Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

~

Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

~

The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened.

If I was going to address “The Power of You,” I already had my outline: this very blog. It was all there: my years in Germany, in China, in Korea, in Singapore; my path “down the digital rabbit-hole” as a teacher, and my struggles to be a teacher despite working for schools. I looked at the archives page, so conveniently displaying titles and dates of my journey since starting it on New Year’s Day of 2007, and found a multitude of patterns to shape the speech. Better still, I realized I already had a huge amount of images in the posts themselves that I could use in my slides. That extra time searching Flickr for cc-licensed content to enhance my posts, and attributing the creators, turns out to have been time well-spent.

I went ape-shite. Clicking archive links, copying images to slides, animating them, coloring them, coddling them with my best designer’s care, adding “Godinesque” titles and captions and “chapter” headings, on and on, for hours and hours. I filled the gaps for the new ideas — civilization and its “complex institutions,” Jesus and Socrates and Luther and Gutenberg, Moodle and Blackboard and Ning, other Names and Facts — in this slideshow-cum-outline with new images from Flickr, searched for and found them, all in a life-loving delirium.

More seductions came: the speech would aim to play to the multiple audiences enabled by our Brave New Web — beyond the Aussies in the auditorium to my students, to my readers and Twitterverse, to my wife (See? All that work pays off!), and to you, Seth Godin, in playful tribute. You live right next door on the web, so why not invite you in? We’re all neighbors — and you’ll love the clip in the preso showing your influence on the student who explained Confucian philosophy via a Simpson’s slide.

More ideas pushed forward, nudged out old ones, gave a startlingly higher purpose to the speech than originally planned. The thing began to take on the shape of a major life-work, a symphonic summing up of all before and the unveiling, in the “fourth movement,” of a climactic new chapter in the War on Schooliness. It was nothing short of mystical, in the best combination of inspiration and gut-laughter. It was polite but subversive, pedagogical but political — “serious,” to quote Hakim Bey, “but not sober”⁴ – and it so raged against the edu-Philistines that Jesus himself would be proud. It was, in short, completely bonkers — and I had no doubt that it would work.

On and on I tinkered, on and on composed, some god alongside laughing with me all the while. So this was how it could feel to make a presentation of “an idea worth spreading”!  The clock on the desk withered away into air. Sun and moon rose and fell, rose and fell, measured by coffee-spoons that kept sleep at bay.

Centuries later, the clock re-materialized on the desk. The calendar said it was Sunday night. Time, then, for bed, and back to teaching tomorrow.

Mortal Combat, Round 2

After that mad marathon of 50-odd hours, I discovered a slight problem.

I had created a 300mb presentation containing 196 slides. The keynote was slotted for 45 minutes.

(If those figures didn’t make you gulp, you need coffee.)

But no worries, I said. I would arrive in Australia late Wednesday night, rehearse the timing in my hotel room, and be good to go by curtain time Friday morning.

Interlude: In the Classroom

The Chinese history class got interesting that week. It was the week of my war with the Google Fundamentalists in my classroom. Our online forum was heating up with controversy over whether a website I deemed a Mao-smearing disgrace was, or was not, a reliable academic source. Of all the weeks to leave the class to a substitute teacher, it had to be the one with the semester’s best and most  authentic teachable moment — with fiery debate, to boot.

But leave I did, flying off to Australia with all my war gear: my Macbook, my Keynote, my back-up and wireless router and cables and cameras, my kitchen sink. I was prepared.

Taming Time

I arrived in Brisbane, met the driver who took me to Mooloolaba, arrived at the hotel around midnight, found the hotel had no night staff and had left a code for me to get my key from the hotel safe. Front desk staff only worked daytime hours, would return the following morning. I’d never seen that before.

The room was perfect — wireless internet, balcony, ocean view, coffee and coffee-maker — and the night was quiet and balmy. Perfect for rehearsing my slideshow and cutting it down to size.

But since I had wireless, no harm in checking in to the class forum and seeing how that debate had unfolded during my seven-hour flight.

Moth, Flame

The forum was an all-out war of all against all — and quite a few of the students, more glorious still, against me. How delicious: they were pushing back against their teacher with their sharpest arguments and most defiant challenges, not yielding an inch to my authority. Thread after thread they raised their cry: “We’re not convinced — en garde!”

What the hell. It was only midnight. The keynote could wait.

