Somehow find a way to use Diigo to assess student web-log writing without defacing the students’ “intellectual property” and turning writing into “schooliness.”

So here’s my latest experiment, with thanks to Chris (and to Diane Quirk, who suggested this much earlier): using Diigo Groups (with a separate Diigo login for me, to keep my own bookmarks separate from my classroom bookmarks).

My students have joined the Group. Now when they go to their web-logs, after logging in to their Diigo account and setting “Show Annotations > Show Group Annotations” on their Diigo toolbar, they will see the highlights of specific passages from their writing that I have left (and I can start students doing this too, it occurs to me in a very attractive flash), and my annotations will pop up on their screen when they hover their mouse over the highlights.

Also good, our Diigo Groups Bookmarks page records all highlights and annotations I have made on one page. Students can use that to see all feedback I have given to specific strengths and weaknesses on all students writings.

And since they’re using anagrams instead of first-name usernames on their blogs, there’s less of a chance of any embarrassment resulting from this “public feedback”–with “invisible ink.”

The screenshot below is an example of what one student will see when she visits her blog with Diigo turned on.

How to Highlight and “Sticky-Note” Websites, and Save It All Online, Using Diigo (1 January 2007)

Here is an updated version of the Diigo tutorial. Your students will love you (not immediately, but only after they’re gone–they’re students, after all) for teaching them this great research tool!

And you’ll love being able to access your online notes of every website you’ve researched yourself, too–from any computer in the world.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I’m browsing the comments on last week’s Open Thread: Your Favorite Teacher Blogs?, and want to thank Bill Ferriter for sharing upstate New York English teacher Dina Strasser’s The Line.

I’ve read Dina before, and was struck by her writing then, but life has been too fast recently to bring me back to it. The return trip just now blew me away.

I want to share Dina’s first attempt at digital storytelling. Like Education for Well-Being’s Bill Farren’s “Did You Ever Wonder?”, Dina’s “Do You Know?” is a riff on Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?” “Do You Know?” is Dina’s vehicle for expressing her reactions to a recent trip she made to New Orleans. Just watch it:

It’s an interesting thing, this trend of intertextual riffs on Karl’s and Scott McLeod’s “Did You Know?” If I were them, I’d be quite proud to have generated this type of connective and competing reflection on what education in the 21st century should mean.

And if I were Dina, I’d be proud indeed of such a powerful first outing as a digital storyteller.

Don’t stop here, by the way. Check out Dina’s blog. There’s much more waiting for you there.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

Just sharing another quick writing exercise to follow up on the “titles and introductions” lesson using Alltop, since some writing teachers seemed to appreciate that one.

We did this lesson in my PLN/Networked Learning writing elective last week.  So many of my students, after 10+ years of writing in school, were writing post after post of the most monotonous, artless sentence structure - the basic Subject + Verb + Object or Complement - that reading them was like Chinese water torture.  Not good, when your classwork is a real-world blog project you hope will attract readers about your (presumed) passion, and will continue to be yours long after the school year is over.

So I adapted an exercise I learned from a Six Traits of Effective Writing workshop I  attended years ago in Shanghai by posting it on the class blog, and having students “turn it in” in comments to the post in class.  Here it is:

Leave a comment in which you write this sentence with as many sentence openings as you can - YOU CANNOT ADD OR SUBTRACT ANY WORDS. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE AT LEAST FIVE DIFFERENT SENTENCES WITH DIFFERENT OPENINGS BY SIMPLY REARRANGING:

He was quickly and happily crossing the street eating a hamburger when the bus came out of nowhere and ran over him.

As in the titles and introductory “hooks” lesson, I had students revise their previous posts to vary their sentence openings.  Again, the differences after revision were evidence that this quick lesson helped students to see the monotony of their own writing styles.

It’s a pretty fun exercise, by the way.  Should we turn this into an open thread and see who can write the most variations, without changing the meaning of the original sentence, or adding to or subtracting from the original words?

(P.S. I dashed this sentence off spontaneously, because I lost the sentence used in the workshop. If any of you writing teachers out there have done something like this and have a sentence that works better, please share it for the good of all.)

