Beyond School

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“

–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.

But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past – those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” – attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)

Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian – the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”

Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries – the “facts” – that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)

Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,

. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.

At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

I shot back,

And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?

Then Chris wrote:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment – biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered – threatened? – to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:

A History Assignment I’d Like to See:

Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*

Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?

—

(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)

Image: Quite Puzzling by Cayusa

I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose – voluntary, as usual – could have more social value than the bevy of “Stop Bullying!” messages we most often see in response to this ugly subject. Here’s Jack:

Clay,

I googled bullying stories because I wanted something to help me through troubles that I am currently facing in ninth grade. “Stop bullying!” sites really didn’t help me. This was just the kind of story I was looking for. I get called names feverishly because I didn’t make the best impression first semester. I try not to care what other people think of me but it feels like I am always watching my back.

Anyways, this story was very interesting indeed. Thanks a lot for sharing. It helped substantially. [Emphasis added.]

I’ve already thanked Jack, but I want to thank him again. He confirms that for him, at least, “Stop Bullying” messages may be nice and all, but they don’t do much to comfort those trying to cope with being bullied.

I’m not saying anti-anything messages have no positive value. I’m just saying they often fail to help the victims of the thing being opposed. Telling bullies not to bully may be worth the effort, though it’s apparently predicated on the dubious belief that it’s effective to appeal to the compassionate side of bullies, who in my experience have almost always been a pretty heartless bunch. Bullies enjoy psycho-social benefits from bullying – profits, in a sense – in the same way arms dealers do from selling weapons. Appeals to delicate instincts require delicate audiences, and delicacy is a thing usually absent from these hardened types.

But as Jack testifies, just hearing Bullied Success Stories – that survival is worth it and life gets better? That’s a speech-act worth performing.

So the Meme: Share Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories

I did it in my podcast, a 30 minute story – literally, a story – of my experience of three years of bullying in high school. It’s actually just an mp3 of the class session in which I told the story to my students (there was bullying going on in that grade). I just fired up GarageBand and recorded it as I shared it with my class.

That’s one way to do it. Other ways:

• a blog post
• a webcam video
• a Skypecast
• a Comic Life or photo-essay
• a VoiceThread
• [your idea here]

If none of those work for you, but you have a story to tell, you can also leave a comment or drop me an email volunteering for a Skype conference call, where we can take more of a group story-telling session. I can do the editing and turn it into a podcast.

I hope this makes sense to you. It does to me. Jack’s comment strengthened my belief that, short of somehow stopping bullying – and come on, it’s been with us as long as war – one of the most helpful things we can do is offer ourselves, and our stories, as living proof that the nightmare can be survived, and this dream called life can become sweeter as it moves into adulthood.

I often throw dreamy ideas like this out on this blog, and they land with a thud. This one seems a likely candidate as the latest in that series. But I hope not. My bullying podcast gets a surprising number of visits from people googling “real life bullying stories” and such, and it gets downloaded quite a bit too.

So there is a need.

And instead of putting more energy into “stop bullying” sermons (which I’m not saying we should stop), we can maybe devote it to stories of hope.

I know it’s a busy time, so if you can only get around to it later – this summer, even – that’s fine. Just link here whenever it’s done. If we get enough of these, we can make a permanent site for them on a wiki, or even a dedicated blog.

And by the way: this offer is open to any students out there with anything to say as well. I’d love to host a Skype conference call about this topic.

Photo: Locker by Steven Fernandez

[Update 2: Goodness! A 75-comment debate exploded in less than a day.  Best sustained conversation among all commenters (not just responding to the post) that I've ever seen on this blog.  A true "cocktail party" about an important subject: Assessing with a bias toward writing, versus assessing to reward non-written communication skills equally in grades.]  [Update: Good comments in this one. Thanks to Adrienne Michetti (whose new team-blog looks promising), Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez of Generation Yes, and Arthus for rooting this post in the basics - which still aren't basic for so many. And do yourself a favor: watch the Ali video embedded below. It's the evidence of the argument, and a breath of fun to boot.]