I spent the next three hours on the battlefield, sometimes engaged in direct combat with this or that foe, other times combing through the arguments of student allies in the thread to marshal the force of their best moments in block-quoted volleys across the field. My travel-clock melted away in all the Homeric fun. It re-appeared three hours later, when my laptop warned me: “Your battery will run out in ten minutes. Plug in your computer to avoid losing your work.”

The interruption was annoying, but a good reminder. I needed to get to work rehearsing and timing the keynote.

I dug my adapter out of my suitcase, and then it hit me: I’d forgotten to buy an international plug adapter at the airport. I couldn’t plug my computer in.

The Holy Grail

3 a.m., and no front desk clerk to ask for an adapter. No choice but to strike out into the night.

I discovered Mooloolaba was a quiet little surfer’s resort town at this hour. All the shops were closed and streets empty, the stray and utterly useless packs of drunk teens notwithstanding. For the first time in my life, I prayed for a 7-11 (I usually wish for its destruction) that would have an electronics rack with an adapter, thinking I had decent chances of success. This was a tourist town, after all.

No luck at the first one. I was hungry, though, so I bought a loaf of bread and — “Wait, I’m in Australia, so put the peanut butter back on the shelf and buy the Vegemite next to it instead.” The cashier gave me directions to another 7-11 that I think she had hallucinated. I couldn’t find it.

So I went back to the hotel without the grail, forlornly chewing Vegemite on bread as dawn broke. Two hours later I was at the conference, sleep-deprived, introducing myself and meeting the organizers, begging them for an adapter. I got one.

The only problem was, the conference had started, and I wanted to watch the other presenters, meet the attendees, socialize. That, and I was dog tired. So I put off the editing for later that night.

A Tragic Ending

Of course I crashed that night without rehearsing. I think I even convinced myself that so many of the slides were meant to be rapid-delivery style that it would probably all work out within my 45 minute limit.

The next morning came, and I gave my speech without rehearsal — not a big deal for teachers, who do that every day for a living. It went swimmingly enough, I think — lots of laughs, occasional applause, an audience with great energy — until, halfway through my speech, weird music started playing.

I thought it was somebody’s cellphone, and ignored it as long as I could, but it started getting louder.

Then I was told it was the “wrap-up” signal. Farce had struck.

Have a good laugh at the last 5 minutes of Part 1. I laugh too. I speed through dozens and dozens of slides, saying wistful goodbyes to each as I rush to the end — because I had a new project to launch (I’d given a sneak preview of Students 2.0 to the ADE audience in Bangkok, and wanted to give a similar one to the new project, which is still getting its final pre-launch touches).

So the whole thing came to a crashing, and very awkward end — until.

A Comic Reversal

Teachable moment again: Show the students the value of assertiveness.

An unassertive person would have slinked off like the grandest of dorks, accepting defeat. I figured I’d risk being the grandest of dorks differently: I asked the host — after first asking the audience — if we could make time for the rest of the speech. Maybe out of compassion, maybe out of interest, the audience left him no choice. We scheduled the lunch hour for Part 2.

So we tamed time after all, by forcing our will on it.

Epilogue: The Most Important Thing

As for Part 2? I realized after watching it that I left out an essential piece of the puzzle by skipping the video of the Texas State Board of Education, and how it’s perverting US education by imposing a single, far-right ideology on US textbooks. Thus the Youtube video embedded above.

Luther took on a corrupt Catholic Church with the help of Gutenberg’s printing press, and brought it to its knees. We can take a page from his book and use the web to take on a corrupt textbook industry — by attracting students to find everything the textbooks leave out to please activist extremists dominating the Texas Board of Education.

I’ll be asking for help on that soon. In the meantime, thanks for stopping by.

And thanks to all the wonderful folks in Australia, and to the people I give shout-outs to in my address: Karl Fisch for first blowing my mind, Jeff Utecht for teaching me the tools, Dean Shareski and Scott McCleod and William Farren, and to too many more to ever fit in a list. It’s been a wonderland indeed.

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.”
3. I actually use that phrase in class
4. If you think that means alcohol was involved, you’re tragically way off. Go read some Nietzsche for a year.

17 Comments

• At January 31, 2010, ShellTerrell wrote:

  Must read for all presenters! RT @cburell: My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts http://bit.ly/cniGXD

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At February 1, 2010, Dean Shareski wrote:

  You're such an awesome storyteller and then to see my name somehow attached to it was a nice bonus. But seriously I look forward to the presentation but the backstory stands on its own. Well done.

