Beyond School

[Update: I added a complete novel you should be able to guess, just to give you an idea of what this would look like (h/t to Adrienne for the spark).]

Going Deeper with Post-Clouds

Since a lot of people seemed to enjoy the TweetClouds as Windows of the Soul meme, I thought this bit of serendipity snagged from some tweeted link might interest you as well. It might even have some classroom use as a reflective tool for student bloggers.

It’s called TagCrowd. In a nutshell, it takes any text and creates a tag cloud based on the text’s word frequency.

I decided to make a Tag Crowd of all posts on this blog for this month of April. I think I’ll make it an end-of-month ritual from now on. It will serve as a visual snapshot of my month’s obsessions. So here’s

April ‘08 on Beyond School*:

–at a glance, I can see this was the month of Ali, Lolita, Project Global Cooling, Diigo, Speech v. Talking, Twitter, and a Debate about Writing. That pretty much sums April up. Kind of cool. (What would REALLY be cool is feeding all posts and comments from an entire blog, but I know of no easy way to generate a text doc from an XML export. Anybody?)

The site suggests more uses – including educational ones – here:

TagCrowd is taking tag clouds far beyond their original function:

• as topic summaries for speeches and written works
• for visual analysis of survey data
• as brand clouds that let companies see how they are perceived by the world
• for data mining a text corpus
• for helping writers and students reflect on their work
• as name tags for conferences, cocktail parties or wherever new collaborations start
• as resumes in a single glance
• as visual poetry

The list goes on and continues to grow.

Update: Here’s that novel, complete 100-odd pages of text (but see Adrienne’s comment for a better idea).

It’s a voluntary meme, like the last one. No poetry involved.

*FYI: I couldn’t get the embed code to work on WP 2.5, so I just took a screenshot.

First, a mini-photo essay on my own point of view about privileging writing over speaking when grading in the collaborative, networking, multimedia century:

Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of putting Diigo annotations on posts instead of leaving comments in the thread was a negative thing. Only Diigo users would see the conversation, and the post’s comment thread would be left poorer for that.

But after a wild four-hour storm of 74-and-counting comments on my Muhammed Ali post about privileging writing over other communication strands when we grade, it occurs to me that Diigo might come in handy here. There are so many incredibly insightful comments there, and the issue is so relevant to the futures of our students, that I fear the sheer bulk of comments might dissuade new readers from discovering the gold shining here and there.

Diigo highlights and annotations of the thread might help. If you want to take part in this experiment, go at it. It could be a great way to demonstrate the value of Diigo highlights and annotations as a complement to, instead of a substitute for, blog comments. Because the debate – particularly the one between Benjamin Baxter, who maintains that writing should constitute the bulk of a student’s grade in English/Language Arts and history classes, and opposing viewpoints that grades should more equally credit speaking, graphic language, and more, as articulated by Arthus Erea, Adrienne Michetti, Kirstin “Keamac,” Dean Shareski, Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez, Carolyn Foote, and many others – that debate never seemed to reach any resolution.

It sounds like I’m piling on Benjamin here, but I don’t mean to. Fifty million people saying something is true doesn’t make it so. Moreover, Benjamin works in an inner city school, and his arguments are rooted in his perception of what best helps his students’ futures. It differs with mine, but I’m in a different context. And we’re all running on varying assumptions about things like the future of work, the purpose of schooling, and more.

But that thread drifts into so many tangents – the high school freshman Arthus v. high school teacher Benjamin debates are priceless, but sometimes distracting (or am I wrong?) – that I see Diigo, again, as possibly helpful here. Highlight and annotate the strong assertions, the weak rebuttals, the evasions of direct questions and the red herrings, and let others add comments to those annotations.

(This connects, by the way, to a conversation with “Uninspired Teacher” Tom and Charlie A. Roy on the “Schooly Speeches versus Real Talks” post, about using juries instead of judges in mock trials – or better, real ones – to improve that old practice.)

Peter Rock said it took him an hour to read that post and thread (but he also said he read it slowly). That scares me. So many comments in that thread don’t deserve burial in the noise.

So head on over to that thread, if you’re a Diigo convert – especially if there’s a Diigo group on assessment - and have at it.

