Beyond School

I just discovered the 2008 Webby Award-winning “You Suck at Photoshop” series on YouTube. While it may not succeed at making me a Photoshop ninja, it does succeed at convincing me that this kind of project would make the classroom an awesome place.

Here’s why: the series demonstrates a mastery of content knowledge — in this case, Photoshop technique — while at the same time adding a creative element that makes the content-master stand out from the equally masterful but unimaginative competition. Point blank: in the hands of this guy, something as dull as “how to use layers” becomes a vehicle that screams, “Hire me to write for ‘30 Rock‘!” He proves he can turn lead into gold, which is a real-world skill not many people have. Alchemists like that deserve the chance to display their creative magic in school.

The Mental Work is Hard….

“You Suck at Photoshop” displays that creative magic in the form of fiction (see the Wikipedia entry on the series for  more). The host of the tutorials is a persona named “Donnie,” a loser stuck in a lousy life with a lousy wife. We learn about Donnie’s life through a series of such sometimes-subtle details as his choice of photos for the tutorial — “Say you want to use a photo of the Vanagon your wife meets her high school boyfriend in on Friday nights….wait, I’ve got one right here” (scroll past other photos of — gulp — handguns, and one of the high school boyfriend labeled — gulp — “douche-b.png”) — and such sometimes-over-the-top details as the wife barging in to kvetch at him in the middle of his tutorial, or his loser friend Skyping in with a loser-emergency while Donnie is making his screencast.

The creator of this project not only demonstrates his literary creativity by creating the fictional “Donnie” persona and populating his Photoshop folders with props like the pictures mentioned above; he takes it further with his dramatic creativity as he acts out the role of that persona with his voice-over. The vocal acting covers a broad emotional terrain, from dude in his basement chillaxing with his laptop to powder-keg psychopath struggling to keep the flame from his fuse. The acting is just awesome.

….The Tech is Dead Easy

The beauty of the project technology-wise is that it requires nothing more than a screencasting program like the free Jing or Screencast-o-matic, plus a webcam and microphone — your standard kit in most computers today. So the technical hurdles for students to do such a project are basically nil.

That leaves the whole of their energies to devote to the other two aspects of the project: mastery and critical understanding of the content, and creative concept development to deliver that understanding.

Too Beautiful for School?

So I’m wrestling, as usual, with the ways this wonderfully simple approach to creative learning will be complicated by the forces of schooliness:

• Do I have to make a rubric for it, and if so, does that kill the creativity with its prescriptive check-box drudgery, or limit the infinite creative possibilities by dictating “it must be this and not that, and that and not this”?
• Is it sustainable in terms of watching and grading and giving feedback to 100 students doing such an assignment?
• How do I define satisfactory content mastery and creativity for this assignment?
• How do I encourage experimentation and the healthy embrace of possible failure when I have to slap a low grade on it if it does indeed “fail”?
• Should I make it optional, in following with my increasingly elitist impulse to definitely not “push” the unwilling to attempt genius, and not even “pull” them, but only to “attract” the three percent of “roses” in any student population who might blossom in the attempt?

I don’t know.

Nor do I know how to adapt this for a history classroom. Can “You Suck at Photoshop” become “You Suck at History”? How? How can this be used for Europe from the French Revolution to the present, or the complete history of China?

My recent brainstorm on giving a conceptual purpose to learning Chinese history by “interpreting it for historically-ignorant Westerners” seems to have some openings. God knows, there are ample websites of Chinese and Western art, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and more that students could tab through on their screencasts as they provide their commentary like “Donnie” does to his open Photoshop on his desktop. But the maker of “Donnie” has the luxury of revealing that persona through the image “props” in his folders, while history students wouldn’t have as easy a task of  revealing persona if they were forced instead to work with history websites in their screencasts.

One solution I’m considering is making it a summative, end-of-semester project, in which students have most of the semester to let their creative juices stew and come up with their own ideas over the first few months. Then give a couple of weeks of class time to a workshop in which they design and execute those ideas.

Otherwise, I’m mostly adrift. Maybe you can help.

But if you watch the three-minute first episode below, you should see why I’m bewitched by the idea:

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole playlist. Then help me figure out how I can make this work?