I went into a restaurant downtown – you couldn’t do that back then, because things weren’t integrated yet – and I sat down with my [Olympic] gold medal around my neck, and the waitress came up, and I said, ‘Yes, I’d like, uh, a cup of coffee, and a hot dog.’ And she said, ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve negroes here.’ And I got so angry, I said, ‘And I don’t eat them, either. Now bring me a hot dog!’ — Muhammad Ali, 1971 TV interview (YouTube embedded below [Update Dec. 2009: YouTube took it down, so I replaced it with another vid that doesn't have this dialogue, but is still a great watch.])

You never could have made me believe years ago, when I got out of high school with a D- average – and they gave me the minus because I won the Olympics, 1960, I graduated in 1960 and I won the Olympics in 1960 – . . . . and if you would have told me that I would be offered a professorship to teach philosophy and poetry at Oxford, and speak at Harvard, I never would have believed it. — Muhammad Ali, Harvard graduation speech 1975 (YouTube here)

In 1964, [Muhammad] Ali failed the U.S. Armed Forces qualifying test because his writing and spelling skills were sub par. — Wikipedia

An Historical Argument Against Writing-Privileged Assessment

It’s been a sleep-in Saturday after a long week. I woke up and took a rare cruise through YouTube. It started with laughs with Ali G, and ended with inspiration from Muhammad Ali.

This post is for any student who, like Ali in the epigraph above, has a low GPA (and thus a low self-image), but a brilliant mind. It’s also for teachers of those students who wish they could do their part to make that GPA more accurately reflect that student’s abilities.

Listen, in this YouTube interview from 1971, to this “sub-par” English student’s brilliance with language*, and laugh at the limitations of assessing writing and spelling to measure verbal intelligence:

And teachers – English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms – ask yourself, in this age of user-created video and audio, if it makes any sense to keep giving the Muhammed Ali’s of our classrooms a D- because they can’t write well, when they can speak well enough to be honored, like Ali was, at Harvard and Oxford. The English teacher in me is uncomfortable with this question, but the history teacher in me thinks it’s justified: Writing is no longer supreme since the Digital Revolution. It’s now on equal footing with Speaking and Graphic Communication. Isn’t it?

If yes, then why, in most classrooms I’ve seen (and taught), is writing still weighted as around 75% of the final grade in the Language Arts classroom? And how can so many teachers who themselves are capable thinkers and creators, but horrible writers, justify this sort of assessment policy in their own practice?

Ali’s language could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” and with it this man “shook the world” – but neither his high school nor the Army could reflect this in their assessments. Instead, they labeled him “below average” and “sub par.”

It’s been more than 50 years since Ali left high school. Can we leave that assessment philosophy now? (I hear the answers already: “Not until the SAT allows oral instead of written essays.” Just kill me.)

Story Time: When I Met Ali First, and Second

I met Ali in 1982 or so in a West Hollywood restaurant on Sunset Boulevard*, serving him as his white-boy waiter. I was about 20. I told him my name was Clay, and that when I was in first grade in the ’60s and he was still known as Cassius Clay, people called me “Cassius.”

When he heard that, this gentle giant smiled, put up his lethal dukes, dodged and weaved for a split second while he said,

“Oh. So you a fighter.”

Then he offered a handshake, into which my hand disappeared.

I was an English major in college then, but I didn’t take mental marks off of Ali’s performance for omitting the “are,” didn’t say, “You mean, ‘You are a fighter.’” And this wasn’t just because he could have lifted me over his head and snapped me in two. It was because his language, bad grammar and all, was far more electrifying than many a grammatically perfect professor I had at the time.

I was unschooled in Ali’s history at that time. All I knew was that he was a heavyweight world champion of my childhood, and now had some sort of neural disorder (he often fell asleep at his table, and his wife would wake him up). I wish I’d known then what I know now – that he was one of the great men of the 20th century – so that I could have told him that. Instead, I just laughed with the stupid giddiness people often have in the face of celebrities, and served him his pasta.

Only years later, after watching Leon Gast’s riveting documentary, When We were Kings, did I realize just how great Ali was – not only as a boxer, but also as a citizen and man of conscience for a nation adrift. Punished with the loss of his boxing license at the prime of his career for his political dissent and his refusal to fight in Vietnam, he became an American pariah.

