Beyond School

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription - well worth it - required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that

[t]eens who communicate frequently with their friends, and those who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones, do not write more often for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens

seems hardly news at all, doesn’t it? Is it me, or does it imply that some people think that The Vast Percentage of Teens Who, Like the Vast Percentage of Adults, Do Not Enjoy Writing will suddenly, because somebody plops a laptop, tablet, or cellphone in their hands, have some Road to Damascus experience that magically converts them to the Cult of Writing?

That implication seems embedded in the “finding” above, and it’s about as silly as expecting people to all become economists when they’re given their first checkbook.

If you go into a 1:1 program with fantasies that all students are going to become writers because of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Nothing makes a writer but the self-compelled need to write. And that’s a limited commodity now as always.

The eSchool news article continues with this further bit of non-”news,” which this time, though still making me chuckle, also quickens my pulse and gets my dander up a bit:

Teen bloggers, however, write more frequently both online and offline, the study says.

–check that language out, that loopy logic: “Teen bloggers,” we’re told, are teens who write frequently “both online and offline.” I’m no expert, now, but why are we calling teens who write a lot, with and without blogs, “bloggers”?

Any of you adult bloggers out there, are you with me in wanting to correct people who call you a “blogger” - some person who “makes blogs,” apparently, like a designer makes designs and a reporter makes reports - by telling them: “Actually, I’m a freaking writer. I just publish my own writing online on a blog. I don’t buy those daily word-counts on my blog at Wal-Mart. I write them.” Such sloppy language!

(Note that I didn’t say “good writer.” Mediocre and bad writers fill the ranks of bloggers as much as they do of newpapers, magazines, and books.)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, this word “blogging.” The label cheapens the practice. Writing bloggers are writers, photo-bloggers are photographers, podcast-bloggers are audio producers, vloggers are video artists, etc, in teenhood as it is in adulthood.

So let’s revise that last excerpt for clarity:

Teen writers, however, write more frequently both online and offline.

Talk about a report from Captain Obvious. Give any writer a journal and pen, s/he’ll scribble away. Give him or her a blog, s/he’ll type away. There’s no mystery here.

Things get weirder here:

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs.

What, exactly, does that unidentified fifty-three percent of “teen bloggers” who do not “write outside of school for personal reasons” actually write on their blogs, then? Wait — hold it – I think I’m getting a whiff of something. Do you smell it?

Bad air! Bad air! It’s a homework blog! Another moronic oxymoron brought to you by Schooliness, Inc. Let’s cross this 53% off the Book of Writing, and focus on that lovely, remaining 47% who blog write on blogs, not because schools make them, but because they’re writers. Breathe in the perfume, folks - we’re in the rose-garden now of flowering young writers.

They’re the ones I want to teach - because they’re the ones who probably want to be taught about ways to improve their writing.

There. I said it: I’m an elitist as an English teacher.

I’m not a democrat when it comes to teaching writing. Just as Thomas Jefferson believed that all people are born equal, but natural differences create a “natural aristocracy” - one having nothing to do with money and everything to do with spirit (and I mean that naturally) - I believe the same is true in the classroom. A rich kid can’t pay me to want to help him become a better writer if he doesn’t show me, through the evidence of steady, self-impelled production, he has a writer in him. A working-class kid who does have a writer in her - who can point to hundreds of blog posts or journal pages having nothing to do with homework - will find not only my door open during lunch and after school, but also my Skype and Twitter at home. As I said in a comment on Carolyn’s blog, it’s

the bloggers mentioned in the survey above . . . who interest me, . . those who have the will to write, the seed of a writer, in them.

Those “kids” aren’t mere students. They’re writers.

Let’s keep looking at that Pew Garden, and try to find the prize roses. I think I see them hidden in this statistic:

Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life.

Pop Quiz: Who are the “teen bloggers” who are the true writers?

a. the 65% of “teen bloggers” who “believe writing is essential to later success in life”

b. the 35% of “teen bloggers” who do not believe this.

If you answered “a,” I give you a zero.

To me, the answer is “b.” Because it implies that these young writers are writing not, as most of the consumerism-drugged “school is for money” customers in our classrooms do (and as the students in answer “a” seem to do), “to get a better GPA, go to a better college, get a better job, so I can buy a better house, car, and handbag.” This 35% in “b” wins my vote. They’re the prize roses. They write for the pleasure in the present, not the payoff in the future. [Update: Freshman Arthus trumps me in his comment. He gets an A+, I get a B.]