"Old dogs" my mange-ridden tail. (I'm the guy with the receding hairline, inset lower left.)

I’ve been meaning to scratch this itch of a digitized reading/writing/speaking unit for any school with basic podcasting gear for a while, but have been too busy.

Busy with a new job, here in Seoul, writing and announcing radio news. I applied for it a good two months ago, and after a glacial hiring process, got the nod in mid-November. (Some of my fellow tweets know this.)¹

And while it’s obvious that I enjoyed the advantage of being a foreigner when it came to breaking into radio at my age, I want to add that it didn’t hurt to have a background teaching reading, writing, and speaking skills for eight years. The old joke I loved as a new Humanities graduate – “I have a Liberal Arts degree: Will that be for here or to go?” – seems less funny now, because less true.  The basic skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening, which really just mean communicating, in the end – have more value to them than we often credit.

That teaching unit I mentioned? I think about it most days as I drive home from work. In a nutshell, it’s this: invite your students to turn your content, whatever your subject matter, into five-minute “top of the hour” newscasts, applying the craft of writing for radio (great resource here), and then speaking for radio. Then have them follow up, at certain points, with “talk radio” in which they discuss and debate their “content news.” In addition to that work-flow’s simple progression from fact-mastery (identify the main ideas of each section of a chapter and distill them into a short, well-crafted précis) to higher-order thinking (analyze, synthesize, evaluate those main ideas in a natural discussion), there are two more bonuses: first, the technology slice is so simple it’s invisible (in live studio news broadcasts, you only get one chance to announce the news, so for students that means hit record, read for five minutes, then wrap by hitting “stop” and call it a day), and technology should ideally be as invisible as pen and paper; and second, the activity develops all the real-world skills that come with real journalism and broadcasting (or, as Wes Fryer puts it in regards to podcasting, “narrowcasting”).

Glancing back at my last post about Linda Darling-Hammond on performance-based assessment, this type of learning-while-doing workshop measures performance across a wide range of literacy skills: reading for main ideas, writing them with economy and accuracy (and no passive voice, mostly action verbs, citation of sources, distinctions between “alleging” and “charging,” and more), and best of all, speaking with proper pace, volume, inflection, emphasis, pitch variety, and all the other qualities radio announcers have to master to avoid losing their listeners to the next station on the dial.

It’s “real-world project-based learning” that uses the same skills as outlining, note-taking, and giving those schooly little front-of-the-classroom speeches.

The only glitch I can see is this: if you have 20 students that you put into pairs, they can’t all record at the same time in class, so they’ll have to do the actual recording outside of class. They can still have the class period as the workshop to read and write their news scripts, and practice announcing them to each other. They can also discuss and outline the questions and topics for the higher-order “talk show” piece.

Here’s the process we follow at my station. I really think it could be duplicated in an 80-minute block. At work, I do it as part of a team of two. Here it is:

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.: Read newswires (in class, this could be, say, a chapter from a history textbook), select ten articles (sections from the textbook) for the 5-minute 9:00 hourly, divide the labor, then condense those news articles – which read aloud would take two or three minutes each – into crisp little 20-to-30 second summaries of main ideas.

That means cutting about 90% of the length, without cutting the important ideas. (In other words, that means: critical reading for main ideas.)

8:30 to 8:50 a.m.: Practice reading the scripts, making last-minute adjustments where necessary. Focus on the oral skills here: breath control, pace and pause, acceleration and deceleration, words and phrases to emphasize (just consciously watch or listen to any TV or radio newscaster, and notice how different their speaking is from normal off-air speech).

8:50 to 9:00: Go upstairs to the studio, make sure your pages are in order.

9 to 9:05: Announce the news. No second chances.

Again, the reading, writing, and practicing take 80 minutes – a standard block period. The actual recording would have to be done outside of class (Skype, anyone?).

