Local issues can link to wider ones - but meta-cognition goes a long way in propelling the ripple I think.

I don’t think that teens lack the psychocosial foundations of connecting with the world. For the past 4 years, we have held global projects connecting 3 million students from across the world with each other and with experts investigating environmental change and life in the Arctic regions of the world. Their experiences caused change rarely seen in the regular old classroom. In other words, they initiated action within their own community, holding fundraisers, carving dogsleds (the projects have to do with dogsleding across the arctic), and striving to teach others (adults and teens alike) that local actions have global implications… My perspective is that teens are ready. We just need to figure out the best way to get them excited about such projects. If you just tell them “hey look, here’s a kid in Greece, talk to her” I don’t think you’ll be seeing much “change.”

With that said…my perspective is shaped, honed, skewed (possibly) from a business perspective. While I admit that I am a newbie with regard to wikis and global collaboration in my classroom, I am a seasoned veteran with regard to building and sustaining a competitive advantage in the workplace.

In my estimation, our students need all types of collaboration–building, local, national, and global. And, as others have already stated we can’t collaborate just for collaboration’s sake. Young adults (all of us, actually) are always asking, “So what?” As educators it’s our responsibility to answer all of the ’so what’ questions before they are asked…we have to let the students know up front ‘what’s in it for them.’ If the content isn’t relevant, if they can’t make the connection(s) on how they can apply (in the ‘real world’) what they are to learn, then what’s the point?

I consider it my ‘duty’ if you will to prepare my students for the inordinate amount of (and sometimes downright nasty) competition they will face as they enter the marketplace. In addition, I am driven to teach my students how to build and sustain a competitive advantage in both college and career. By participating in meaningful collaboration projects (be they global or otherwise), students are exposed to another valuable learning tool that will help them build that advantage.

Estie Cuellars last blog post..Thing #20 YouTube and TeacherTube (part 2)

I love the lyrics in this song sung by Kathy Mattea and written by Pat Alger and Ralph Murphy. It reminds me of the wisdom of taking the longer perspective when working with students.

“Sometimes I stop on my way home
And watch the children play
And I wonder if they wonder
What they’ll be someday
Some will dream a big dream
And make it all come true
While others go on dreaming
Of things they’ll never do
We’re all just seeds
In God’s hands
We start the same
But where we land
Is sometimes fertile soil
And sometimes sand
We’re all just seeds
In God’s hands
I saw a friend the other day
I hardly recognized
He’d done a lot of living
Since I’d last looked in his eyes
He told his tale of how he’d failed
The lessons he’d been taught
But he offered no excuses
And he left me with this thought
We’re all just seeds
In God’s hands
We start the same
But where we land
Is sometimes fertile soil
And sometimes sand
We’re all just seeds
In God’s hands
As I’m standing at a crossroads once again
I’m reminded we’re all the same when we begin
And in the end…
We’re all just seeds
In God’s hands
We start the same
But where we land
Is sometimes fertile soil
And sometimes sand
We’re all just seeds
In God’s hands
We’re all just seeds
In God’s hands”

I love the sentiments expressed here. Looking back to those confused teenage periods in my own life, I see how my best teachers planted some powerful seeds. The most powerful where ones that eventually formed the foundations of my own philosophy of being in the world by exposing me to the wisdom of ancient cultures. These were the seeds that formed the basis for the understanding of my own soul.

I wonder what I would have said about those lessons back when I was a teenager. I expect I would have mocked them like so many others of my peer group, but that mocking would not have truly reflected the impact those lessons had in forming my way of being in the world.

As a teacher, I try to develop the mindset of one of my many mentors, the one who plants trees. He told me that he plants them not from himself, but for his children’s children. His is a perspective that has wisdom and honors the totality of the human life span.

So I teach, innovate where I can and continue to hope and trust that seeds planted today will grow in unknowable but profound and beautiful ways.

All the best in everything that you do,

Greg

I read your full post on your own blog, and nodded in agreement with most of what you had to say.

I especially liked the “beyond the wow” thrust of it all, which dovetails nicely with several other comments about not doing it for its own sake, but only when there’s a good purpose for it.

I’m still unable to let go of the idea that, at this developmental stage, local collaborations geared toward local action and connection might serve as good “training wheels” before pushing kids off to ride global bicycles alone (and that’s one mangled metaphor, but I hope you get my drift).

In other words, “Think globally, act locally” might still be good advice for leading kids out from their classrooms and into the world - but first their close world, and later, the far one. Local citizenship, as Morgante noted above, has more immediate and personal results; and more importantly, aims to improve the local community. That’s something best done by the local players, students included.

Which is not to say there’s not room for both.

Thanks for weighing in.

Would you like that statue in bronze, or marble?