At the same time, far be it from me to dictate rules. If you want to just comment instead, of course that’s okay.

—

Photos:Toksik by The Sizemore McCabe Project, Continental Paper Grading Company by quinn.anya, Spring Branding Near Crane Oregon 1982 by mharrsch

I promised in an earlier post to give the link when Teachers Teaching Teachers posted its podcast with students weighing in on “How to Be Unschooly” in blogs, Twitter, and more. Consider it done. It is so worth a listen.

There’s something to say, too, about the back-story on this. Soojin, the Korean student who generated the tweet that triggered the podcast, was a student of mine – but from last year. As Soojin discusses in the podcast, my efforts to push him, as a member of my classroom, to turn on to connective writing didn’t work. A year later, he’s out there doing it independently – I see him on Twitter all the time, and read his blog – and out of nowhere, from Korea, Soojin is causing educators in New York to invite him to a podcast, and invite me as almost an afterthought. I love that.

I also loved finding the other student pioneers on that Skype call and chat – especially, and for reasons similar to the Soojin story, Lindsea. A Hawaii student, I “met” Lindsea last year through my classes’ collaboration on the first 1001 Flat World Tales with her class with teacher Chris Watson. Lindsea is now, like Soojin, a part of my network, and a student pioneer.

You’ll meet other pioneering students on the podcast as well:

• Hannah, a student at principal Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia (and an excellent writer and speaker I “pray” will contribute to Students 2.0 regularly, and pull Philadelphia into Project Global Cooling next year). Hannah’s been blogging intensely about environmental issues in her region, and mentioned she’s received little to no encouragement from comments. Can we remedy that?
• Ben, from the excellent New York City Students group blog – another fantastic model of real student blogging. (Ben, as I told you on the podcast, I invited you all to Students 2.0 when I was seeking recommendations from my network, and Diane Cordell pointed me to you. That offer is still open as an additional, less frequent, non-competitive megaphone for your group.)

And then, manning the chat channel with his usual good questions and helpful hands, was another Philadelphia student I’ve come to know over the past year: Tyrone Kidd. Tyrone, I’ve wanted to give a shout-out about how impressive you’ve been as another pioneer since you popped up on my radar (and in my Seoul Networked Learning class blog) a few months ago. I love your pioneering spirit.

All the students above are noteworthy for showing they can navigate these networks, and prudently and maturely learn along with us.

They’re also noteworthy for teaching us how to make blogs and social networking “unschooly” to them. But for that, you’ll need to listen to the TTT podcast. (And Paul Allison, it was nice to finally make contact, so many months after discovering your blog.)

Photo: Pioneer Aviator Bessie Coleman, First African American Pilot from PingNews on Flickr

[Update 2: Goodness! A 75-comment debate exploded in less than a day.  Best sustained conversation among all commenters (not just responding to the post) that I've ever seen on this blog.  A true "cocktail party" about an important subject: Assessing with a bias toward writing, versus assessing to reward non-written communication skills equally in grades.]  [Update: Good comments in this one. Thanks to Adrienne Michetti (whose new team-blog looks promising), Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez of Generation Yes, and Arthus for rooting this post in the basics - which still aren't basic for so many. And do yourself a favor: watch the Ali video embedded below. It's the evidence of the argument, and a breath of fun to boot.]

I went into a restaurant downtown – you couldn’t do that back then, because things weren’t integrated yet – and I sat down with my [Olympic] gold medal around my neck, and the waitress came up, and I said, ‘Yes, I’d like, uh, a cup of coffee, and a hot dog.’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve negroes here.’ And I got so angry, I said, ‘And I don’t eat them, either. Now bring me a hot dog!’ — Muhammad Ali, 1971 TV interview (YouTube embedded below [Update Dec. 2009: YouTube took it down, so I replaced it with another vid that doesn't have this dialogue, but is still a great watch.])

