Beyond School

I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread:

What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution?

I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can find and do similar things in their subjects.

1. Annotating Open Courseware University Lectures on Academic Earth, YouTube, Yale:

I’ve been watching UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt’s European Civilization from 1750 to the Present course lectures on Academic Earth to review modern European history before teaching it in the semester beginning next month.¹ I’m also watching Yale Professor John Merriman’s course on the same subject.

Here’s the rub: Yale’s courses are better watched at Yale’s Open Yale site, where you can find transcripts, video downloads for iPods, and all sorts of supplemental goodies for each lecture. But I haven’t been able to find the UCLA course on any UCLA-hosted site, so all we have for Prof. Hunt’s course is Academic Earth’s video. That means no transcripts or text of any sort. [Update: UCLA has a YouTube channel that allows downloads of the lectures -- something Academic Earth doesn't do. I'm putting my floating stickies on the YouTube lectures too. Here's the Modern Western Civ course playlist.]

Dr. Hunt’s a fine lecturer. She opens each class with a musical or artistic piece from the period covered, for example, and discusses its significance in the wider historical context. Her lectures are also well-organized, tight, and interesting. So my new routine, as the screenshot below shows, is a simple one: While I watch a lecture, I have a Diigo floating sticky-note open on the page, and simply outline the lecture with time-stamps. You can see it live here, if you have Diigo [Update: And here on YouTube]. Obvious uses:

• I — or anybody else — can use the time-stamp to show exactly the segments wanted in class.
• I can also adapt and/or condense the entire lecture for my own presentations in my classes. Simply extract the time-stamp and notes on my Diigo page, print them out if needed, and voila — an outline for a lecture, presentation, or discussion.

Again, this is simple and no big deal. It’s just taking notes while watching a video. But the cool thing is, other teachers worldwide (if they use Diigo) can share mine and add their own. (Among other possibilities.)

Here’s the screenshot:

Dr Hunt's UCLA lecture, my Diigo floating sticky-note (click for larger image)

2. Planning Classes While Walking to School with iPod/iPhone Voice Memo

Talking to Yourself is Good

I love Voice Memo. My daily routine in Singapore is an hour metro ride to school, then a 10-minute walk from the metro station to my classroom. I use it as planning time, and my best tool is my iPod Touch’s Voice Memo app. My iPod earbuds have a mic in the wire, so all I have to do is spend five minutes or so thinking about how I want to structure the day’s classes, and talk it into my iPod. When I get to school, I listen to the voice memo to write my lesson plan on the board.

I know some people can plan classes weeks in advance, but I’m not one of them. Too many ideas worth incorporating come in the days,  even the hours, before the class. So this has been a godsend for me. I don’t forget my best ideas, and don’t have to write them down. I literally talk to myself as I walk to class about the best ideas I have for the day.

Again, no big deal. A drunk could do this in his worst hangover. And that’s the beauty: low-labor, high-leverage changes in routine, thanks to new tools.

What about you? Any to share?

And Happy New Year, by the way. May the five-fingered fist of fate always smash the mean person next to you, and pet you like a kitten until 2011.

1. Be warned: the audio is sometimes bad, but the lectures are quite good. Dr. Hunt’s a trooper for not tearing off the microphone and telling the tech crew she’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more. [↩]

I’ll have more to say soon about how I’ve been trying to teach the wisdom in this “napkin philosopher” piece in my classroom all year. It’s going to get center stage on my classroom door window first day back to school. Maybe even tattooed on students’ hands.

But right now, it’s off to the airport to send my in-laws back to Korea. (If you haven’t downloaded Seth Godin et. al.’s What Matters Now, follow that link. And see more about Dan Roam’s work here and here.)

Dan Roam, from "What Matters Now" (click image for larger file)

I expect to be soundly whipped for this post, but in this age of “failure being free,” I don’t mind. I hope to learn from teachers who can offer specific examples, or research, that give evidence that digital learning is superior to traditional. (Or who can contest my framing of the issue, and improve on it.)

I’m having a conversation with Nathan Lowell and Monika Hardy — it’s too long to post in its entirety, but it starts here — on the “Using Technology Without Understanding It” post.