Now for the testimonial: When training for this gig, my first few attempts at speaking were disasters. Adrenaline would make me read too fast. I couldn’t control my breath, so you’d hear huge whooshing sounds as I came up for air after long sentences. My voice and hands shook. I couldn’t meet the 5-minute final out deadline. I couldn’t turn pages skillfully – you’d hear rattling paper or, worse, page one seque to page three because I’d lifted two pages instead of one, resulting in an economy article ending with a surreal sports score followed by a brain-frozen omigod pause. My vocal style would start strong, but during the underwater feeling of the third and fourth minute, I’d drop into a monotone without realizing it. And more.

But my partner’s constructive feedback and encouragement, and self-critique by listening to the performance, and imitation of newscasters online and on air, soon – within a week – led to massive improvement in both writing and speaking, by all accounts. I still have the job, so that must be the general consensus. My point here is that, done regularly, giving students time to stumble and fail, then try again until they succeed and become finally comfortable with all this literacy, will, I’m convinced, make them much stronger readers, writers, and speakers than ye olde schooly lecture-outline-take notes-summarize-give a speech drill.

It was the same with the reading and writing. My partner and I took forever, the first few days, to be able to hone in on the main ideas in all the articles we re-wrote, leading to no practice-time before going live and worse. But now, our speed has at least doubled. We’ve developed the skills, in other words, of skimming, evaluating, separating central from supporting information, and re-writing those quickly and clearly.

So, when I re-enter the classroom next year (yes, you heard that right), this performance-based workflow will be one I introduce early in the year, and sustain throughout it.

I know it’s not original, by the way, and I’m sure many teachers are doing this type of thing. I’m just struck by it because I’ve experienced it from the other (and real-world) end, as a learner.

1. The station is the first all-English radio station in Korean history, and launched December 1. La-de-da. [↩]

This is just hilarious, and a brilliant idea at the same time: taking the Wasilla Town Meeting minutes (Sarah Palin presiding), and turning them into a one-man drama performance. Do yourself a favor and laugh as you learn about the extent of this woman’s experience, and worse yet, her leadership style.

A little ice-breaker after my fear-frozen last post: CollegeHumor.com also found noteworthy Matt Damon’s comments about Palin leading the US government and military. But they had fun with it, bless ‘em. Enjoy (and h/t to Crooks and Liars).

(And on an educational note, if any of you have student films that so creatively comment on history or current affairs, feel free to drop a link to them in the comment thread. I’d love to see students given the freedom to make this kind of commentary in the classroom.)

John Larkin in Oz nudged me to consider playing with the idea he so creatively played with on his own site: “How Far I Roamed as a Child.”

John’s post gives the full background of the idea, and a nicely visual guided tour of his own childhood using personal photos and satellite imagery from Google Maps¹. But this excerpt from John’s post brings out the historical and educational thrust of the idea:

[An] article in the Mail online, ‘How children lost the right to roam in four generations‘, is particularly telling. It sets out quite clearly how from one generation to the next children are not roaming as far as their parents and grandparents.

Firing up Google Maps and revisiting my elementary and junior high years’ stomping grounds in Tennessee was a blast – and as John seemed to understand by inviting me to play with his idea, it has all sorts of engaging applications for the writing classroom. One example is all I have time for at the moment, and it’s this:  By typing in my childhood home address on Google Maps, then clicking “street view” and zooming and panning around a bit, I found, of all unremarkable things, the street-drainage ditch in front of my house, with its tunnel under the street to the other side, which I crawled through as a child surely hundreds of times – and up the hill from that, in what was once my yard, the grandest hickory tree you could ever imagine, whose autumn leaves I and my brother and sisters and parents and dogs raked into piles (okay, the dogs didn’t rake), dove into, splashed around in like leafy surf, on and on.  Here’s a screenshot:

The Ditch, the Hickory, the Memory Flood

Wouldn’t This Work in the Writing Classroom?

The photo above may not do anything for you, and it shouldn’t.  But me?  I can hear the flung rocks echoing from the tunnel, smell the algae in its puddles, remember the sense of mystery of the world opening out at tunnel’s end.  For autobiography and personal narrative, again, this beats the utter hell out of brainstorming with pencil and paper about my childhood.  Never in a hundred years would I have even remembered that ditch and tunnel. But now that I do, the related memories wax exponential.  That ditch, for example:  after a heavy rain, it was a child’s river, and so, with my best friend Gary (who drowned with his father a few summers later), we named that “river,” in a bit of blood-brother name-combining, the “Clary.”  Again, just an example of how this goes beyond brain-storming to brain-flooding.