• At February 1, 2010, Miguel Guhlin wrote:

  Great job, Clay! Thanks for sharing!

  .-= Miguel Guhlin´s last blog ..DiigoNotes - Phoebe Prince, 15, Commits Suicide After Onslaught of Cyber-Bullying From Fellow Students =-.

• At February 1, 2010, Jodi wrote:

  Shalom from the last leg of our trip here in Israel, Clay, where we have a "down" day and I'm treating myself to catching up on RSS feeds, including this post AND the accompanying videos (plus a couple of extra TED talks for the hell of it). NB: I don't know if it's just on my end, but the second segment of your speech got all skippy somewhere at the 3' mark, then slow and stretchy, and finally out-of-synch. :( But it was still fun to watch!

  I'm hoping to use the next few months of my own sabbatical to figure out how to re-invigorate my own teaching, even given the constraints of working for my school. :) Though I don't know how you manage it all -- even though I'm pretty handy with the tech tools I still find it takes an inordinate amount of time to get them set up for classroom use and then follow them, too.

  And then there's a certain "Creepy Treehouse" factor that seems to prevent my students from REALLY buying in to the things I set up, even when I've tried to make the work more authentic -- as you point out, exhausting and disillusioning. So I have to re-examine that, particularly how to work within the required confines of my school's program and my province's curriculum, too.

  Sometimes I wish that all us like-minded teachers could just start our own little internet-based school. But then who would fill our bank accounts? :P

  Yeah, yeah... back to being on non-school-related sabbatical. Cheers!

  .-= Jodi´s last blog ..Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger =-.

• At February 2, 2010, Sandra wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  I was wondering if you had another version of your speeches where we didn't have to download the microsoft programme to watch it. Thanks!

  .-= Sandra´s last blog ..Mi nueva página de inicio. Google se quedó corto al lado de... =-.

• At February 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Sandra,

  Unfortunately, all I've got is what the conference published. Wish it were otherwise.

  Clay

• At February 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Jodi,

  The tech problems in part 2 are not on your end, unfortunately.

  I'm hoping to make each part of the preso -- all four of them, in other words -- separate "TED"-like talks of high enough quality to do justice to the original idea, instead of the high-speed train-wreck it became due to my lack of rehearsing the timing.

  Not that I cared too much. It was still great fun, warts and all.

• At February 4, 2010, What Did They Tweet? | Teacher Reboot Camp wrote:

  [...] to use the tools we should support and see what they can do. I encourage you to visit his post, My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts, with the video links to parts I and II of his keynote. Here is an excerpt from his post: Teachable [...]

• At February 4, 2010, Jonathan Chambers wrote:

  That was a wild ride down 'collective memory lane', Clay. I enjoyed it, and I appreciate the fact that you still have your spirit and your voice. Your discussion of experimentation that you've rethought and reinvented is what I appreciate most.

• At February 5, 2010, roadster5555 wrote:

  My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts http://bit.ly/drvpuj – powerful message re authentic teaching

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At February 5, 2010, Cindy wrote:

  Hey Clay, I also enjoyed it and great to hear about your reflections on the rabbit hole and beyond. Hope you enjoyed your first visit to Australia.

  Cindy

  .-= Cindy´s last blog ..Portal to Media Literacy =-.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Miguel, just a quick thanks not only for the kind words, but for all the help and fun you've provided along the road. Enjoyed seeing you on the list-serv I recently joined. It's a big, small world now.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Cindy (you did hear your name pop up in the preso, I hope?). I loved Australia -- as friendly irl as it is in the virtual one. Hope you're well.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Dean, you're somehow attached to so much of the last three years. I'll be in touch re your email after returning from a school trip to India next weekend.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nice to see you, Jonathan. Now get me a job in Shanghai so we can start Chapter 2. Hope you're well.

• At February 8, 2010, Cindy wrote:

  Sure did! I'm great, loving Ho Chi Minh City.

  .-= Cindy´s last blog ..Portal to Media Literacy =-.

• At February 17, 2010, Bill Farren wrote:

  Hey Clay: thanks for sharing this. It was nice learning more about your journey, the learning that comes from success as well as failure. Nice to see how you don't sugarcoat what it is, like too many tech evangelists seem to be doing. But on the other hand, you do a great job showing how anyone (who is curious) can improve their craft by connecting students to real people and real situations.

