Category Archives: blogging

But not here. I’m blogging with my History of China students here. Why?

Crazy, beautiful backstory: Several eons ago, I wrote a “Must-Reads Before Dying” post that the inimitable Stephen Downes challenged for its omission of Confucius. I met his challenge with a cheeky “Confucius? Really? Too stuffy for students” type response:

And Stephen, notice the sentence before this update? Of course there are omissions…. The Dao De Jing? A deep book, but too ponderous and opaque next to the joyous alternative of Zhuangzi. The Analects? Sure, though far from a literary masterpiece.

Fast forward to, oh, the last three years teaching the entire history of China six times over (it’s a semester course, so I get to watch that epic story twice a year). With each turn to the “100 Schools of Thought” of Classical China, during its very un-classical and downright barbarous Warring States Period, I’ve had the pleasure of re-visiting Master Kong’s Analects and, with each re-visit — and re-read, and reading of new translations (my god, the Ames and Rosemont philosophical translation is rich), and re-annotation — and I’ve had the pleasure of esteeming and enjoying him more and more. (Prof. Robert Eno of Indiana University has an excellent, free “teaching translation” here.)

So, Mr. Downes: a mega mea culpa. You were so very right — and your philosophical background, which you recently pointed to in a Stephen’s Web post defending the value of a philosophy major, showed that value in your challenge to that “Must-Reads” post. Do I still love Zhuangzi and Laozi and the Daoists? Absolutely. But Confucius has grown on me with each new read until now, he — and Mencius and Xunzi — are even more “must-read before dying.” The bloody Chinese hit the jackpot in terms of ancient wisdom. Crazy cool.

So anyway, yeah: not much calling to write about technology in education any more (obviously, as the silence shows). But to use it to write alongside, with, to, and for students? And anybody else interested in what the world’s oldest living civilization may have to offer the young upstarts like our own? Oh, yes.

Anyway, that’s how this blog started, years ago. It was for my students. I began because I was making my freshmen in Korea blog about history and literature, and pulled the old “practice what you preach” thing by blogging alongside them.

Now, though, it’s China and the West in the ultimate civilizational stand-off. Drop by and join the conversation if you’re interested (and here’s the class blog, chocablock with readings to catch you up if you want an education in Chinese history that has nothing to do with textbooks and everything to do with provocative reads and questions).

Consider that an invitation. Here’s the card:

Student Blog Highlights, Homework-Free Update, and Free Podcast Hosting and Embedding

My last post‘s experiment with embedding Archive.org‘s audio player failed. Somebody in the forums was kind enough to point me to the help page showing how to get the player to include a playlist, so now I can share — and also share some mild ecstasy at the quality of learning and student blogging in my new (almost-) homework-free classroom.

Using Archive.org for Podcast Files

This is so worth sharing. Those of you geeky long enough to have been burned when once-free hosting services went premium-only (e.g., Ning), belly-up, or whatever, don’t need me to tell you that a free host committed to remaining free — and well-funded enough to honor that commitment — is hugely important. Otherwise, hours, weeks, months, and years of building content can go up in smoke.

So Archive.org seems to be a very fine solution — especially for audio (vids can go on Youtube, Vimeo, Blip, whatever, but audio-only seems strangely less welcome on most sites). Its “about” page lays our that it’s a non-profit with very strong institutional support and a mission to be around forever, so I don’t fear getting burned again.

Lecturing Alone

As I mentioned last post, I prefer to lecture alone by simply recording voice memos on my iPhone when the spirit moves: distracted students don’t distract me, and don’t distract students who want to listen. Students can also listen when the spirit moves them. It’s win-win. So I made a channel on Archive.org, the iPhone Analects, and uploaded all my voice memos to them. They have a nifty batch upload function that makes the job fast and easy. **Warning: Don’t use iTunes’ AAC format, because Archive.org won’t convert them for play in the Audio Player. Using .mp3 worked for me, and iTunes will convert AAC to mp3 with a click. Search help or the menu options and it’s easy to figure out.**

Voice memos can also be a way to differentiate and extend for those who want to go further or deeper. I don’t assign most of what I record; I simply invite those who like the stuff we’re learning to listen to a sincere adult think aloud about the stuff because he likes it too — and doesn’t speak like a textbook, encyclo- or wiki-pedia, but instead like a person with questions, hypotheses, insights, curiosities, emotions, jokes, and wonder about it all. As one student put it in my class, “you’re further down the path than we are, and seem more to be learning with us than teaching us what you’ve finished learning.” That’s a paraphrase, but a faithful one. That kid nailed it. (And I thank the Big Lump* for giving me the best three Chinese history classes this semester that I’ve ever had. We do teach each other by discussing this stuff together. I do see new things they show me that turn on light bulbs left and right. It’s worth the early grave because the extra work makes the present so much finer. See this class blog post for links to some wonderful student blog reflections on our three hours reading original Taoist texts. And note that this writing is done at home, while in class we read together without computers, and discuss it without computers. They use the computers at home to blog about the f2f in class. And the quality of writing this semester is way more insightful than in the past. It’s their only homework. We do all reading in class together. I’m italicizing because dammit, I love this, and so do they. We’re working less and learning more, and more enjoyably at that.)