How Far I Roamed

Anyway, like John, man did I roam as a child.  I must have walked four or five miles a day on average.  Here’s Google Maps, with my first attempt to use Adobe Illustrator for labels and arrows, to show the details (click image for larger view, and note the key in the lower left corner):

How Far I Roamed: Chattanooga, Tennessee, 1960s and '70s

(And for the students out there who read this, let me know: do you roam as far these days? Or have you “lost the right to roam”?  And Dad: you can comment too, you know. How far did you roam as a child, on a daily basis?)

If you decide to play with this meme, by the way, please link it to John’s original post. It’s his baby, and it’s a good one.

1. including the astonishing “street view” which, as the name implies, puts you in the perspective of a photographer standing on whatever spot of road you choose, and allows you to pan 360°, tilt up and down, zoom in, “walk” up or down the street [↩]

A little behind-the-scenes glimpse at the bridge-building I’ve been doing to market my tutoring service, and at the same time to share another Web 2.0 offering with teeth: the video-subtitling site called dotSUB.

One of the biggest challenges I face on this limb is communicating with Korean parents who I am, and how I’m different from most of the “I’ve got a college degree and speak English, but have no teaching experience at all” English teachers in Korea.  The parents, understandably skeptical about foreigners claiming to be teachers, have a million questions that bear on their decision to hire me.  But they don’t speak English, and I don’t speak Korean, so my poor wife is caught in the crossfire playing two-way interpreter.  Since she’s not a teacher-geek, it’s both hard on and unfair to her to shoulder her with explaining blogs, wikis, Skype, etc, to parents – or even to explain my background and experience as a teacher.

Enter the wonderful world of Web 2.0, and dotSUB particularly.

I’ve got so many movies on this space, on YouTube and Google Video and BlipTV and Archive.org, all explaining and demonstrating my background, character, skills and abilities, and all of them would serve admirably to put many parent questions to rest – if only they were in Korean.

Well, thanks to a full day’s work transcribing my own videos first, 3-second clip by 3-second clip on dotSUB, my wife is now plugging in her own Korean translation on the site under each time-stamped subtitle.  Here are the results of the first one, the first half of a teacher-training video I made a few years ago at Shanghai American School (where Jeff Utecht and Jonathan Chambers first served me the Koolaid) about collaborative team-teaching in the mainstreamed ESL classroom. (I was the ESOL department head and teacher-trainer then. Ignore the Southern Baptist look; I must have been feeling nostalgic for Camp Joy.)

Cooler still, anybody at dotSUB can freely add a translation in their own language – which others can edit, wiki-like. All translated languages would auto-add to the drop-down menu in the media player’s “languages” bar. Very cool.

I’ll show you a few more things as they come. But what do you think, I wonder, about applications of this site for foreign language classrooms? Food for thought there….

Alrighty, Mr. Meyer – you’ve won me.  What you’re doing with video is worth it for everybody to watch.  I’m enjoying your questions and explorations, and you’re certainly upping the game. This one’s my favorite so far:

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

I’m hoping to be ready to plunge into upping my own game in a humanities-guy sort of way. Just bought a Canon HV30, soon to install FinalCut Express.  What’ll it take to get you to share your know-how?

Seriously – great stuff.  I hope everybody’s watching.

Just saw this on Crooks and Liars, and think it’s worth sharing to teachers and students alike. Ira Glass, radio host of This American Life on (the USA’s) National Public Radio, shares how expectations – our own, and others’ – shouldn’t be too high for our media creations, because “it takes years” to bridge the gap between our “tastes” and our attempts to attain them in our media productions.

To teachers, this says, “Don’t grade blogging, podcasting, and other things too harshly.”  To students it says, “Whether you like it or not, it’s good to hold you to a required production schedule that forces you to regularly create – that’s the only way you’ll get better.” (Reminds me of the old saying, “Don’t wait for Inspiration.  She’s a lazy b*tch that has to be chased down.”)