They’re writers.

A Revised Position Statement on Classroom Blogging, Two Years into the Fray:

And this brings me to the latest position-statement in my evolving views, after two years of experimenting with it in the classroom, of the value and place of blogging to teach writing in schools:

It should only be required in an elective “advanced blogging” class. But we need a better word than that tuneless aural trainwreck of a word, “blah - geeng.”

“Advanced writing,” though I’ve restricted this article to writers because the Pew study does the same, is no better a title, because “blogging” invites the natural talkers and interviewers, singers and raconteurs through podcasting; the natural symbolic and visual communicators through photo and computer graphic, fine arts and video blogging. So “advanced digital communication,” then?

You tell me. But I think you see what I mean, don’t you? Simply a workshop of the thirsty, the hungry to improve - the natural aristocracy of self-expression and communication.

Over the door I would post a big sign:

ROSES ONLY. NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.

Then we’d set to working - making perfume.

Images:

• De Petale, by Christiane Michaud
• untitled, by rosemary*
• rose for you…, by Lyubov

Relevant posts:

• 21st Century Education: Thinking Creatively by Anthony Chivetta, Students 2.0
• Dialogue with a New Student Blogger on the Question of Classroom Blogging

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Jaeho and Younsuk were gracious enough to give me a half hour of their time this Monday night for this Skype interview about the Basketball Without Borders blog and podcast project. I’ll go ahead and re-embed the video interview I shot with them directly after their Skype interview with their college basketball hero KJ Matsui a month ago (see the original post here):

A month later now, they discuss with me how having their own real-world, self-selected blog project for our English Seminar elective feels (click here for all posts about this “networked learning” class). As I say in the podcast, this class is far from perfect, but Jaeho and Younsuk give some very interesting feedback on how this real-world project-based learning approach has improved their speaking and writing skills - and motivation - differently than what they’ve experienced in a traditional “writing and speech” class.

Again, this is my first attempt for this type of teaching. Listening to Jaeho and Younsuk makes me want to stick with it beyond this “beta” version next time around. I can’t urge Language Arts teachers strongly enough to give these guys a listen. It’s a half hour, edited, with nice music for you and everything.

A request: I begged these guys to let me link to their site for a preview - they want to finish editing and post a couple more interviews with basketball stars they’re working on before unveiling it to the basketball world - and they gave me permission to give a sneak preview to you educators. So go ahead and take a look at Basketball Without Borders (love that alliteration!), listen to their podcast with K.J. Matsui, and show them some comment love.

The podcast is enhanced with chapter headings for easy navigation in iTunes (right-click here and “save as” to download). Click the player below to listen to it here:

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This is the excellent foppery of the world.
–Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear

Remember last summer those Korean Christian missionaries who came up with the bright idea of spreading their gospel in, of all places, Afghanistan? Sure you do. It was all over the news for a couple weeks. They were taken hostage by the Taliban, and a couple of their pastors were executed. Strangely enough, they were from a church in my old neighborhood in Seoul.

I don’t mean to be callous, but my reaction was: “Well, what did they expect?” Talk about “tempting the Lord.” Why not trust Him to protect a scuba dive in a lava bed? “What were these people thinking?” I asked.

They didn’t know what I want to call the First Rule of Evangelizing: Know Your Potential Converts.

I think we web 2.0 evangelists - at least this one - have to come to terms with a similar case of our own foppery: spreading the Gospel of RSS.

Even though we all use RSS readers - and even that’s a questionable assumption as the flood of feeds rises, and I, for one, find myself reading Twitter links far more than RSS feeds these days - can we all agree that our success rate at converting others to do the same is dismally low?

As a classroom teacher who has tried to convert students to the Good News of RSS Aggregators for almost two years now, the picture is even grimmer. All those hours walking students through setting up accounts, finding feeds, and all those additional hours of trying to guide them to the explosive learning that comes from the feed-reading habit? Fast forward a year later, and almost none of them have seen the Light.

Burn me at the stake, dear reader, and rail at this heretic if you must, but I must draw this conclusion: Maybe RSS is not The Only Way. We need a New Gospel.

