Beyond School

After watching the following video on Dean Shareski’s blog (thanks to Kate Tabor for the alert):

Carrotmob Makes It Rain from carrotmob on Vimeo.

–and then watching this immensely disturbing clip from the Uncounted documentary about election theft in the 2004 USA elections:

–and in the 2006 elections:

–it should be no wonder that I fantasize that, on election day 2008, students and teachers take cellphones and video cameras to the voting centers, and show what a smart mob can do to defend democracy.

You can see ten more clips from Uncounted here, and order the DVD here.

I never had a civics class in school. Are they still taught in the US? And are educators either practicing or modeling politically engaged behavior in their own lives? What’s our ratio of communicating to our elected officials in proportion to tweeting our networks, for example? Do we need to reflect on that?

The elections are just around the corner. What a learning opportunity for our students and ourselves - especially if we act to ensure our votes are counted.

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danah boyd just posted a “request for brain-fodder” from her readers, and I played along by posting the below (or trying to - maybe it’s being moderated, maybe it was spammed, maybe some cyber-Cerberus ate it on the banks of the thread).  It’s a question I’ve been turning over for a while now, and enough of us have jumped into collaborative classroom projects now to share our reflections on the question I asked danah.

Let me preface this by saying that I think Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis deserve monumental statues on Cyber-Main Street for their pioneering work in the Flat Classroom Projects.  They sparked my own plunge into the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling.  So I’m not dissing anything here, but rather critically reflecting on our own assumptions about our students’ psycho-social developmental readiness to catch the buzz we’ve all caught from this so-spiked digital koolaid.

As I say below, in horribly confused prose, danah’s presentation of her research on teen networking practices made me question whether teens are as impressed by the potential of global collaboration as we (rightly) are.  I’ve gone through two of them now, and am fairly certain that once the unit was over, so were any connections that those teens made with other teens flung wide around the globe during that unit.

Faceless Flat, Huggable Round?

And that leaves me wondering if local collaboration - within a school (and my, does that hurt Mr. Unschooly to say), or a comfortably snug geographic zone like a town or city - might be more engaging for the students.  Face to face is possible across town, and less so around the globe - and face to face seems, if I get danah right, to matter more to teens. The world may indeed be flattening, but round may have its own excitement for them.

Another anti-koolaid factor for teens might be that generally, they’re too busy with schoolwork to have developed any passionate, intrinsically compelling causes to collaborate about. Beyond schoolwork and school society, neither their identities nor their concerns extend. So . . . . you know, “Collaborate about what?  Why?  Don’t you realize the football game is Friday and the prom is Saturday?”

I’ll only add that part of all of these reflections involve the levels of engagement I saw in two different types of collaboration I’ve done in the past two years: one was global (wiki workshop here, anthology of best stories here), but the other was within the school-building. That second one involved all the students in world history - five classes shared between another teacher and me, meeting at different times, but all working on historical fiction set in the French Revolution on a wiki, all linking to the characters’ diaries created by their friends, all creating encounters of their own characters and their friends’ characters in a wildly promiscuous way.  My takeaway, when I compare, is that the collaboration that had the most zing to me was obviously the global collaboration: come on, my students in Seoul were writing with students in Colorado and Hawaii.  But my students?  They were way more zapped (in teacherspeak, I mean “engaged”) by the work confined to the fourth floor of our high school.

It makes me want to pull out my “Child Development” textbook from my education classes for more input.

But in the meantime, I’ll ask you for input too: Here’s the question for this Open Thread:

If you have led students through a global collaboration project, are you aware of any permanent change in your students’ networked lives?  Have they sustained any of the relationships formed then?  Have they used the experience to start their own independent collaborations?  Or have they climbed back out of the rabbit hole and resumed teen life as usual?

I really hope some of you - and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, especially you students out there - will throw some observations in comments letting me know your thoughts. My Korean student population may be anomaly, for all I know.

If they’re not an anomaly, though, it bears asking: with all the incredible labor that goes into teacher design, planning across time-zones, and managing of these projects (not to mention the same demands the students have to face when participating in them) - if local is more developmentally appropriate, just think of all the crows’ feet and raccoon eyes we escape by scaling things down to local size.

*    *    *

I embedded danah’s presentation in a footnote to my post last week about getting students to learn the story of history, but here it is again. She starts around the 8 minute mark, wearing the wool cap.

Here’s the comment I left her, but I won’t hate you if you stop reading here. I said it all above.