Photo credit: martha madness on Flickr.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

The following is rough transcript of my introductory remarks to two Advanced Placement Literature classes about a month ago.

I have two important announcements. Please pay attention.

One: I’m forming a Smoking on Campus Committee.

I’ve had enough of all the wrong-headed anti-smoking hysteria in our school. Smoking is not a social evil; it’s a social good. The world is over-infested with humans, and any habit that decreases our numbers is a long-term good for the planet. Further, any habit that saves us from the miseries of octogenarian decrepitude - dentures, incontinence, senility, and so forth - should be embraced, not shunned. Therefore, I’m announcing the Smoking on Campus Committee. Our platform consists of, first, promoting the sale of cigarettes and other tobacco products at the student store; and second, asserting students’ rights to smoke in the classroom, hallways, cafeteria, and anywhere else on campus.

Any students interested in applying for leadership positions in this committee are urged to see me after class.

Two: I’m offering One-on-One Conferences in Remedial Cheating

Cheating is an important skill for school. Done successfully, it saves you from wasting hundreds of hours of precious developmental time on mindless homework, and gives you the opportunity to devote that time instead to the pursuit of your own interests: music, sports, real reading and writing, friendship, navel-gazing, sleep, romance, whatever. As a teacher, it is my duty to equip you with the real-world skills you need to succeed. So I want to see the following students, whose plagiarism skills are not adequately fool-proof, for some remedial one-on-one lessons after school: [names withheld].

April Fool’s? Yes, for this post. But not for my class. I really did deliver something like this a few weeks ago, as an introduction to Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Rather than try to explain how Wilde’s characters utter the most outrageous, radical things - but with such straight faces that the humor and social criticism go right over the heads of switched-off audiences - I thought I’d attempt to give them a taste of Wilde’s method by making the above announcements with a straight face of my own.

I wish I’d filmed the students’ faces. Typically blank at first - another teacher yammering away - then the eyes get a little wider and more focused; then the glancing at other students with “are you hearing what I’m hearing?” looks. A few students nodding their heads in agreement with my “logic.”

A one-minute discussion of “Why did I make these announcements?” and “Were they entirely ridiculous?” (-”No.” -) “Why not?”, and they were ready to watch Wilde. Here’s a clip from the 1952 film adaptation by Anthony Asquith - as perfect a film as you’ll ever see. Enjoy the (not so) foolishness as the respectable Lady Bracknell interviews “Earnest,” a suitor for her daughter’s hand in marriage :

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

This is the excellent foppery of the world.
–Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Remember last summer those Korean Christian missionaries who came up with the bright idea of spreading their gospel in, of all places, Afghanistan? Sure you do. It was all over the news for a couple weeks. They were taken hostage by the Taliban, and a couple of their pastors were executed. Strangely enough, they were from a church in my old neighborhood in Seoul.

I don’t mean to be callous, but my reaction was: “Well, what did they expect?” Talk about “tempting the Lord.” Why not trust Him to protect a scuba dive in a lava bed? “What were these people thinking?” I asked.

They didn’t know what I want to call the First Rule of Evangelizing: Know Your Potential Converts.

I think we web 2.0 evangelists - at least this one - have to come to terms with a similar case of our own foppery: spreading the Gospel of RSS.

Even though we all use RSS readers - and even that’s a questionable assumption as the flood of feeds rises, and I, for one, find myself reading Twitter links far more than RSS feeds these days - can we all agree that our success rate at converting others to do the same is dismally low?

As a classroom teacher who has tried to convert students to the Good News of RSS Aggregators for almost two years now, the picture is even grimmer. All those hours walking students through setting up accounts, finding feeds, and all those additional hours of trying to guide them to the explosive learning that comes from the feed-reading habit? Fast forward a year later, and almost none of them have seen the Light.

Burn me at the stake, dear reader, and rail at this heretic if you must, but I must draw this conclusion: Maybe RSS is not The Only Way. We need a New Gospel.