Fifteen years after meeting him, I had another Ali moment. Having lost all desire to become an academic, but not having lost the lifetime of college debt I’d accumulated in that (for me) fool’s quest, I was in a personnel processing center at Fort Leonard Wood, Arkansas, with a freshly shaved head and a duffel bag, ready to start Basic Training. There was a wall-mounted TV in the corner of the room, with live coverage of some important-looking outdoor ceremony. I was out of all media loops that summer, and didn’t even know the Olympics were going on. It was the Torch-lighting ceremony on that TV that I was watching – and it was history. Ali lit that torch in his final, moral comeback. The audience and media adulation was for once justified. It brought tears to my eyes and gave me faith in America.

–

*The critical thinking about race in religion and in US history are not too shabby either. And yes, while Ali shows a lack of critical thinking in his wholesale swallowing of everything Elijah Muhammad preached to him, we shouldn’t be too hard on him. Lack of critical thinking about one’s own religion is the norm in most people of any religion, from what I can see. As I read somewhere – maybe Sam Harris, maybe Bertrand Russell – everybody’s an atheist when it comes to others’ religions. Full non-theists just take them one further.

**Los Angelenos, is “The Old World” restaurant still there? On the corner diagonal from Tower Records, across the street from Spago?

I just finished watching Al Gore’s new TED Talk – the debut of his first new presentation since An Inconvenient Truth, called “How Dare We Be Optimistic?”, and will embed it at the bottom of this post. As TED describes it, Gore “presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of ‘generational mission.’”

The talk coincides with a post I had planned for this weekend announcing the upcoming Project Global Cooling, a global campaign to implant a consciousness of climate change and an agenda for promoting sustainability in K-12 schools around the world.

The history of this project is interesting. The idea came to me after a severe bout of bad conscience I had last summer after teaching a unit on Gulliver’s Travels to my grade nine (14-year-old) students last year. The culminating project was for students to design real-world, web-based interventions about whatever social or political issue they cared about, while meanwhile I sat back and gave them grades about it – instead of also practicing what I assigned. You can read all about that in a post that landed with a thud, last June, here. Lesson learned? Summers are not a good time to post serious, ambitious calls to action.

But the funny thing was, what I developed from that hypocrite’s hangover was, without my being aware of it, a student version of Kevin Wall and Al Gore’s Live Earth concerts, held in 12 cities world-wide last summer, to promote consciousness and action about climate change.

It’s been a tough ride trying to launch this over the last eight months (I’ll post a reflection about that later), but thanks to a few educators and students around the world who took on the extra work, it’s happening in six cities on three continents, k-12, beginning this week. (You can see all the details on the PGC website, a WordPress blog using a “magazine” style theme that’s geekily interesting, though hard to drive.)

The Events: Six Countries So Far

1. Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic: Education for Well-Being’s William Farren is holding a “laptopalooza” event;

2. Melbourne, Australia: Change-agent librarian Jenny Luca and students of Toorak College, a high school outside of Melbourne, are staging their own concert this Saturday, April 19:

3. Beijing, China: IB Science high school teacher Jeff Plaman is staging a PGC concert at International School of Beijing;

4. Bangkok, Thailand: Justin Medved and James Denby have added elementary students from International School of Bangkok to the mix at an Earth Day Festival on Saturday, April 25:

5. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA: Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur, high school sophomore and writer at Students 2.0 is spear-heading the Hawaii event on April 25 with high school English teacher Christopher Watson at Punahou School. Here’s a video Lindsea made:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gGr5Nkp0yQ[/youtube]

6. Seoul, Korea: My own students in Seoul, due to AP exams and SAT preparation, scheduled the Seoul concert for May 17. Here’s a PSA video student Jessica Yun made last week

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4Lm3rf0zAQ[/youtube]

And here’s the draft of our poster:

Education with ADD: Distracted by Tests and Facts?

I’ve got AP Exams coming up for my literature seniors in three weeks, and have been so distracted by the test prep that I’ve given this project less attention than it deserves. It’s the first year for PGC, and next year will be easier with this year’s accomplishments to point to (and let me note, the concerts are only the promotional wing – sustainability initiatives at schools and communities are the serious side).

It’s a supreme understatement that getting climate change and sustainability should not be such an addon – an extra-curricular, more accurately – to our standard k-12 curriculum. Attempts to gain traction with inter-disciplinary lessons on the topic of sustainability have so far led nowhere. We teachers are almost all too distracted by the demands of the traditional curriculum and the daily grind to address the elephant in the atmosphere.