Here’s the clip:

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our new apartment on Tuesday – after which I hope to be able to think clearly.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying simply sharing some of the amazing free resources I’m discovering these days. Today’s offering:  Celtx (click screenshot for full view).

From the Celtx site, a partial overview of the scriptwriting, storyboarding, collaborating, production scheduling, and on-and-on-ing it performs:

Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.

Multi-Media Friendly: Celtx helps you pre-produce all types of media – film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and however else you choose to tell your story.

All-In-One: Unlike scriptwriting software, you can use Celtx for the entire pre-production process – write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.

Fully Integrated: Celtx is designed to help your entire production team work together on a single, easy to share project file – eliminating the confusion of multiple project files, and the need for ‘paper and binder’.

There’s more, too: a Project Central community site for global Celtx users, and more beyond that. Check out the site for the goodness – and don’t miss the screencast tutorials to get the full effect.  Just wonderful – hats off to Celtx.

It’s cross-platform, by the way, so goodness for all, PC, Mac, and otherwise. (h/t to Ostatic for the excellent Six Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers post. Go there for five more goodies beside!)

In my third month of writing here about 21st century education, way back in March 2007, I put the pom-poms down, stopped cheerleading, and started thinking about all the ways schools can kill the learning that is possible when students have a simple laptop and a blog. This snippet from a post from back then says it all, and my views haven’t changed on this one. (Add “and laptop learning” whenever you see “student blogging”):

[My] last two or three posts–and the comments, thank you – have conjured depressing visions in my head at random moments. I’m a bit worried about the future of student blogging.

I fear we teachers are going to ruin it for the learners.

“Blogging is just another way to turn in homework.” That’s the sentence that scares me. Because that’s how non-blogging teachers, and perhaps those unfamiliar with literacy pedagogy – communication across the curriculum, writing to learn, authentic writing, and more – will probably use blogging in the classroom.

And it will become drudgery. And the students (not learners here, because “teacher” can’t let go of being “teacher,” dominating, squelching, and dictating to students) will bang out the minimum for “blog homework,” as in old days, and turn to something authentic. Like their MySpace.

Toward a solution (or at least mitigation): train teachers in the philosophy of blogging before letting them use it in their classrooms.

[Update 6 hours later: I misspoke when I said "my views haven't changed" since I wrote this. They have. I don't think any longer that "training teachers in the philosophy of blogging" (or 1:1 learning) is enough to make it work, if they're not also mentored by someone who is immersed in the 21st century learning movement - and that mentor is acknowledged and supported. Teacher training is no evidence of teacher learning.]

Since writing this, our school has become a 1:1 Apple laptop school. All the students have blogs. They have iLife, so they can podcast, make iMovies, the whole nine yards. One of the students in my PLN class, Younsuk (you may have read about his Basketball Without Borders project, in which he and another student have arranged Skype interviews – in class – with Asian college and pro basketball players, and podcasted them on their Wordpress.com blog), recently wrote the below on his “schooly” (required) blog. It’s just a snapshot, and I wish he’d have offered a possible solution for getting students to write on their blogs without somehow requiring it. I also wish he’d have the opportunity to learn that visual communication, the language of film, is a valuable (and not easy) skill to develop as well. But still, there’s much to learn from him. And he makes me wonder if my “prophecy” is coming true. Here it is:

[Our school] thinks we’re cool because the students carry around MacBooks. But carrying around a laptop doesn’t make a school cool, although it will certainly make the school look cool. Did [the school] get MacBooks so we can look cool? I hope not.

What are some of the cool things we do with our laptops?

[Most] students would be shouting, “iMovies!” right now. It is unique that we don’t write papers for our English final exam. Instead, we make movies using iMovie. But, is that really cool? Because I think there’s more potential to this than making a funny iMovie just to get grades for English class. I would understand it if it was for a movie making class. But does making iMovie enhance our skills in English…?

[Our school] is just trying to look cool by trying to use MacBooks whenever we can.

I’ve had too many teachers assign us to “make an iMovie” for this and that. I had to make an iMovie for my World Geography class and Asian Studies class. I was surprised when even my Spanish teacher told me to make an iMovie. It is obvious [our school] is trying too hard…to look cool.