Buddha is said to have advised seekers of Truth, faced with so many dogmas and doctrines and sects and claims, “Don’t mistake the fingers for the moon.” (For the metaphorically-challenged, the Moon would be the Truth, and the Fingers would be all mortal attempts to formulate it. Buddha is saying not to mistake the attempted answers with the ineffable reality they try to contain. Words can’t touch the Ultimate Truth, whatever that may be. It’s another reason I’ve always thought Buddha was cool. I’d love to hang out with that guy.)

So to riff off The Awakened One: if reading blogs and such is the moon, and RSS is a finger pointing the way to them that the vast majority of humans are too lazy and habit-driven to adopt, let’s be open to other ways.

I’ll share one that I found the day it was launched, and used in a writing classroom the day after. It’s called Alltop.

Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Evangelist, author, venture capitalist, Truemors creator, and Top 100 Technorati blogger, launched Alltop.com about a month ago. True to his mantra-making form, he describes Alltop as an “Online Magazine Rack.” It’s an apt description. As this screenshot shows, Alltop’s main page feels like an online version of the magazine section at a Borders or Barnes and Nobles. Click on the picture for full-size:

You see the main categories -Work, Living, People, Interests, Culture, Geekery, Good, News - that function as the “sections” in a magazine area of a bookstore. And beneath each category, you see the “subsections” - under “Culture,” for example, you have Design, Fashion, Movies, Music, and Photography (since he’s asking for suggestions, I’ve asked Guy to add “Books” to this work-in-progress).

By clicking on any of the subsections, you drill deeper into that subject by going to its subdomain page - for example, culture.alltop.com. Here you get a page of links “top” sites about the topic and, as the screeshot below of the “Interests > Crime” page shows, the latest five feeds from each site. Again, click the picture for full-size view:

I chose to screenshot the Crime page because I have a student in my Networked Learning/PLN elective class who chose to do a project on detectives in real life, and on TV and film. She’s writing crime humor scripts that she wants to direct and film, so she needed to find websites to research real detective life and find plot ideas involving funny crimes. The “Dumb Criminals” and CSI sites were just what she needed for these purposes.

But I had all of my students in this class do an exercise about the importance of titles and opening paragraphs using the main page of whatever Alltop site best suited their self-designed project - sports journalism, restaurant and bar design, comfort foods and recipes, political satire, game reviews - and the final feature of Alltop that has value for teaching writing. You see it in the screenshot below: the popup first paragraph of each feed’s post:

So here’s how the writing exercise went: 1) Go to the topic on Alltop that fits your project; 2) List the three best, and three worst, blog or website titles from the page, and explain why they shine or stink; 3) Select the three best and worst post titles, and explain the same; 4) Hover over the links of posts and find three excellent introductions from the popups, and three lousy ones, and explain your choices; 5) Post your analyses on the group PLN blog (here’s an example from a student: “The Difference a Title Can Make”).

Since doing that exercise - and then assigning students to re-title and re-write the opening paragraphs of all their posts - I’ve seen the evidence that the lesson worked. And I’ve also found that Alltop is a way for my students to find fresh information about their interests - without facing the tribulations of evangelizing RSS readers.

Full disclosure: Beyond School is featured in Alltop’s Education page. But I was using Alltop in class before that. I’d switched my homepage to Alltop from Popurls.com, which featured only social bookmarking hits from del.icio.us, Digg, and so forth, and thus was uneven at best (the Ron Paul crowd learned how to manipulate these sites to push their posts to the top, along with many other sensationalistic titles). Alltop is an improvement for this reason.

Finally, be warned: puritanical classrooms will not be comfortable with Alltop because it features topics like “BLTG” - bi-sexual, lesbian, trans-sexual, gay - and it also features posts with some taboo vowel-consonant combinations. Me? I find it the perfect opportunity to train my students in not freaking out over real-world realities and language, and to get over any hangups about them caused by schooliness - whether Monday-Friday schooliness, or Sunday-schooliness. Let’s be real. They’re in high school, and they’re not strangers to these things.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)