Buddha is said to have advised seekers of Truth, faced with so many dogmas and doctrines and sects and claims, “Don’t mistake the fingers for the moon.” (For the metaphorically-challenged, the Moon would be the Truth, and the Fingers would be all mortal attempts to formulate it. Buddha is saying not to mistake the attempted answers with the ineffable reality they try to contain. Words can’t touch the Ultimate Truth, whatever that may be. It’s another reason I’ve always thought Buddha was cool. I’d love to hang out with that guy.)

So to riff off The Awakened One: if reading blogs and such is the moon, and RSS is a finger pointing the way to them that the vast majority of humans are too lazy and habit-driven to adopt, let’s be open to other ways.

I’ll share one that I found the day it was launched, and used in a writing classroom the day after. It’s called Alltop.

Guy Kawasaki, former Apple Evangelist, author, venture capitalist, Truemors creator, and Top 100 Technorati blogger, launched Alltop.com about a month ago. True to his mantra-making form, he describes Alltop as an “Online Magazine Rack.” It’s an apt description. As this screenshot shows, Alltop’s main page feels like an online version of the magazine section at a Borders or Barnes and Nobles. Click on the picture for full-size:

You see the main categories -Work, Living, People, Interests, Culture, Geekery, Good, News - that function as the “sections” in a magazine area of a bookstore. And beneath each category, you see the “subsections” - under “Culture,” for example, you have Design, Fashion, Movies, Music, and Photography (since he’s asking for suggestions, I’ve asked Guy to add “Books” to this work-in-progress).

By clicking on any of the subsections, you drill deeper into that subject by going to its subdomain page - for example, culture.alltop.com. Here you get a page of links “top” sites about the topic and, as the screeshot below of the “Interests > Crime” page shows, the latest five feeds from each site. Again, click the picture for full-size view:

I chose to screenshot the Crime page because I have a student in my Networked Learning/PLN elective class who chose to do a project on detectives in real life, and on TV and film. She’s writing crime humor scripts that she wants to direct and film, so she needed to find websites to research real detective life and find plot ideas involving funny crimes. The “Dumb Criminals” and CSI sites were just what she needed for these purposes.

But I had all of my students in this class do an exercise about the importance of titles and opening paragraphs using the main page of whatever Alltop site best suited their self-designed project - sports journalism, restaurant and bar design, comfort foods and recipes, political satire, game reviews - and the final feature of Alltop that has value for teaching writing. You see it in the screenshot below: the popup first paragraph of each feed’s post:

So here’s how the writing exercise went: 1) Go to the topic on Alltop that fits your project; 2) List the three best, and three worst, blog or website titles from the page, and explain why they shine or stink; 3) Select the three best and worst post titles, and explain the same; 4) Hover over the links of posts and find three excellent introductions from the popups, and three lousy ones, and explain your choices; 5) Post your analyses on the group PLN blog (here’s an example from a student: “The Difference a Title Can Make”).

Since doing that exercise - and then assigning students to re-title and re-write the opening paragraphs of all their posts - I’ve seen the evidence that the lesson worked. And I’ve also found that Alltop is a way for my students to find fresh information about their interests - without facing the tribulations of evangelizing RSS readers.

Full disclosure: Beyond School is featured in Alltop’s Education page. But I was using Alltop in class before that. I’d switched my homepage to Alltop from Popurls.com, which featured only social bookmarking hits from del.icio.us, Digg, and so forth, and thus was uneven at best (the Ron Paul crowd learned how to manipulate these sites to push their posts to the top, along with many other sensationalistic titles). Alltop is an improvement for this reason.

Finally, be warned: puritanical classrooms will not be comfortable with Alltop because it features topics like “BLTG” - bi-sexual, lesbian, trans-sexual, gay - and it also features posts with some taboo vowel-consonant combinations. Me? I find it the perfect opportunity to train my students in not freaking out over real-world realities and language, and to get over any hangups about them caused by schooliness - whether Monday-Friday schooliness, or Sunday-schooliness. Let’s be real. They’re in high school, and they’re not strangers to these things.