Gore’s latest TED talk, again, gives us an update with compelling evidence that the realities of the pace of climate change are worse than we thought. In that talk, Gore states,

I’m optimistic because I believe we have the capacity, at moments of great challenge, to set aside the causes of distraction, and rise to the challenge that history is presenting to us.

Project Global Cooling is our attempt to set aside those SAT-oriented distractions and bring that thing so rare in schools, real citizenship, into being. Here’s Gore’s talk. It’s worth the time:

Stay tuned for more updates as the PGC concerts are streamed and/or embedded on the website. And join us for the second annual in ‘08-’09. Since the USA is still the world’s top contributor to carbon emissions, we hope more US schools especially will lead next year!

Mathew Needleman has done a nice turn to visual learners and 21st c. education evangelists by giving us a movie version of the old “If Rip Van Winkle woke up today and went to school, he’d feel right at home” meme.

It’s nice to see high production and design values in another educator-created movie – one to add to the ranks along with Education for Well-Being’s Bill Farren. (Mathew shares the software he used to make the movie on his Creating Lifelong Learners blog – thanks, Mathew, for sharing what you learn.)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm1sCsl2MQY[/youtube]

Is there an educator out there who has the digital story-telling* skills Bill Farren shows in this work? If so, I’m not aware of it. From the message (the use of fear in population control) to the medium (archival footage, skillful titling, rhythmic audio-video editing, original music, and so much more), I literally have not seen a better original digital story come out of the edublogosphere. I thought Bill’s “Did You Ever Wonder?” was strong. This out-leaps it twice over.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMW8eEfclLk[/youtube]

Shared with permission. Bill’s Education for Well-Being website has transcripts of the quotes used in the video and more, along with some of the most thoughtful and substantial content around. No echo chamber over there.

See Bill’s guest-blogging posts on Beyond School here.

Does anybody else in education have these kinds of A/V skills? Please leave links in the comment, if so. (Actually, Nathan Lowell is doing some great stuff, but I can’t find the exact links on his blog. Scott McLeod featured them last week on Dangerously Irrelevant, though.)

*Who came up with the term “digital storytelling,” anyway? Is it me, or is it far less sexy than – and far too schooly for – the good old word, “film-making”?

I’m browsing the comments on last week’s Open Thread: Your Favorite Teacher Blogs?, and want to thank Bill Ferriter for sharing upstate New York English teacher Dina Strasser’s The Line.

I’ve read Dina before, and was struck by her writing then, but life has been too fast recently to bring me back to it. The return trip just now blew me away.

I want to share Dina’s first attempt at digital storytelling. Like Education for Well-Being’s Bill Farren’s “Did You Ever Wonder?”, Dina’s “Do You Know?” is a riff on Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?” “Do You Know?” is Dina’s vehicle for expressing her reactions to a recent trip she made to New Orleans. Just watch it:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWG7CBIpcN0[/youtube]

It’s an interesting thing, this trend of intertextual riffs on Karl’s and Scott McLeod’s “Did You Know?” If I were them, I’d be quite proud to have generated this type of connective and competing reflection on what education in the 21st century should mean.

And if I were Dina, I’d be proud indeed of such a powerful first outing as a digital storyteller.

Don’t stop here, by the way. Check out Dina’s blog. There’s much more waiting for you there.

[This is guest-post number two by my long-time global partner Chris Watson in Honolulu, with whom I've collaborated in Seoul for over a year now. See Chris' first guest post here. -- Clay]

Remixing Curriculum: An Interview with Lisa Stewart

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. The areas of focus were: brain plasticity, learning styles, reading development, emotional responses, and mindsets. If you’re interested in more details in these areas, I’ve been posting my notes, albeit slowly, to Watsoncommon. What I want to write about in this post is a question I asked at the conference for which there wasn’t a research-based answer.

It goes like this:

I was in a session about engaging students’ emotions with curriculum and leveraging their brains’ social needs with activities in class. As you can imagine, the examples covered in the session were things like group work, task-specific stations, anticipatory sets that give students the opportunity to generate the essential questions for a unit. And there was all kinds of brain research to show that these kinds of activities trigger the best hormone balance for long-term, meaningful learning to happen. My question was if virtual social environments and activities also create the same ideal brain chemistry for learning.