  (also, thx. for the shoutout).

  Be well.

  .-= Bill Farren´s last blog ..What’s Your Learning Attitude? =-.

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

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

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

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

2 Comments

• At December 28, 2009, Derrick Kwa wrote:

  I think this is a great lesson, but I think it's a useful lesson for more than just students, and about more than just blogs.

  1) Lots of people make those kind of comments on blogs. Look around, there are tons of blind parroting of agreement with no additional value, by everyone, not just students. Lots of people could gain from learning not to do that.

  2) Students should also learn not to do this in class. At least here in Singapore, I've seen lots of classroom "discussions" which seem to go that way. Blind agreement which adds nothing to the discussion.

  Great point, definitely, but I think it's much more applicable than you let on. ;).

  .-= Derrick Kwa´s last blog ..What Are You Hiding? =-.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Derrick,

  Fair points all. The post was a lark and a whim, and I'm glad you took it where you did. Gave it value.

  I checked your blog, wondering if you were a student at SAS, where I'm teaching now, but seems that's not the case. Too bad.

  But fyi, I'm in Singapore now if you're up for a meetup of any sort. I'd like a geeky group to play with film, audio, TED-type stuff, whatever, locally. Live in Chinatown, if you're interested.

  I'm trying to place you. Did you give me the comment feed plug-in a year or two ago? Or did you do the viral Top Twitter Users by Country post? How do I know you?

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Interesting:

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

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

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

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

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

(h/t to One Good Move)

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

The Candle by Rickydavid

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Forty research papers. Then 100 China and Western Civ exams, all with essays. All in the last five days. I need a massage.

I also need a Do Not Go to Doghouse pass.

The birthdays in the last two weeks:

1. My wife.
2. My Dad (Happy  Birthday, Dad! You’re just waking up in Alabama while I’m hunched over my desk at school with eyestrain and red ink-stained fingers at 6pm here on the other side of the world! But I’m thinking of you! Thanks for making me, even though that makes you partly responsible for the nightmare that is semester exam week! I forgive you!)
3. My sister! (Ouch! Sorry! Totally forgot! You have to understand that December in Singapore isn’t December! It’s every other month! It’s Groundhog Month!)

Am I complaining? No! I love them all.

And am I complaining about the old teaching buddy and his wife who visited last week as I was trying to make the exams? Or about the four Korean in-laws I really do love so much who arrived just an hour ago for a (very Confucian) *cough* three-week stay in our apartment?

No! I love them all too!

But still. New Rule: Teachers are above all social laws and norms, from this day forward, during the last two weeks of the semester.

Also: No birthdays or anniversaries during this time either. A two-week grace period is hereby declared.

Let the word ring out across the land. (And seriously — if you’re mad at a teacher over stuff like this, cut ‘em a break. You have no idea what a SCUBA experience this time of year is. Give him or her time to surface, and things will be fine.)

10 Comments

• At December 17, 2009, Steve Ransom wrote:

  Peace to you, Clay. You captured the essence of this for many.

  .-= Steve Ransom´s last blog ..Federal Doublespeak =-.

• At December 18, 2009, Matt Montagne wrote:

  Wow, Clay, I'm guessing you spent somewhere between 30-40 hours of evaluating student work in the past 5 days...crazy. Enjoy your rest if you get a vacation here over the holidays. Sounds like you indeed deserve it.

  .-= Matt Montagne´s last blog ..1:1 Laptop Learning at Our School Next Year =-.

• At December 18, 2009, Diane Cordell wrote:

  Come now, Clay! It can't be that bad (says the VERY happily retired Librarian) ;-)

  .-= Diane Cordell´s last blog ..The Alice Project =-.

• At December 18, 2009, Sal wrote:

  If you're makin' rules . . . how about no family visits the first and last weeks of school!? This happened to me this past June and September - Mom and sister both not working have all kinds of time on their hands and are bent out of shape when I can't "tear myself away" . . . grr! Then the guilt rolls in of course. You're killing me people!

• At December 18, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Consider it decreed.

  My inlaws (I love 'em!) arrived last night, all four of them, while I was inputting grades and comments at school until almost midnight.

  Now all I want to do is sleep for 12 or 24 hours, but that would be rude. (And I could do it, too, mat on the office floor and all.)

  We're so misunderstood.

  But at least we have jobs.