Okay, this k-12 educator who drank the “global collaboration” edu-koolaid a couple years ago will bite:

I saw your preso on YouTube (where, Berkman? Berkeley? I forget), and your summary of your research on teen practice online supported a creeping suspicion from my own experience that teens just aren’t yet psychologically developed enough to “get” the power of global networking. Their maturity levels - and thus their online practices - are still local and somewhat narcissistic. So while their teachers expect all sorts of vistas to expand in their students’ understandings, the students are pretty uninterested in the fact that they’re doing project work with other students a pole away, and far more interested in working online with their schoolmates in a classroom down the hall.

So: a) Do you think “flat classroom” projects (global collaborations) in high school assume a psycho-social developmental level that teens largely lack, and thus might be a largely wasted effort on the part of their teachers (who do grasp the significance of the shifts)?

b) At what age do you think such experiences will enhance education?

Sheesh, this feels as woolly as my grey matter right now. Hope it makes sense.

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1. Pew News IQ Quiz: America’s college graduates score a D- (61%) on basic news knowledge.

(click for larger image)

Take the Pew quiz here. It’s only 12 questions.  It raises a few questions, among which these interest me most:

a)  I haven’t lived in the States since ‘98, and haven’t consumed any mainstream US news or TV as a habit since then.  I get my news primarily from political and cultural blogs.  Yet I scored 11/12 correct, compared to 7.4/12 correct for US college graduates.  The question:  What does this say about the US mainstream media’s performance in contributing to an informed citizenry? (I assume most Americans still watch and read mainstream US news.  Maybe I’m wrong.)

b) How does our e-blogosphere and -twittersphere measure up against these results?  If we educators are similarly uninformed, are we connecting at the expense of staying informed?

The State of the Republic reflected in these results makes the following two entries a bit more understandable:

2. Texas Board of Education Approves Bible Study Elective Class

Here’s FOX News on the story

(Historically-informed people will notice that the blond “expert” perpetuates the fallacy that America’s founding fathers were Christians, when many of them were either partly or fully Deist, believing little of the miracle stories or other magical claims of the Church. And she’s going to be teaching the classes )

The New York Times adds this bit of research, to pre-empt the “there’s nothing wrong with teaching it as history” argument:

Mark Chancey, associate professor in religious studies at Southern Methodist University, has studied Bible classes already offered in about 25 districts. His study found most of the courses were explicitly devotional with almost exclusively Christian, usually Protestant, perspectives. It also found that most were taught by teachers who were not familiar with the issue of separation of church and state.

Since Texas shares with California the biggest sway in national education issues, this bit of nose-thumbing at the Constitutional separation of Church and State is not trivial - instead, it’s a retreat from the third millennium to the first.

Secular and non-Christian parents in Texas must be thrilled to pay for religious indoctrination in their schools.  And perhaps the money should go instead to basic geography and geopolitics, as the next item shows:

3. McCain Looks at “Struggle” on the “Iraq-Pakistan Border”

So okay, forgive him on his internet illiteracy, his fifth-from-the-bottom GPA from the Naval Academy, his admitted “need for education” on economics.  As he says, he’s still better at foreign policy, right?

I hate to say “wrong,” but jeez, watch this 20-second interview clip and tell me how not to?

McCain: We have a lot of work to do. It’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.

–what else can I say, as a social studies teacher, but sheesh: wrong.  There is no Iraq-Pakistan border. (Unless he plans to create one by occupying Iran - surely the most justifiably nervous country on the planet. Sandwiched between the US occupation of Iraq on the west and of Afghanistan on the east, and sitting on some massive oil deposits, wouldn’t you be paranoid about your defense?)

Defenders will say this was maybe a slip-up, or his advisers are there to save us from his “knowledge”-base, or whatever, but I don’t buy it for two reasons: first, we’re seeing a pattern and a history of what I’ll politely call “deficient understanding of basic things” in this candidate; and second, we ignored similar warning signs from the last president and elected him based on his persona instead of his intelligence - and look where that got everybody.

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“I want to stress that this book is not, and never was, intended to replace any textbooks of history that may serve a very different purpose at school. I would like my readers to relax, and to follow the story without having to take notes or to memorise names and dates. In fact, I promise that I shall not examine them on what they have read.”
–E.H. Gombrich, preface to the Turkish edition of A Little History of the World

Schooly History: Neither Forest nor Trees (or, “History as Test-Garbage In, Test, Test-Garbage Out”)

I’m tutoring a couple of Korean students home for the summer from their Oregon high school. Like many English language learners, they’re wonderfully bright, but challenged by the readability level of their assigned  high school texts. And like many students generally, all their years of schooling in history have failed to equip them with any coherent understanding of the flow of history at all.

