Beyond School

Dispensing with the Easy Stuff First: Guest Bloggers Bill Farren and Chris Watson

I wish I could say I was really taking a honeymoon, but it has to wait a week or three. More on that after I announce this week’s guest-bloggers, who have kindly agreed to take the helm while I float back down to earth from Saturday’s nuptial clouds.

Bill Farren will post his third weekly installment on Education for Well-Being (the full series*: my intro “Beyond ‘Did You Know?’ - A Video for Viral Times: ‘Did You Ever Wonder?’“; Bill’s first guest-post, “Education for Well-Being“; Bill’s second guest-post, “The Hidden Curriculum“; and Seoul sophomore Patrick Nam’s outstanding podcast interview with Bill for Project Global Cooling).

Also, Christopher Watson will make his first appearance. Chris teaches at Punahou High School in Honolulu and blogs at WatsonCommon, but is also my closest team teacher. Yes, I’m in Korea, and yes, he’s in the most remote Pacific island on the planet, but we’ve team-taught, brainstormed, and tried to trail-blaze constantly since collaborating on the 1001 Flat World Tales over a year ago. Chris’ imagination, as well as his penchant for organization and management, have made his blog a gold mine for me for the past year. He’s got full license to post as much as he’d like this week.

Now for the Tough Stuff: An Impossible “Thank You”

I shared my Korean wedding on this blog via Ustream for two main reasons: first, to include my family in the States and my friends from Twitter and elsewhere; second, to model the infinite possibilities of blogging to any and all educators and students who can’t see the history, the wonder, the playfulness, the power of it all.

Let me repeat that second point: Ustreaming my marriage was yet another attempt to teach the power of this new medium.

Deliciously enough, though, the result was a new discovery - a new learning - for me. I learned that, simply put, this new medium can unlock new forms of human kindness.

I only have time right now for three examples:

Carolyn Foote sent me a home-made Flickr card before the wedding:

Wedding present on Flickr - Photo Sharing! via kwout

During the wedding, Chris Betcher in Sydney started this “real-world project” Voicethread with my twitter friends (go ahead, click “play,” and be amazed):

And after the wedding, Frank in Mexico (whose blog has my all-time favorite header!) posted the full wedding chat on Ustream - I was “away from keyboard” for obvious reasons (the inlaws vetoed my bid to carry my Macbook to the altar) - and the Twitter history during the wedding as well (and more):

Clay’s Wedding 2.0: Blogged, Ustreamed, Flickr’d, Voicethreaded & Twittered so del.icio.us | Faces of Web 2.0 ★ 21st Century Teachers via kwout

That’s just the tip of the warmthberg - but it already exhausts my abilities to adequately thank (and Diane Cordell, I can’t even begin to describe your constant kindness).

Still, I want to pull one more teachable moment out of this: etymologically, the word “education” comes from the root “duc” - Latin for “to lead” - and the prefix “e-”, “out, away from”. In the Deep Old Sense, then, “education” is “to lead out” (and I’ll milk that vague connection to “Beyond Schooliness” for all it’s worth here, thank you).

What do these historically new acts of kindness have to teach us, we students of life? I’d suggest this: if you think you have nothing to write about as you face the blank screen, remember these people, and their fine gestures, and consider, instead of thinking, simply feeling. And create from that. Create some new form of kindness. Let your education “lead you out” - from yourself. Let it pull you to engage the world from the tip of your nose to the opposite pole.

I’m afraid I didn’t get that right, but that’s okay. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

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*Due to a technical error, I lost all the comments to these posts, but will restore them from my comments RSS feed as soon as the dust settles. My apologies to Bill and all for that.