Beyond School

It’s been about six weeks since my last update on the ten-week-old Networked Learning class I created with the help of so many of you in the initial Open Thread post and Twitter. Students are still grading themselves and justifying it - and showing the same fondness for grade inflation as so many of our colleagues. They’re also reflecting up a storm on how messy learning is when it’s yours to create and pursue.

Lesson One: Natives Can’t Tweet, and Twits Must Sleep

I’m learning a lot too. I’m learning that students aren’t comfortable with Twitter - another strike against the Digital Natives concept - and don’t adapt to it easily. I’m also learning that the Twitterverse is so much fuller of good will and idealism than it is of time and energy that it’s often unreliable (and I include myself in this charge). I pulled back from that angle when I realized the absence of network input could be an excuse for not generating your own content from good old-fashioned writing (or new-fashioned blogging and multmedia).

Lesson Two: Failure Can Breed Success

But the favorite piece of learning I’m having is this: there is no unit testing involved, no chopping up of learning into opened-then-closed chapters. Instead, there is a lot of time for confusion, drift, frustration, and failure - without the option of quitting. And to me, that’s pregnant with more real-world learning than most stuff on the SAT or AP Literature exam.

Lesson Three: Fall Down Nine Times, Stand Up Ten — Then Slam-Dunk

And here’s some evidence: Jaeho and Younsuk have gone through a lot of challenges as they’ve tried to launch their Basketball without Borders website (I’m withholding the URL until the tell me it’s ready to launch). They’d

had a lot of leads for interviews that fizzled out, were delayed, fell through, and so forth, and had to traverse some really windless seas for a few weeks. We kept busy with more schooly writing exercises and such while waiting for fresh winds, but still - “inspired” and “motivated” are the last words to come to mind when I remember those weeks with this project.

But today they had a slam dunk: K.J. Matsui (Washington Post feature article here), an NCAA basketball standout from Columbia University, agreed to a Skype call from Korea to New York - during our class - to record for a podcast interview for their site. Younsuk skyped me at about 2 this morning to give me the news, chat about his interview questions, and so forth, which is, ah, unusual from almost any student. Then today in class, Matsui was on Skype as promised. (How cool is that from a world-class athlete, by the way?)

How do “inspired” and “motivated” fit these project creators now? You decide. I filmed them just as the interview ended, and interviewed them myself. It’s 4 noteworthy minutes, especially to those who can read body and facial language.

And me? I’m inspired, as a teacher, to help them write as well as they can on this site. I want it to succeed and grow long after they leave me.