Apparently, there is no research in this area yet, according to the presenter. So at my school, this has become somewhat of a guiding question. What are effective practices with technology and what are the results? And there are a handful of teachers who are purposefully employing and reflecting on new kinds of activities with these questions in mind. To frame the creation of these activities, we’ve been using Marzano’s research on effective instruction as structure: Identifying similarities and differences, Summarizing, Reinforcing efforts and providing recognition, Practice, Nonlinguistic representations, Cooperative learning, Setting objectives and providing feedback, Generating and testing hypotheses, Cues, questions, and advanced organizers. Let me know if you’re interested in the full article.

Lisa, mentioned in my first guest post, is one of the teachers (she’s a technology resource teacher too) designing and implementing activities in her class that not only use the technology but explore these essential questions. The other week, I subbed her class and learned about a remix project that she’d given to her students. It was an opportunity to create a nonlinguistic representation of their understanding of Holden Caulfield. In this podcasted interview, Lisa describes the design of the assignment, some observations of the products, and how it led to a different kind of essay. Also embedded below are some example projects, one of which she references in the interview. The Voicethread blew me away! Enjoy.

Shifts are happening more and more quickly in my world. I’ve seen too many inspired visions crash on the shoals of reality to celebrate these shifts yet, but they do make me hopeful.

They’re happening with a few select students: Lindsea in Hawaii (I often want to call Lindsea “my favorite student,” but I’ve never met her outside of Skype, Twitter, blogs, and the 1001 Flat World Tales workshops where we met a year ago) and Patrick in Seoul are becoming the 21st century students I (we?) need to point to as examples, for teachers who need to see what we can only talk about. I’ve already blogged about them recently, and will return to them soon in more in-depth posts. (But see Jenny Luca’s post about their visits from Hawaii and Seoul into a classroom in Melbourne today to discuss Project Global Cooling with the Australian students: Connecting, creating, collaborating on real-world global citizenship.)

I’m equally tempted by hope because shifts are happening with my school administration. My principal, Rich Boerner (next year’s director), approved my course proposal for an elective class next year – the only one I’ll teach, as I spend the rest of my time as K-12 21st C. Learning Coordinator. I want this class to be a showcase of what the students with the right stuff – confidence, creativity, motivation, vision, courage, playfulness, outside-the-boxedness and beyond-schooliness – can do, given a classroom with an open network, MacBooks for all, and a certain kind of teacher (which means, for better or worse, me).

I was just on “Shanghai Jeff” Utecht’s and “Taiwan Dave” Carpenter’s Shifting Our School’s podcast with Chris Betcher* from Sydney, Australia. I shared my course description there, and Jeff said some listeners on the Ustream chat asked me to post the course description.

So here it is, without any claims to it being a silver bullet. Any feedback between now and next August when this class starts is more than welcome. So are any offers to connect our students next year, without teachers, by simply saying: “There are students in Korea, Hawaii, Australia, and elsewhere following Youthnet on Twitter (and on the Youthnet wikispace). You students wanting to find others to do collaborative projects can find each other there. Let me know if you need feedback on anything.” And then we teachers just focus on the quality of those projects, assessing by “sitting with” and guiding in whatever ways we can. (And in my class? Students will suggest their own grades, and justify them by showing what they learned about creating, collaborating, learning, and communicating, as well as by showing me they were not lazy or dull.)

Here it is:

Advanced Writing and Multimedia Projects:

For real writers and creators: Love to write, to speak, and/or to make films? Wish there was a class where you could work on your own ideas, your own projects, and learn advanced podcasting, film-making, writing/blogging, social networking? This class is for you. You design your project(s). You develop them however you want them to go. And you get feedback from your teacher on the quality of your writing and other multimedia (radio/podcasting, movie-making, blogging, social networking strategies). If you choose, you can learn to market your project for world attention. It will be yours to continue in coming years, when class is over.

Projects can be: creative or non-fiction, text-only, multimedia-only, or mixed. Interaction and collaboration with world students in Australia, the USA, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America via Skype, Twitter, and other tools is encouraged, but not required.

Pre-requisite: By interview only. Bring evidence that you actively write, podcast, make movies, etc; and be able to describe the project idea(s) you want the freedom to work on in school.

We’ll see how this goes. Realistically, I only hope it adds a few more “lighthouse students” to the world stage, like Lindsea and Patrick.

–

Photos: Biandronno’s trampoline by otomatuah; Isle to Red Door by StephanosP