This I’ve confirmed with almost all students (not just English Language Learners) in high school classrooms over the years by doing this simple exercise: Scramble the major periods of history in a random cluster on the board or a handout - you know, “Medieval Period,” “Cold War,” “Roman Empire,” “Enlightenment,” “Age of Exploration,” “Classical Greece,” “Industrial Revolution,” “Greek Heroic Age/Trojan War,” “Renaissance,” “Sumer,” “Solomon Builds the Jewish Temple,” “Scientific Revolution,” “Alexander the Great,” “World War I and II,” “Mohammed and Islam,” “The Crusades,” “Egyptian Pharoahs,” “The Reformation,” “Buddha,” “The Romantic Era,” “The Catholic Church Begins,” “Confucius.” (We can quibble about this list, of course, but for now play along.)

Then tell the students: “Make a list in which you place these major historical events and periods in the correct chronological order.  Then, write the approximate dates you think each one took place or began.”

Then wander the room monitoring the students’ progress. In almost all cases, depending on your personality, you’ll either laugh or weep. It’s not unusual to see the Industrial Revolution occurring before the Middle Ages, the Holocaust during the Enlightenment, and Columbus before Confucius. Stalin was a Renaissance Man. What a muddle.

I tried this on my “advanced placement” seniors this year, and the above description fits (again, there were about two exceptions). Whatever history they’d learned seemed to be garbage in for the test, then garbage out.

Penetrating the Students to Reach the Learners

I recommend doing this with students, because in my experience, it opens up a wonderful space for asking, “How could you have gone through more than a decade of schooling and remember - or understand - so little of what you were supposedly taught of the story of our species on this planet?”

The nice thing about this conversation is that it leads wonderfully into the follow-up: “You’re about to graduate and become adults. You won’t have many more chances to get your head around this story, which truly educated adults should know. If I promise that this 5,000 year old story is really pretty easy to learn and know - as a story - do you want to take this opportunity (possibly your last) to learn it?”

The refreshing thing: By a wide margin, the answer is a very sincere “Yes.”  This conversation seems to penetrate the thick defenses against schoolwork that students have built up over the years, and get them in touch with that part of us that simply doesn’t want to be ignorant about basic things like history. It’s a wonderfully ironic “a-ha” moment that, if subtitled in a film, would read, “How the hell did I remain so ignorant of all this stuff after having it crammed into me for all these years? What a debacle! What a charade, my high GPA!”

History Teacher as Epic Bard, Students as Bardic Apprentices

At that point, the 5,000 year story of history has what it needs to be enjoyed: an eager audience, and (we pray) a skillful story-teller (I’d like to be humble here, but I know my strengths as well as my¹ weaknesses, and telling the story of the last 5,000 years as a narrative, as the real Greatest Story Ever Told - full of gut laughter, wistful “what ifs,” amazing characters and events, philosophical wonder, and chains of cause and effect over centuries, over millennia, all liberally peppered with audience-participation requests for predictions, connections to earlier episodes, summaries of why Marx couldn’t have come earlier than the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment couldn’t have come before the Renaissance, on and on - that is one of my strengths).

But hearing the story, being mere audience, isn’t enough to learn it.  Like the bards that kept the Iliad and Odyssey alive through several centuries of the Greek “Dark Age,” during which reading and writing disappeared, and the story lived through oral transmission from older to younger storytellers, the students need to rehearse what they’ve heard from teacher - and a simple, low-tech way for them to do that is simply to re-tell the story they’re hearing, episode by episode, as simple written narrative summaries.¹

Back to the two students I’m tutoring: Today we just concluded our last class together. Over the course of two or three hours of this story-telling for each of twelve days, they’ve gone from the muddle above to being able to tell the story of five millennia, with approximately correct dates, causal connections, main players and events - and with enthusiasm. That’s roughly how long it took Homeric bards to recite the Iliad and the Odyssey.

I share this simply because I find it wonderful, but vexingly difficult to implement in the school setting. In schools, bells would have stopped the story. Other classes would have choked and vitiated the story’s roots with competing homework. Large class sizes would have made the constant comprehension-checking conversations impossible - unless one of you can suggest a way to pull it off, for which I’m all ears.

I know it’s not fair that all students can’t afford this kind of private education - but I wonder if a different approach to delivering it (YouTube presentations?) might not narrow that unjust gap.  But besides that, I just discovered a book that comes very close to that “bardic” approach to narrative history.