You never could have made me believe years ago, when I got out of high school with a D- average – and they gave me the minus because I won the Olympics, 1960, I graduated in 1960 and I won the Olympics in 1960 – . . . . and if you would have told me that I would be offered a professorship to teach philosophy and poetry at Oxford, and speak at Harvard, I never would have believed it. — Muhammad Ali, Harvard graduation speech 1975 (YouTube here)

In 1964, [Muhammad] Ali failed the U.S. Armed Forces qualifying test because his writing and spelling skills were sub par. — Wikipedia

An Historical Argument Against Writing-Privileged Assessment

It’s been a sleep-in Saturday after a long week. I woke up and took a rare cruise through YouTube. It started with laughs with Ali G, and ended with inspiration from Muhammad Ali.

This post is for any student who, like Ali in the epigraph above, has a low GPA (and thus a low self-image), but a brilliant mind. It’s also for teachers of those students who wish they could do their part to make that GPA more accurately reflect that student’s abilities.

Listen, in this YouTube interview from 1971, to this “sub-par” English student’s brilliance with language*, and laugh at the limitations of assessing writing and spelling to measure verbal intelligence:

And teachers – English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms – ask yourself, in this age of user-created video and audio, if it makes any sense to keep giving the Muhammed Ali’s of our classrooms a D- because they can’t write well, when they can speak well enough to be honored, like Ali was, at Harvard and Oxford. The English teacher in me is uncomfortable with this question, but the history teacher in me thinks it’s justified: Writing is no longer supreme since the Digital Revolution. It’s now on equal footing with Speaking and Graphic Communication. Isn’t it?

If yes, then why, in most classrooms I’ve seen (and taught), is writing still weighted as around 75% of the final grade in the Language Arts classroom? And how can so many teachers who themselves are capable thinkers and creators, but horrible writers, justify this sort of assessment policy in their own practice?

Ali’s language could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” and with it this man “shook the world” – but neither his high school nor the Army could reflect this in their assessments. Instead, they labeled him “below average” and “sub par.”

It’s been more than 50 years since Ali left high school. Can we leave that assessment philosophy now? (I hear the answers already: “Not until the SAT allows oral instead of written essays.” Just kill me.)

Story Time: When I Met Ali First, and Second

I met Ali in 1982 or so in a West Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Boulevard*, serving him as his white-boy waiter. I was about 20. I told him my name was Clay, and that when I was in first grade in the ’60s and he was still known as Cassius Clay, people called me “Cassius.”

When he heard that, this gentle giant smiled, put up his lethal dukes, dodged and weaved for a split second while he said,

“Oh. So you a fighter.”

Then he offered a handshake, into which my hand disappeared.

I was an English major in college then, but I didn’t take mental marks off of Ali’s performance for omitting the “are,” didn’t say, “You mean, ‘You are a fighter.’” And this wasn’t just because he could have lifted me over his head and snapped me in two. It was because his language, bad grammar and all, was far more electrifying than many a grammatically perfect professor I had at the time.

I was unschooled in Ali’s history at that time. All I knew was that he was a heavyweight world champion of my childhood, and now had some sort of neural disorder (he often fell asleep at his table, and his wife would wake him up). I wish I’d known then what I know now – that he was one of the great men of the 20th century – so that I could have told him that. Instead, I just laughed with the stupid giddiness people often have in the face of celebrities, and served him his pasta.

Only years later, after watching Leon Gast’s riveting documentary, When We were Kings, did I realize just how great Ali was – not only as a boxer, but also as a citizen and man of conscience for a nation adrift. Punished with the loss of his boxing license at the prime of his career for his political dissent and his refusal to fight in Vietnam, he became an American pariah.

Fifteen years after meeting him, I had another Ali moment. Having lost all desire to become an academic, but not having lost the lifetime of college debt I’d accumulated in that (for me) fool’s quest, I was in a personnel processing center at Fort Leonard Wood, Arkansas, with a freshly shaved head and a duffel bag, ready to start Basic Training. There was a wall-mounted TV in the corner of the room, with live coverage of some important-looking outdoor ceremony. I was out of all media loops that summer, and didn’t even know the Olympics were going on. It was the Torch-lighting ceremony on that TV that I was watching – and it was history. Ali lit that torch in his final, moral comeback. The audience and media adulation was for once justified. It brought tears to my eyes and gave me faith in America.