It started with Nathan saying,

Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

Monika seconds that claim, and adds:

The focus needs to be on the connections web access allows – to knowledge via people. People aren’t buying in because we’re missing the point. Learning how to learn.

And I just replied to Monika with this — which I hope some of you, again, will chime in on to show me the error of my ways:

I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.

I see the value of both, though. I’m thinking a separate course — a sort of “Intro to Web 2.0″ — might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.

And I’m still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I’ve recently been calling, in my internal monologues, “barbarians with laptops.”¹

Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who don’t learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).

And the new tools also enable “connections to knowledge via people” that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.

I think it helps to fine-tune the discussion a bit: “content” breaks down into your “core” disciplines — maths, sciences, social studies, language arts — plus your electives in arts, technology, languages, and so forth. Am I wrong to think some disciplines deserve more emphasis on coverage than others? Maths, for example, and science? Isn’t time lost on digital experimentation in these classes a costly thing, since it may cost students a deeper focus on, say, evolution, or advanced calculus, or whatever?

And if the answer is “yes” — notice the “if” and be nice, readers — then doesn’t it follow that web experimentation in some classrooms should be treated with extreme caution?

Open Thread: School Me

Whatever your subject matter, I’d love to see specific examples of digital tools and practices that, either through research-based evidence or your own direct observation, you think enhance the learning of content or the development of skills in the classroom.

1. I think this whole post is influenced by my recent viewing of the film, Idiocracy. If you haven’t seen it, it presents a future world in which everybody is hi-tech, but their favorite TV show is called “Ow! My Balls!”, and their language and lifestyle have degenerated to a pastiche of FOX Tea-Baggers and Live Wrestling aficionados. It’s hilarious, if you haven’t seen it. [↩]

Watch the two videos below — I even took notes of highlights to prod the attention-deficient — and then show them to your students.¹

1. Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, on Collaboration and what I’ve been calling Social Intelligence in the Workplace. Key concepts:

1. Making co-workers look good, not bad;
2. “plussing” your partners;
3. wanting people not only with “depth” — résumé-based hires — but also a proven record (portfolios? blogs?) of innovation and
4. the ability to recover from failure instead of avoiding it;
5. on the desirability of “mastery of anything” (skateboarding, playing spoons) in a person’s past;
6. “the proof of a portfolio versus the promise of a résumé” (and, I’d add, GPA);
7. on wanting people who are interested, not interesting (that is, your piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and daddy’s bank account are cheap ways to be interesting; much more interesting are people who are interested — hipsters take note);
8. communication skills based, again, on social intelligence vis-a-vis audience-awareness;
9. desirability of breadth (great, you’re a tech whiz; it would be nice if you knew, say, art history too);
10. on collaboration (“amplification” via “interested listening” and breadth and unique contributions to a project) versus cooperation (not getting in each others’ way).

Via Edutopia:

2. Seth Godin on Curiosity:

1. On the mental poverty of religious fundamentalists
2. On the mental richness of the curious
3. On how two generations lead sadly mediocre lives due to television, and how the lucky few have kicked that habit
4. On the curious and the fearful — “the masses in the middle [who have] brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing”
5. On the difficulty of becoming curious — due to decades of schooling punishing curiosity
6. Nice Mao reference for this Chinese history teacher!
7. Paradox: “The safest thing to do is be risky; the riskiest thing to do is be safe.”
8. How Godin beat the odds and remained curious.
9. How religious fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with an outlook that rejects curiosity.

Via Seth’s Blog:

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

1. Big hat-tip to Katie Day at The Librarian Edge, from whom both of these videos are nicked. Follow that link for an excellent post. [↩]

I was going to delete this spam, but upon reading it realized it could have been written by so many students new to commenting on blogs.

So students, if your comments sound like this, consider them an epic fail:

Easily, this article is really the most informative on this deserving topic. I agree with your conclusions and am eagerly look forward to your future updates. Just saying thanks will not just be enough, for the extraordinary clarity in your views and writing.

And thanks to the spammer for the inspiration. It’s a perfect example of how words can add nothing to a text.

This “Critical Thinking” video is worth a watch.

Now: What follow-up questions for discussion or writing will get the most bang for the buck if used in the classroom?

(h/t One Good Move)

This editorial from our high school student newspaper is a must-read for its criticism of the school-wide technology integration initiative. It’s a must-read for other reasons too — and other readers — but read it first, and we’ll get to that very different party afterward.