  Jobs that are, in fact, way more wonderful much of the time than most other jobs, I'm convinced. (At least for me. I basically get paid to learn more stuff that I love learning about, and to help others learn it. Not a bad deal.)

• At December 18, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Don't tell anybody, but much of the time I was tweeting.

• At December 18, 2009, Douglas wrote:

  You complain a lot for someone who's able to blog like 5 articles while you say they're supposed to be grading papers...

• At December 18, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Douglas,

  Thanks for the really swell comment. You're absolutely right. I should be ashamed of myself for not devoting every waking minute of my week to the task. How dare I consider a few 30-minute blocks over the week as "time off." The gall!

  If you're ever in Asia, please drop by so I can buy you a nice fruit-basket.

  In the meantime, keep up the good work of keeping the world sunny!

  Cheers!

• At December 19, 2009, Douglas wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  I think you misunderstood my comment. I was just merely mentioning that you posted 3 or 4 large blog posts during the time that you said was hectic and crazy for you. That means you had extra time to post the blog posts.

  Over reaction much?

• At December 19, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  *facepalm*

  Two fruit baskets.

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wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.”

True here as well, but only slightly.

Autopsy

The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up:

My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb
And my piano crouched in the corner of my room
With all its teeth bared

Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not much more to add.

Since moving here to Singapore from Seoul in July I haven’t written a word on this space. This is due to many factors: enervating humidity (we’re about 1 degree from the equator here), an hour-long (and offline) subway commute to and from my new teaching job each day, the time demands of familiarizing myself with a new curriculum and school (the “two days ahead of the students” syndrome), on and on.

And then there’s the burn-out from the writing job last year, when two posts a day on US education policy taught me that mandatory writing on a prescribed topic grows toxic — a lesson that has informed my classroom blogging policy this year, which is so minimal as to be almost non-existent.

Also — and students, skip this part — I’ve been suffering a health issue that reminds me, to compare a worm to a dragon, of Keats being told by his physician not to write any more poetry because his health was too fragile to withstand the excitement. For Keats, tuberculosis was the issue. For me, it’s merely smoking. Since college, coffee and tobacco have been my study-and-writing enablers, and successfully kicking the habit months ago coincided with an inability to sit still, focus, and write. I can’t help but suspect Keats was tempted to decide, “Screw it, life without writing is no life at all,” and I’ve fallen to that temptation myself. To push the Keats trope further, my own

…fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain

have prompted me to choose an early death with a higher word-count, if that’s the choice. I’m hoping I’ll be as lucky as my Scots-Irish grandmother, who puffed her corncob pipe well into her eighties, thus having her vices and beating them too. Sure, those last few emphysemic years were no fun, but a life should be judged by more than its feeble final years. So yes, I’m enjoying this writing because I’m enjoying a smoldering clove-stick and cup of coffee as I write. Let the bodies fall where they may. (And though I know the logic is flawed, I’m still compelled to add that yes, I smoke, but I’m constitutionally and philosophically disinclined to those just-as-deadly but socially-sanctioned killers known as alcohol and junk food, so before you condemn my lungs, dear moralists, check your livers and your waist sizes.)

Then there’s this blog itself.

First, my RSS feed was, and may still be, broken because of a WordPress plugin I was using. I couldn’t fix it, and the plugin developer’s offer to fix it for me may or may not have been carried through on, I’m not sure. (If any kind soul out there can reply and tell me if they got this post in their feed-reader, I’d appreciate it.)

Second, I’ve been conflicted over the evolution of this blog from teacher-geek stuff to personal narrative writings to “unsucky” literary lectures. It’s become such a hodgepodge I’m probably going to make a couple of new sites: one for the unsucky lectures, one for the personal narrative, and keep this one as the ramblings of a teacher-geek. I don’t know.

So that’s the dreary side.

“The Bright Side of Life”

(Yes, that’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian on the right. My Wordpress captions aren’t working, blast it.)

1. Rediscovering the Book

On the upside, my hiatus from the web has turned me on to the beauties of something I’d almost forgotten: books. My reading habits before my web-hiatus were almost totally dominated by my Google Reader. And while the subscriptions to blogs and newspapers and magazines and journals and whatnot were certainly enjoyable, I can’t say I’ve missed them as I’ve enjoyed the flow through hundreds of physically-bound pages of this writer or that: Gwendolyn Leick’s fascinating study of the first Sumerian and Babylonian cities in Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (yes, dear Unsucky readers, I’m burrowing into the scholarship of the worlds of Gilgamesh), Richard E. Rubenstein’s Aristotle’s Children, a magnificent story of the rebirth of Aristotelian philosophy and natural science in the theology and liberal arts departments of late Medieval universities, and, currently, John Gribbin’s gripping Science: A History: 1534-2001, which picks up admirably where Aristotle’s Children leaves off.