–

*The critical thinking about race in religion and in US history are not too shabby either. And yes, while Ali shows a lack of critical thinking in his wholesale swallowing of everything Elijah Muhammad preached to him, we shouldn’t be too hard on him. Lack of critical thinking about one’s own religion is the norm in most people of any religion, from what I can see. As I read somewhere – maybe Sam Harris, maybe Bertrand Russell – everybody’s an atheist when it comes to others’ religions. Full non-theists just take them one further.

**Los Angelenos, is “The Old World” restaurant still there? On the corner diagonal from Tower Records, across the street from Spago?

I just had to share this opening. Blogs are not uncommon, but opening lines like this one from Charlie Roy? Obviously written with care (and some intangible verve), they’re pretty rare. Just had to share:

All of us have seen presentations that dull our intellect and shorten our lives. We cope and endure often times by giving the occasional head nod and then staring at the floor, believing that in this case our closed eyelids might be construed as concentration.

I love writerly blogs like that.

Charlie goes on to offer an alternative to these life-threatening presentations with an encomium to TED Talks. It’s a good overview of what TED’s about, if any poor soul out there has not yet converted to it.

Photo: macwagen

[Update 2: Most of the clarification promised in the update below is in the comment thread. I still don't hear a lot of testimonies that RSS is really sticky with non-geeks, though, even from its strongest defenders. So I'm still wondering if we shouldn't be looking for other paths to conversion in our PD sessions and classrooms.]

[Update 5 hours later: Yet again, Clay is a victim of his own English teacher-y proneness to a turn of phrase. I'm almost finished with a post clarifying and extending this (and thanking some people for diagnosing my RSS malady). But right now I have to pick up my wife. More soon ]

From a comment I just left on Darren Draper’s blog, in which Darren lists focusing on RSS as a priority for Professional Development workshops :

I suspect that RSS is Dead, but we evangelists don’t want to lose something to preach.

I think Twitter links, Diigo groups, Education.Alltop.com, and such are easier ways to turn people onto the blogosphere.

Just because we believe in RSS doesn’t mean we’ve converted others. I think our track record on that is miserable enough to speak for itself (mine is, anyway, with colleagues and students alike). Can we say “dead horse”?

How many of you out there really do see Feed Readers / RSS Aggregators sticking after you leave the class or workshop?

Faith that RSS is the true savior does not make it so. I think it’s more of a Model T Ford – or an Edsel.

Photo: Nietzsche by escolanomade; beautiful by dawn m. armfield

It’s almost 6 p.m. here in Seoul, and that’s bedtime for this nocturne. Before curling up in Morpheus’ arms, I want to throw this screenshot of my Tweetcloud up here (thanks to Cathy Nelson for sharing that one). It’s an interesting little thing, this tag cloud of your most frequent tweet words. The largest words are most frequent from your tweet history, the medium fairly frequent, the smallest less so, but apparently still frequent enough to gain a space on your cloud.

The temptation to see it as a window to your soul – or your Twit-soul, anyway – seems a respectably objective hypothesis that, better still, opens up a bit of fun. So here’s the cloud, followed by a little playful (but sometimes pregnant?) poetasting:

The “self-promoter” (i.e., guy who likes to share his thoughts and seek yours in reply) inevitably tops the cloud with “New Post.” (Shamelessly) Guilty. (But note: We can promote others too, as below )

But I’m happy to see the next most frequent tag is “Thanks,” next to the thanked-for “@dmcordell.”

There’s lots of poetry there too. I especially like:

From the obsessive AP Lit teacher:

Check classroom – college coming.

From the secular naturalist mystic:

Day’s delicious design.

From the army veteran who ain’t above a little spicy naughtiness now and then:

Doing @dswaters? Easy.

(Sue, I think I know you enough to know you’ll ROFL at that one! )

From the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling guy:

Getting global, going google.

From the best teacher in me:

Learn learning.

From the guy who loves passionate students worldwide:

Life, @lindseak! Look! Love!

From the guy who likes the virtual cocktail parties:

Need network! Play, pln!

From the blogging evangelist:

Post posts, ppl!

From the Church of Poetry acolyte:

Reading real right.

From the guy who pines from Korea for his life’s love, China:

Send Seoul Shanghai.