The first thing I did when I read this was mentally applaud.

The second thing I did was wish I could reply to it and, better still, promote it for a wider audience than the guaranteed one in the schoolhouse (I’ve always thought school newspapers were a bit like busywork, since they were monopolies without real-world competition, and had no incentive to earn a bigger audience through superior quality — especially silly in the Information Digital Age).

I wanted to start a conversation with the writer, share ideas and viewpoints, extend the topic — you know, basically learn more from her,¹ and ideally give such quality feedback in my comments that maybe the author would learn more too. Surely she knew that authors have far less authority in the Information Digital Age, that the nature of those things called texts and authors has been revolutionized by the ability of readers to write on the same page, to (in the language of AP exams) “challenge, qualify, and extend” the author’s ideas and words and worldview.

Surely she knew that the 21st Century writer learns as much from the 21st Century reader as the reader does from the writer. (Because 21st Century readers — the best ones, anyway — write with the writer. Just look at Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman’s blog, all the references he makes in his writing to what his readers are saying in comments. Look at Rolling Stones’ Matt Taibbi having conversations with his readers in the space beneath his articles — you know, those silly “forum”-like things. Just look.)

So yeah, I wanted to respond to it, and share to the world here on my (real) blog. I thought the writing and the critique of the rush to laptop use in the classroom were that good.

But the editorial was on that precious resource and traditional tool called — what was it? It’s been so long since I’ve written on it — oh yeah, paper, so no luck there (for me, or the forests, or the atmosphere, or the students’ future environmental situation).

The third thing I did was figure, since the student says her “generation is more than adept at using technology,” that she would surely know that journalism lives more and more online now, that print news is dying.² Since she says, after all, that she’s a “member of the Information Age,” she would know that the Huffington Post — a newpaper that has never been in print — eclipsed the venerable old Washington Post (that traditional newspaper that actually still uses paper) to take the number 2 spot, after the New York Times, in total traffic last September. I figured she’d know that the, what shall we call it?,  traditional NYTimes itself is taking out loans on its headquarters building, due to its almost nonexistent profit margins³ in this post-Gutenberg age. But surely this student knew all this stuff too, because I’m sure she uses an RSS reader, and reads links from the thousand smart people she’s built up in her Twitter network — surely Tweetdeck is one of the applications open at the bottom of her screen, and surely it’s populated not by people who share her blood or her table at the school cafeteria, like most of the silly Facebook crowd, but by like-minded peers (and unlike-minded ones) around the world.

Surely she uses these by-now old tools to stay more informed about the world than people who don’t use them.

I figured, in short, that I could find an online version of the editorial — since the student surely knew that that’s not only writing’s future, it’s its present — and be able to respond to it, and promote it to all of you readers dotting the six inhabited continents on my nifty Clustrmap at the bottom of the right sidebar. A simple select, copy, paste, and link to her site so my blog’s readers could follow the link, join the conversation, share their praise (and their experience).  Maybe offer her an internship if they’re in the publishing biz, since I figured her blog would surely have a “Contact Me” page for just such possibilities. I mean, she’s technically adept, after all, and so used to troubleshooting Internet Explorer for her parents. (She surely dropped IE long ago with most geeks in favor of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, or whatever. It’s a parent thing, surely.)

The fourth thing I did was search for the online version of the paper and, sure enough, I found it — in pdf. You know, the format where, as I saw Will Richardson put it, “good ideas go to die.”

And that almost totally changed my view of the editorial. I couldn’t comment. I couldn’t read other students’, teachers’, administrators’, parents’, and purely authentic Readers-from-the-Brave-New-Web’s ideas about the text. I couldn’t copy and paste the most interesting ideas in the text for fine-grained commentary here, and link to the article to send you there. Instead, I had to take screenshots of it and upload it here. All of which suggested to me that, contrary to the claims of “adeptness” and expertise in the editorial, the editorial writer(s) have much more to learn than they realize.⁴

Parting shots: Last month I took three days off of school to fly to the beach in Australia, all expenses paid, in order to give a talk to an educational technology conference. I got the offer via the “Contact Me” page on this blog, from a reader of this blog I’d never met (because while she did read, I’m not aware of her ever commenting). She invited me to speak simply by virtue of the fact that she said she was a long-time reader who liked what she read here.