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

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

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

Lesson Two: Failure Can Breed Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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One for the MiniLegends

[Update: I was out of the loop preparing for my wedding when Australian Al Upton's MiniLegends and Qatar's Jabiz Raisdana got hit by two shockingly reactionary hammers. Since this podcast features Noel Thomas, an Australian high school principal representing all that is most forward-thinking and impressive about Australia's educational system, I'd like to dedicate this podcast to Al, the MiniLegends, and Jabiz. Noel, I can't help but fantasize that you and Al discover each other and join forces. As you say in the podcast, most teachers will never get it. Al is a teacher who has impressed us all for years with how much he does get it. (h/t to John Connell for the miniLegends badge - John, I hope you don't mind me nicking it?)]

Love This Podcast, or I’ll Eat a Bug

As I say in the intro to this podcast, if you don’t find it the most interesting hour of podcasting I’ve ever done, I’ll eat a bug. (And yes, Los Angelenos, that is a quote from the old Cal Worthington used car commercials of the ’80s.) That intro was hard, by the way: I tried about 8 times to summarize why I’m so excited about the things happening in that podcast, but couldn’t, and did the “eat a bug” intro instead. In retrospect, it sounds silly. But I had to get the thing published.

Creative Destruction Abundant

What walls don’t come down in this hour-long talk? Bye-bye edu-caste system, bye-bye geographic and temporal barriers. My guests are from three continents and four levels of school hierarchy:

• High School Principal Noel Thomas, Toorak College, Melbourne, Australia
• High School Principal (and next year’s Director) Rich Boerner, Korea International School, Seoul, South Korea (my employer)
• Librarian Jenny Luca, Toorak College, Melbourne
• Lara H., high school student, Toorak College
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilber, Punahou High School student (and Students 2.o staff writer), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• and me, high school teacher and tool-guy, Korea International School

(Quicktime free download required)

(right-click and “save target as” here to download enhanced podcast for iTunes)

Table of Contents

If you download to iTunes, you can navigate by these chapter headings:

• Intro: I’ll Eat a Bug
• Audio Snapshots
• Welcome
• Noel Thomas, Toorak College, Melbourne Australia
• Toorak’s Dilemma re: Web Access for Students
• Rich Boerner, Korea Internat’l School, Seoul
• KIS’ Open Web Access for Students
• Factors Favoring Relaxed Filtering at KIS
• Toorak Librarain Jenny Luca: Toorak Change Agent
• Jenny’s Views on the Value of Blogging to Learn
• Toorak and KIS Connect thru Project Global Cooling
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur, Intro (Hawaii Student)
• Student Lindsea Teaching the World
• Lara H., Intro (Australia Student)
• Sustainability at Our Specific Schools
• Broader Issues of Connecting Schools for Learning
• Lindsea on Youthnet: Student-Initiated Global Collaboration via Twitter and Wiki
• How Clay in Korea has Known Lindsea in Hawaii for Almost 2 Years
• Getting Teachers to Accept Student-Led Collaborative Projects
• Getting Students to Rise to the Challenge of Laptop Learning
• KIS Student Patrick Nam as Model of Networked Learning
• Noel’s Approach to Keeping Students Responsible Online
• Jenny’s Approach to Pulling Students In
• Clay on the Importance of Same Time-Zone Partner Schools
• Rich on Importance of Collab AT SCHOOL, not home
• Acceptable Use Policy
• Toward an Eastern Hemisphere Schools Network
• Spreading the Word to Students about Youthnet
• Lindsea as Model for Student Imitation
• Lara: PGC Should Be Easy in Australia
• Difficulties with Projects in Korea
• Media Interest in Project Global Cooling
• Clay’s Parting Shot: This Tech is EASY
• Parting Shots
• Closing Comments: Project Global Cooling Growing: Seoul, Hawaii, Australia in, and Beijing, Los Angeles, and Bangkok Nibbling - Add Your School This Year or Next
• (Name Your Bug)

Links Referenced in Podcast:

• Jenny Luca’s Lucacept (Australia)
• Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed
• Project Global Cooling
• Bill Farren’s Education for Well-Being blog
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur’s Love and Logic blog
• Chris Watson’s WatsonCommon blog
• Lindsea’s Youthnet post on Students 2.0
• Jabiz Raisdana’s Intrepid Teacher (stay intrepid, Jabiz)
• Jabiz’ Global Issues class blog
• Youthnet Twitter page
• “Natural” Global Collaboration (my networked learning elective class)
• Youthnet Wikispace
• The 1001 Flat World Tales global collaborative writing project
• KIS Sophomore Patrick Nam’s blog and podcast

Recorded on 3 March 2008

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