From the guy who reads Dean:

Share @shareski.

From the guy who reads Sylvia’s tweets from late-night jazz clubs:

Sleep, @smartinez.

From the guy who tried to pull his network into his classroom:

Sorry, @sschwister: story (student stuff). Sure.

From the guy who knows a true teacher:

@taylorteacher, teach teachers teaching.

From the guy who knows a smart librarian of the futur(a):

@technolibrary: tell.

From the guy who knows mashups:

Things think.

From the guy who blogs (almost) daily:

Thinking time today.

From the guy looking for young fires wanting kindling:

Wait. Want. Watch.

From the lonely groom in exile:

Wedding week.

From the guy who Will makes chuckle:

Weird wiki, @willrich45!

From the wannabee Whitmanesque bard:

Wish! Wonder! Work, world!

From the guy who just passed 500 posts in 16 months, after 25 years of writing almost nothing:

Write years.

If you want to play likewise, call it a voluntary meme. Link back here so we can also see your “twit soul.”

Short and sweet, that’s the question. I find it fascinating from the angles of psychology and sociology. Lots of talk about “self-promotion” on Twitter around the blog-hood these days. I frankly don’t know what it means. I say as much in this reply to comments on my last post:

I also wonder about all the “self-promotion” talk going on. If by that we mean announcing a new post we just wrote, it seems most people do it (me included), and I actually like it. It gives me a chance to discover more about the personalities in my Twitbin. I actually use Twitter far more than my RSS reader these days to read new posts. (I also like the writerly aspect of it: Tweeting a New Post announcement requires the ability to write a terse blurb that entices me to click the link.)

Is that what people mean by “self-promotion”? Posting links to new posts? I see it as inviting conversation on the blog, I guess.

If that’s not what people mean by self-promotion,what do they mean?

Can we get specific in the comments? What exact actions constitute “self-promotion” to you? I feel like a Beverly Hillbilly clueless about manners at Mr. Drysdale’s mansion.

Photo by Trainman74

David Jakes’ post slamming questioning Twitter has done a good job of generating reflection on “the uses and ‘abuses’” of Twitter. I left this comment there, and want to copy it here for my records:

The dismissals of Twitter as idle chatter, or stunted substitutes for extended thinking, miss something I’ve noted (and practiced) on a number of occasions: Twitter is a launchpad, not a landing one, for thought and connection. Examples: many of my podcasts start as ideas flitting across Twitter, small exchanges, and then end with the Tweet: “Want to Skype for a podcast?” At least three or four podcasts have come from this approach since I started tweeting regularly in January.

I like the metaphor – and I use it with my students – of all these digital tools as “different trapezes.” In isolation, they’re pretty limiting. We have to be “gymnastic” with them, and swing from one to the other as whim and inspiration strike us. Here’s my favorite trapeze act of late:

Twitter to Skype to Garageband to posted Podcast on Blog to blog Comment Thread to Trackbacks ad infinitum

You notice my entry trapeze is Twitter. You notice my exit trapeze is blog conversations. Twitter is that indispensable for me these days.

But we’re all experimenting in this new Wild West. Let’s keep the carny interesting with the acts we bring to it. They’re all educational, all learning experiences, good and bad.

To change metaphors: we’re evangelizing this stuff, but it’s all so new we can’t be too “expert” at it. We’re not only evangelists of the new Gospel – we’re its guinea pigs as well. We’re experimenting on ourselves. So it’s good for us to experience the abuses, the extremes, so we can, to riff off your post, “better help kids learn.”

International School of Bangkok’s Justin Medved asked me to spread the word about their elementary and middle school Project Global Cooling events, both of which will be Ustreamed:

Middle School Concert for Climate Change – 12-2 pm Bangkok Time on Thursday April 24th

Elementary Earth Day Festival – 8am – 1pm Bangkok time on Friday April 25th

ES Event Guide

Justin, along with the stellar ISB edtech cast of and Dennis Harter, Kim Cofino and, soon, Jeff Utecht, deserve gobs of green credit for introducing sustainability and collaboration to the primary and middle levels.

Logo: Daniel Kim, PGC Seoul