Here. On a simple blog.

That wouldn’t have happened if I thought pdf was good enough for the 21st Century writer.

A couple months before that, I got another “Contact Me” bite from a PBS TV documentary producer asking if I’d be available to be a talking head on a show they were doing about classic literature — for the first episode, to be exact, which was about none other than Gilgamesh, about which I’ve written about 20,000 words over the last year here, on this simple blog. She’d read my take, and said it was exactly the kind of approach and tone her team wanted for the show.⁵

That, too, wouldn’t have happened if I thought pdf was good enough for the 21st Century writer.

But at that Australia conference, much of what I said actually agreed with what the student editorial said: I agree that teachers can be excellent at what they do without technology. I agree that, worse still, pushing teachers to use technology before they’re trained, experienced, and ready can indeed lead to worse teaching and worse learning. I really do think the student writer’s criticisms along these lines should be taken very, very seriously. I’ve been in this world long enough to believe that we can’t push the reluctant to use it, and that that’s a fool’s errand. The best we can do is “pull,” I said in Australia. But even that word is wrong, since it still requires more energy than is sustainable for teachers. Now I believe the best we can do is simply attract. The sun isn’t getting muscle fatigue keeping the planets in orbit. It’s simply attracting them, effortlessly, because of its impressive mass. Teachers should be suns in this way, and students the planets worth keeping in orbit. Those with ears, let them hear.

But. What I hope I’ve given the writer pause to reflect on in all of the above is that having “six or seven apps” open on your computer, doing Facebook, and helping Mom with IE is nothing special. It’s about as impressive as publishing to pdf.

And: Here’s my pitch, and it’s to you, student editorial writer, whoever you are:

Our school is going 1:1 next year whether we like it or not. And I’m not sure I like it myself, since I’ve taught at a 1:1 laptop school before, and really wonder, as I wrote lately, if “the Web is too beautiful to waste on the young.”

Because just as you’re arguing that admin shouldn’t force teachers who don’t want to learn new ways to do their job, I’d much rather not force students to learn what I’ve learned after three or four years of self-publishing, podcasting, networking, and more. I’d much rather invite the “three out of a thousand” I see every year to come by after class so I can say, “You’re a great writer (or speaker, or artist, or photographer, or whatever), and if you want my support in sharing your uniqueness with more than the school hallway or your bedroom file cabinet, I’ll show you some things that have worked for me. They might lead places for you.”

Moreover, I’d much rather you use the laptops at home to watch podcasted lectures and whatnot, and come to school to discuss, write, plan, create in a workshop-style setting that applies what you learned on your laptop the night before.

And I have no interest in playing cop to your generation’s Facebook addiction in the classroom. Sometimes I wonder why I should have to. Students who choose to spend their school time writing graffiti on Facebook (and not, in the traditional way, on their schooldesk) instead of learning from the web activity that the teacher, after all, ideally has judged as worth their time  — that’s their choice. It’s a choice not to rise. Maybe they shouldn’t rise, then, and they should go ahead and practice their spelling of “LOL,” “wtf?”, and “rotfl.”  Meanwhile, the teacher can focus on the students in the room who want to learn, and to peacefully pursue future superiority over the Facebook scribblers sitting next to them. It’s a lesson in real-world responsibility. Sometimes we have to do things we’d rather not do, or suffer the consequences.

And while I’m not sure I believe that, this I do believe: It’s going to be messy for all of us.

And you, student, whoever you are, can help make it less messy. You took a good first step by articulating the problems you say students are talking about. Now take the next step: get those students to join you in generating solutions. (Read my “Recession Skills 101″ posts here, here, and here to get my take on how you should see yourself as a stakeholder in your education — as basically an employee who’s expected to contribute to the betterment of the company.)

Do it openly, do it professionally, do it maturely, and do it constructively. Don’t name names and if you’re going to stab something, stab a solution.

How can you do that? The simplest way would be to start a blog — or turn the newspaper into one.

And one last thing: as you’re helping the school try to launch this thing, as you’re suggesting your changes and communicating your point of view, don’t forget to be open to changing your mind and learning something new. Because there’s more to the web — to “blogs, wikis, and forums,” to quote your example (did you know the CIA and United Nations use wikis now?) — than you seem to understand.