And out of all my classes, Writing Seminar is one class that I think “is cool.” Yep, you guessed it right, it’s his class.

Personal Learning Network, or PLN is what we’ve been doing the whole semester in this class. We use our MacBooks to interact with people from all over the world, and learn how to write for [a] true audience. Not just that, we learn how to accomplish stuff through networking and meeting new cool people.

I have done some big things in this class. I have interviewed Asian college basketball players, uploaded the interview on our website to spread their words and break the stereotype of “Asians can’t play ball.” Some of them play professional basketball right now. I’ve interacted with some real people.

It’s much easier to see what I’ve done if you click here.

Now that’s the right thing to do with these laptops.

Macbook gives us “true audience.” In other words, it is real world out there.

While the MacBooks in the Writing Seminar classroom are shining, the other MacBooks in other classrooms are crying. They say, “what the hell am I doing here?”

I replied to Younsuk on his post, and will share that here as well:

I have a fantasy that, because you and others honestly express yourselves about your educational experience on your blogs, you eventually have an influence on how your classes are conducted – in other words, you teach your teachers and admin how it feels to be their student.

It’s delicate. You shouldn’t attack individuals or be too harsh, but at the same time shouldn’t mute your criticisms out of fear.

This medium can be powerful. Student voice can be powerful if it uses it. I’m thinking you and Soojin Lee and a few others could intentionally create change by focusing your efforts on starting discussion online about what changes you’d like to see.

I’ve read your entire blog tonight. I’ll be using some of your quotes in an upcoming post, and possibly in a book I hope to write this summer.

One last word, in defense of teachers: they’re new at this. Many of them don’t get it at all. So patience is only fair. They’re trying. But you can help them get it through good-willed criticism and instruction. You can teach them.

Stay in touch, Younsuk. You know where to find me.

I share this for many reasons, but primarily this: it’s not enough to “give professional development workshops” to teachers about 21st century education, and equate that teacher seat-time with effective training. Let’s be honest about that. We all know seat-time and certificates are no surer proof of learning for teachers than they are for students.

Younsuk’s situation brings up another important issue as well: laptop schools that don’t truly, really, really have true, true, true “coordination” of instruction risk burning students out with “three iMovie final projects,” as is Younsuk’s case, all due the same week. A good movie takes an hour of editing for every minute of the final product. I wonder how many minutes these students are expected to produce for their finals. It’s scary. And the solution is a real tech coordinator who monitors the load of production the same way a bus coordinator coordinates a workable bus schedule. You can’t leave this up to chance.

Finally, Younsuk’s mention that Macbooks help learning by allowing students to connect and network with the world is something no teacher or administrator is going to understand without doing it. It’s 20th century education with a shiny bell and whistle otherwise. Just a new way to turn in homework. The immigrants in power will think it’s cutting edge, but the students will think otherwise.

I’m curious what all of you read into this. I give credit to my school for trying to pioneer this territory, and expect that things will improve. But it’s not an easy task.

—

You can see all those old “Saving Classroom Blogging from Teachers” posts from Spring ‘07 here. The ideas there are arguably more relevant, now that blogging and digital storytelling and all that are spreading, than they were a year ago when I wrote them. The comments, as usual, hold the gold:

• On the Uses and Abuses of Student Blogging
• Teacher Think-aloud on Student Blogging (a Fresh Start)
• Post-script on Student Blogging Think-Aloud
• On Classroom Blogging 3: Sucking It Dry: Teachers as Vampires
• Blogging 4: Seeking Stakes for Dracula’s Heart–Moodle for “homework,” blogs for “real work”?
• The Conversation Begins: Saving Learner-Bloggers from Teacher-Vampires
• More on Protecting Classroom Bloggers from Teachers
• The Silver Bullet? One Idea for Saving Blogging from the Werewolf
• Phoenix, Blogging: Writing Beyond School
• “Teachers as Blogging Vampires” and “Blogging as Conversation” Gone a Bit Surreal

Photo credit: “Portrait of a Monkey” by s-a-m