E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World: The Big Picture for Little People, English Language Learners, and Historically Clueless Adults

Gombrich is deservedly acclaimed for his majestic The Story of Art, which was my college art history textbook; but he wrote A Little History of the World for children. The results are overall wonderful: the readability level, lexically and syntactically, is appropriate for eight-year-olds, but better still, so is the tone. By tailoring his story for that toughest of audiences, eight-year-olds - too young to pimp for grades and too alive to endure boredom - Gombrich succeeds at restoring the wonders of storytelling to world history, in a way that has both entertained me and, better still, clarified for me some of the basic stories and their significance to the bigger story. Best of all, he refuses to underrate his audience by refusing to dumb history down; the waters stay deep, but because they’re unmuddied by too many names, dates, and ten-dollar words, they’re clearer too. They never lose track of the storyline. (To see just how “deep” this history is, check out this commentary on the controversy it has caused between conservatives and progressives in England. And I’ll add my own little cavil: Gombrich seems to lose his objectivity when treating Judeo-Christianity as history, implying more metaphysical truth in it than in the other world religions he discusses. But maybe I’m just sensitive that way.)

So whether you’re a homeschooler, a parent wanting your child (and maybe yourself) to know history better, or a teacher with a textbook at frustration readability level (or pedantry level) for some or all of your students, I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s almost 300 pages long, and a total page-turner for me.

And best of all: If you failed that little history challenge above, I guarantee you you’ll pass it after reading this book. The story takes care of the plot in such a clear, lucid way that you’ll never again reverse Romans and Romantics.

Bonus Video: The Perfect Prehistoric Introduction

My students spent the night in our apartment last night, and we had dinner and a movie night. I couldn’t resist showing them “The Dawn of Man,” the 20-odd minute prelude of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, as I’ve done at the beginning of so many history and literature classes in schools.  It’s a stunningly realistic “Genesis for moderns,” as I see it, complete with the (technological) “Fall of Man” and Darwinian “Cain and Abel” story. Just stunning. Enjoy:

(Thanks to Christopher Sessums for tweeting me the link.)

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¹ For you techies out there, I will add that my favorite unit design since I drank the digital koolaid employed videotaping students telling the story to class in pairs, episode by episode, and embedding those videos in a student-created wiki history textbook (scroll to bottom for student lectures) a couple of years ago; they also rehearsed all the episodes, not just the ones they orally re-presented, by summarizing them - as stories - in Moodle forums. In retrospect, this local, low-key unit seems more valuable than the splashier global collaborations these same students did in other units - and danah boyd’s findings that teens just aren’t very interested in connecting with strangers in global collaborations - because they’re more keen to extend their face-to-face school relationships with these tools instead - seems to explain this phenomenon. I was far more abuzz about global collaboration than my students, and I didn’t get it until I watched danah’s presentation on YouTube a few weeks ago.  Oh what the heck: here it is. danah starts in the middle third, wearing the wool cap:

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1. many [↩]

I always tell people who tell me that I’m going to hell for being decidedly skeptical about myths from pre-scientific times that a) I’ve read the Bible in its entirety three times, and studied world religions and Church history enough to feel 99% certain the myths are simply myths (and that 1% of doubt is simple intellectual honesty, since I know there’s no absolute proof any god does not exist); and I tell them, b) “If Jesus knew me, he’d think I was a pretty okay guy, because I’m typically not an ass, try to help people, and agree with him that ‘the kingdom’ is already within us, if we’d just wake up to it (not a far cry from most religious messages, read metaphorically instead of literally).”

I’m pleased to announce that I was just told by the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz,

Your sin has been measured. Happily for you, your sin profile leaves room for forgiveness. Your full sinful breakdown below shows you the areas that you must improve, to save yourself from an eternity in hell.

In the spirit of spiritual transparency then, dear reader, I will now share with you a view into the window of my soul, and the degree to which each of the Seven Deadly Sins has possessed it:

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

A naturalist at heart, I’m actually proud that good old natural “lust” - what science and my old dog Fritz would understand as a healthy reproductive instinct, an innocent enough thing when the super-ego* is stronger - is my greatest “sin.” I’m pretty proud - oops! - of the rest of the results. I can forgive myself for them, since I’m human, animal, and naturally far from perfect. (In fact, if I recall correctly, “sin” is based on a Greek word for “missing the target” and thus making a mistake, being imperfect, which has nothing to do with “demons” or “ee-vil,” damnation or salvation, and everything to do with being simply human. In that respect, the results above actually get it pretty right. I do screw up sometimes.)  [UPDATE: Be sure to check out Larissa’s corrective comment on the origins of the word “sin” for an even more interesting twist, and call for philological help from Biblical scholars on the Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek story of the word ulitmately translated as¹ “sin.”)

Another “fluff and fun” voluntary meme for our idle summers in the devil’s workshop. If you play along, please drop us a line with your results.

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*Pre-emptive snarky-comment-prevention strike: I’m not a card-carrying Freudian. Just playing around. Call the super-ego “conscience,” “social decency,” or “humanism” instead, and I won’t protest.

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1. Old English [↩]