And that’s true for all of us.

1. Him? them? I’m going to assume it’s a her. [↩]
2. Scroll left on the graphic and you’ll see the individual newspapers that have closed their doors over the past couple years. [↩]
3. Kaplan Test Prep subsidiary excluded — there’s always money to be squeezed from parents obsessed with Junior going to Harvard [↩]
4. Unless the school itself is prohibiting the use of blogs for the newspaper. I’ve seen that policy before at other schools, so it’s entirely possible. [↩]
5. I couldn’t fly to the States in time for the recording, so it didn’t work out, but that’s beside the point, which is that it was all because I write on a blog. [↩]

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept through. I put my pleas along those lines in red.

Feel free to skip to section three for what’s really the meat of this post. I’d love feedback there especially.

I told my students in the just-concluded semester-long Chinese History course that I gave myself a B/B- for the way I taught it this first time out (call it the Beta version). This post will return to my early “teacher think-aloud” habit on this blog to reflect on ways to raise that grade for the second semester

Since a B supposedly signifies “above average” without signifying “excellent,” I’ll justify that grade first by listing what I thought were the course’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I hope I’ll have enough steam left to dump the brainstorm of how to re-figure the course — using Diigo to heighten the academic rigor, and an “in medias res” narrative structure to heighten the engagement and provide the essential purpose for studying Chinese (or any) history at all¹ — that’s been brewing in my mind over the last (typically post-midnight) hour.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

Strengths: A week before the course began, the returning teachers arrived to work and I was finally able to see the resources and scope of the course. The textbook, to put it generously, was great for 12-year-olds, but not my 16-year-olds in this supposedly “rigor”-driven school — so I tossed it and replaced it with the China chapters from an introductory Asian History college textbook (Rhoades Murphey’s excellent A History of Asia).

Weaknesses: Murphey’s text led to an embarrassment of riches: there was simply too much information in it for a brief survey course. I was also concerned that its readability level was too challenging for some students, but I did a Poll-Daddy poll and found 33 of 36 responded from “It’s a bit challenging, but I can handle it” (my definition of the Zone of Proximal Development for reading) to “It’s just right for my reading level” to “It’s easy.” Still, for the three who couldn’t handle it, alternate texts or resources were necessary, and I didn’t have them.

Another weakness was in the photocopied packet I made of the Murphey readings. I didn’t include the Index in the copies, so it was surely difficult for students to be able to locate information from the text for review purposes.

A final weakness: It had been four years since I’d used the text, which means I’d forgotten most of it, and spent the semester “two days ahead of the students” in terms of content mastery. (Students seem to think teachers remember everything they’ve ever known, which is interesting, since a brief reflection on their own forgetting of content from courses from prior years should demolish that idea. They seem to think the adult brain is of an entirely different model, some new design inserted in the skull upon college graduation or something. So here’s a dirty teacher secret, kids: Our brains are at least as limited as yours.)

Future Improvements: I’ve ordered The Cambridge Illustrated History of China to be the textbook next year. An Amazon “Reader Reviews” and “Look Inside” perusal satisfied me that this is a reasonably solid high school China history text. (We’re looking at ABC-CLIO database as a possible digital replacement for paper textbooks altogether for next year, when we go 1:1. Anybody know how feasible this is?)

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

Strengths: I haven’t written about it yet because I’m waiting for the video to be released, but I gave a keynote speech at the Learning Technologies Conference in Australia last month, and during it I declared a “pox on Blackboard.” I meant it. It made my first month trying to get to know my students’ backgrounds, preferences, and literacy skills utter hell. First I assigned an “About Me” forum that most students put a lot of effort into, apparently….. “Apparently” because I never saw it. Some glitch in Blackboard didn’t save the things, so I never got to read them. That damned me to fogginess about the general skills of my class for the first couple of weeks. Later attempts to use the forums, once the glitches were ironed out, were still clunky due to Blackboard’s horrible user interface (in all fairness, my school is using an old version, and I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive). Example: answering a forum in Blackboard confused most of my students because of the language of the User Interface. Instead of hitting “reply” after my prompt — no “reply” link existed — they had to somehow just know that to simply reply they had to click on “Start New Thread.” Talk about unintuitive.