Embedding the History of China Podcast Player, with Full Playlist First:

–the tricky part: you have to add playlist code to the basic embed code. Archive.org’s audio tips page explains how.

Embedding the Podcast Player with Single Tracks:

“Sentimental Confucius”:

Not perfect — it doesn’t include the file name, for example — but they seem to be working on improving it (and again, see the audio tips page to see how to change the code for single tracks).

Closing Shots

I’m now encouraging students who feel like they’re stronger talkers than writers to make their own Archive.org accounts and embed their own talks on their class blogs. So far, only one has taken me up on it — a great, smart kid who I love listening to in class, and who does seem to shine more brightly in speech than in script.

And for the social kids who would rather discuss than write or talk solo, I’m looking into Oovoo as a free Skype alternative that records video conferences cross-platform. Our school is 1:1, but doesn’t (yet, I pray daily) mandate a single machine, so this Mac and PC-compatible free download is a Big Lump-send.*

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*What’s this “Big Lump”? It’s Ivanhoe’s and Van Norden’s translation of what Zhuangzi calls the Tao, from which all the myriad things — life, the universe, and everything (including us) — emerges, and to which it all reverts. I love the creative freedom of this translation, and how it has fun with Zhuangzi’s ideas by matching them with similarly fun English wordplay.

More on Homework-Free, Document-Based Lessons

(A follow-up to yesterday’s post.)

Hi, can you elaborate on a document based lesson? How much time do you spend working with a document?*

I’d love to hear others’ takes on this question. Me? I’m making my own DBQs, basically, to bring out the essential learnings and understandings key to the narrative frame that I’m building around the entire span of China’s recorded history. It’s a semester course, so much selection and rejection of textbook content is going on — and textbook coverage of those concepts is disappearing almost entirely. Other sources bring these things out so much better, and with so much more interest.

Since the Shang and Zhou dynasties are as seminal to China as the Hebrew and Christian traditions are to the West (Confucian ritual and ideology trace back to the Shang and Zhou), I’m spending a lot of time on those two dynasties in primary source work.

Long story short, rather than a paragraph from a textbook about the importance of Ancestor Rites, I lead students through a three-page essay from a secondary source about the role of music in Zhou ritual that (deliciously) includes two extended texts — one from the Zhou Classic of Odes (Shi Jing), another from a bronze bell inscription — that actually narrate the ritual performance from start to finish.

Since Confucian ethics revolve around ritual and music, not religion or rules, I spent about a half hour on these three pages in class. Procedure (and I myself wince at this too, but feel it’s justified since it’s so crucial to understanding the next 3,000 years of China’s history):

I read aloud once, slowly, instructing students to annotate anything that strikes them (their choice), but also to double-underline any word or phrase that I pause to read twice. (Why? There are key repetitions and motifs that sleepy or inattentive students can gloss over and miss. My reading these key passages twice, I hope, forces the discussion afterward to address these key elements.)
I occasionally pause with comprehension-checking questions (“Who is the ‘impersonator’?” “Who is the ‘revered guest’?” “Remember who King Wen and Wu are?”) along the way to keep everybody from getting lost.
Once I finish reading aloud, students get the essential questions (E.g., “These rites, and the values in them, will be central to China for the next 3,000 years. When Christian Europe arrives 2,500 years later, how do you think Christian missionaries will react to the types of ritual worship we see here? What is ‘holy’ in China that might be ‘sin’ to Europeans?” “What do we learn about how the ancient Chinese saw the afterlife? Is it similar to Christianity, or different?” On and on.)
We open it up and discuss from there.
Homework is only to write on a team blog a minimum 14-sentence post about one of the essential questions of the day. They comment on each others’ posts as a way of peer teaching and, in the best cases, simply conversing about the interesting thoughts they’re having.

I’ve been timing how long it takes me to read the texts aloud before class, and planning the length of discussion based on how many texts are included in the day’s plan.

Here’s the packet with the readings I referenced for the session above (the Shang and Zhou Ritual text on the last two pages is incredibly interesting). The entire packet is a two-lesson mini-unit on the legacies of the Shang and Western Zhou. We’re on a block schedule, so that means about 2 hours in class.

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*Copied from an H-NET history teachers list-serv for my own records.

Beyond School

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Category Archives: blogging

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More on Homework-Free, Document-Based Lessons