Then there was Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning. (I wasn’t about to install and manage my own Moodle. Been there, suffered that. Anybody have solutions along these lines I don’t know about?)

The strengths of Ning: It’s way more straightforward. The Main Page is a one-stop overview and link-list for all necessary tasks and documents for the week. Videos, photo slideshows, forums, blogs, RSS feeds of China News from Google News and from my Diigo China bookmarks in widgets on the sidebars for any advanced student wanting to read more. Hell, even student birthdays announced on the sidebar (it never hurts so sing Happy Birthday in class). So good riddance, Blackboard.

I kept things pretty minimal, as far as assignments went. Rotating groups of four or five students had to blog each week on the prior week’s content — open, whatever idea struck their fancy — and the others had to reply to two that appealed to them (authentic audience response awards students with the best ideas, hopefully stirs those whose posts elicited cricket chirps to reflect on how to do better next time). It was hard for me to participate in the blogs and forums as much as I’d have liked because of the afore-mentioned “two days ahead of the students” reading the textbook.

Weaknesses: Organization. I’m not going to beat myself up for this one, because I had to design the airplane while I was mid-flight in the semester. But I need to set all forums so that replies are threaded under the comments replied to, which isn’t the default, for one thing. Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. I also need to figure out how to instruct students to subscribe to email notifications when somebody replies to their comment or post. I’m not sure this finely-tuned of an option is even available. If not, that means students are getting 40-odd notifications every time somebody replies to the forum they replied to — which means they understandably delete them all, as I do, without looking at them. Clunky. (Help?)

Future Improvements: Frankly, I’m still puzzling over this one. I‘d love to have students use Diigo to comment on other students Ning blogs and forum readings, but since the site is locked and the content is dynamic, I’m not sure Diigo highlights would be visible to other students visiting the pages. Anybody know? [Update: Well that was easy. Diigo told me on Twitter, while I was writing this, that the highlights will indeed show. They also set me up with an Education Account within 20 minutes of my applying for it, which will make class registration much easier. So cool.)

3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")

Strengths: Covering the 4,000 years of Chinese history from the semi-legendary Xia Dynasty of 2,000 BCE to the present in a semester course was no easy task -- especially since China, unlike Europe, doesn't have any gaping 1,000-year Dark Age through which to conveniently fast-forward, but instead boasts an unbroken string of literate centuries across four millennia. Survey though it was, the students did receive an education in the broad (and with Murphey's text, often impressively deep) flow of Chinese history from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and on into the 20th century's Nationalist and Communist regimes -- right up to the present day. (And though I know they couldn't know how skinny their "education" in Chinese history would have been had I just used the old textbook, and thus didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how superior their introduction to that history was in terms of depth and scope, I'm still pouting over the lack of a single expression of appreciation for the bang they got for their semester's buck. I know, I know: Cry me a river. Then send me to a shrink for expecting gratitude from teenagers.)

Weaknesses: The pacing was too fast. Again, I'm not beating myself up on this one because the textbook was new and I'd never used it as the primary text for teaching Chinese history before.

But more importantly, despite the oomph of knowing the highlights of all of China's major dynasties, at a certain point it starts feeling like a stuck record. Most of China's classical dynasties follow very similar "Dynastic Cycle" patterns in which a new dynasty begins, implements some impressive reforms in its first century or so, and over the next century or two becomes complacent and corrupt, and finally loses "the Mandate of Heaven" in the eyes of its subjects, and falls to whichever rebel or neighbor state emerges triumphant in Ye Olde and Verye Predictable Ende-of-Cycle Civille Warre or Forynne Invasionne. It brings to mind the title of an old Bowie song: "Always Crashing in the Same Car."

Most importantly, that almost-never-ending 3,000 years of dynastic cycles becomes, without a purpose for knowing it, an exercise in what Jared Diamond calls "history as one damn fact after another." Diamond insists on what most history buffs would assent to: that there are patterns in history that point towards essential understandings of who and what we are -- and those understandings, of course, separate the naive and ignorant from the educated. More importantly, they separate the citizen who you pray, for the sake of democracy, will not vote, from the one you pray will always vote.

Future Improvements: The course fell into the One Damn Fact Trap because I covered it chronologically: "In the beginning....." Tonight I think I arrived at a better approach.

I'm going to start the next course with the end of the dynastic era in 1911, when the Nationalists threw out the Qing -- more accurately, when the Qing just collapsed due to its own decrepitude -- and went through a painful and practically literal "crash course" in modern governance: nationalism, socialism, dictatorship, fascism, and democracy all in a stew from 1911 until 1949, and then totalitarianism and various shades of communism from 1949 to the present.

But before doing any of that, I'm going to assign the final exam essay questions in the first week of class, and have the students Diigo the hell out of our readings and forums on Ning for the rest of the course in order to arrive at their "answers." Here are the questions:

Essay Questions:

1.  Western Liberal Democracies in Europe and (especially) the USA typically criticize the PRC for its lack of human rights – freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as well as for its one-party dictatorship. Based on your knowledge of Chinese history in the “long view,” how valid do you think these criticisms are? Give as many specific examples from Chinese history as you can to support your arguments.

2.  Mao Zedong waged the Cultural Revolution as a last-ditch attempt to prevent party Moderates (Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) from implementing capitalist reforms to China’s economic system; Mao believed instead that a planned economy relying on the social spirit of the people was the path to prosperity and justice for all.  Based on your understanding of the effects of the Moderates’ reforms from the rise of Deng Xiaoping around 1980 to the present day, to what degree do you think Mao’s resistance was justified? Use as many specific details from the successes and failures of the planned economy during the ‘50s and early ‘60s (the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward), and from the successes and failures of the Four Modernizations to the present, to support your argument.

Why Diigo highlights and sticky-notes (online, on-site, on specific segments of text annotations) instead of simple forum and blog responses? A discussion on a Diigo forum last year that Cliff Mims started -- see my highlights on it here -- sold me. Diigo's Maggie Tsai said it most succintly:

Fundamentally there is a difference between Diigo's annotation and traditional blog commenting. Diigo in-situ highlight and sticky note allows fine-grained discussion to specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges...

So in a nutshell, as students read, they'll be highlighting and bookmarking the evidence to answer our semester-long "essential questions" that traditionally I would have sprung on them as "surprise" cram-questions at the end of the course. This will very much raise the "rigor" bar, and provide a similar routine for individual research projects. But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)]

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

Wordy, I know, but that says it. China might not have made the finals for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” award, but I’ve no doubt it made the short-list. Add to that the endless refrain, from at least the days of Ronald Reagan, of the evils of “godless Communism” and the blessings, historical and contemporary evidence aside (Iraq anyone? Or Afghanistan? or or or?) of one-size-fits-all “Democracy” and “Capitalism,” and you’ve got all sorts of articles of Western ideological faith to complicate with those lovely things called facts.

And please notice I said “complicate.” That’s the beauty of the idea: easy answers to the above essay questions, if pursued across a semester, with all evidence nicely aggregated on a simply-tagged Diigo page, will surely give way very quickly to the type of answers our future adults should have when considering modern China: and I mean nuanced answers.

Now my last two questions:

1. Assuming students will be able to offer valuable evidence and insight into the questions above — questions I’m convinced are relevant enough to the real world to deserve an audience — what’s the best way to present their findings to the world via the web?

2. How can I keep the project alive after its first iteration? Different questions for each successive class?

A million thanks for any who took the time to read and respond. If you see any beautiful ways to extend or enhance the idea further — Skypecast interviews from my students in Singapore with American students about their stereotypes of China and its government, for example? More? — please pitch those in the mix too.

1. it reminds me of David Warlick’s occasional pitch to “teach history backwards,” though my approach is a little more complicated [↩]

Interesting:

Members of the earth’s earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.

According to recently excavated clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform script, thousands of Sumerians—the first humans to establish systems of writing, agriculture, and government—were working on their sophisticated irrigation systems when the Father of All Creation reached down from the ether and blew the divine spirit of life into their thriving civilization.

“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”

“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”

I always thought the Sumerians, like dinosaurs and fossils and Galileo, were tricks of Satan.

(h/t to One Good Move)

Just a quick holiday gift, since music is the food of Life: my budding song-list on blip.fm. Mostly night music, for solitaries and dreamers.

The Candle by Rickydavid