2. The Mental Party of Teaching Chinese and European History

I’ve also had the intellectual joy-ride of my life this semester in my teaching duties, where I teach a survey of Western Civilization on one day, and a survey of Chinese Civilization on the alternating day. Since I began both courses where all histories of civilization should start — with Adam and Eve dropping from the sky (–oops, wrong century) Ardi and Lucy evolving from earlier forms, and their descendants migrating out of Africa and into Eurasia — each course stayed pretty much in sync, chronologically, with the other. This means that Monday would pull my head into the Roman Empire, and Tuesday into the roughly contemporaneous Han Dynasty. I can’t tell you how hilariously this mental tour pricked European pretensions to “high civilization” compared to China — particularly in the thousand years between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, when Europe was a disgrace fully deserving the “barbarian” label the Chinese affixed to it. (In fairness, though, while China wins the “long view” award, Europe wins the Palm for the brief miracle from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. That China couldn’t discover over its 3,000 years of fairly stable and unbroken civilization what Europe did discover in a mere couple of centuries says something precious, its Mephistophelian implications aside, about Western culture.)

3. Notes on the New School (and a Teacher-Geek Heresy)

Teaching itself has been somewhat interesting. The students at my new school are generally the most literate of any school in which I’ve taught. The ninth-graders (14 and 15 years old) write uncommonly well, and the boys are especially delightful for being, in general, more mature and mentally turned-on than the girls (it’s usually the other way around at this age, in my experience). The school is going mandatory laptop for each student next year, but this year it’s only optional, requiring laptop cart check-out and other aversions. So I’ve avoided any ambitious digital projects, for the most part. (I’ll be sharing a couple of exceptions soon enough, and launching a new website I’m very excited about that bubbled up with the help of my best students.) Some of you will cringe to hear that I’m leaning toward traditional teaching anyway, simply because I don’t have the energy to try to de-program students who want school to remain traditional, and can’t be bothered to notice their future won’t be the paper-based world of their school — in other words, I’m tired of casting digital pearls before the lovable young piglets who just want worksheets, and to heck with all this Diigo nonsense. Maybe that will change next year, when they all bring laptops to school. Right now, the web is too beautiful to waste on the young. (Go ahead, teacher-geeks, set up your stakes, gather your faggots, and send your Inquisitors for this heretic. Ecce homo! But I’m using Ning for both classes, if that will soften your ire at all.)

Shocking Crisis of Classroom Faith: “Google is Dead!”

(or, “No, Virginia, There is no Santa Claus”)

Speaking of Ning and my “minimal classroom blogging,” I may as well add this tidbit. To ameliorate the misery of having to grade millions of heartlessly perfunctory blogposts by students only doing it for the grade, another teacher and I worked out a rotating “four bloggers per week” routine. All the other students not blogging that week only have to reply a couple of times to the posts of the week that caught their fancy. Long story short, one very bright student decided he would investigate the glowing characterization of Mao Zedong during the Long March in a PBS documentary we’re watching in class. He wrote a post with all sorts of questionable claims and characterizations that made Mao out to be far less impressive than even Western historians and academics admit him to have been in this period. And he didn’t cite or link to his source.

I found the source easily enough, and was aghast at its quality: riddled with weasel-words, blazing with bias belying its “FactsandDetails.com” title, a train-wrecked “Works Cited”, red-stained with cherry-picking the bads and omitting the goods. It would take a page to count the ways this site failed as a credible source. Turns out it was written by a guy with no authority, either academic or algorithmic (have you seen Shirky’s latest on this?). So I assigned all the students to read and reply to two student posts: one, a good exemplar that would play Trojan Horse for the second one, the uncited Mao smear piece. I wanted to see how many students would read the smear and reply skeptically.

Almost none did. Even the best students, with very few exceptions, swallowed it whole: “Wow! Your post shows how biased the PBS documentary we’re watching in class, and the textbook, are! Now I realize what a monster Mao was.” Et cetera and ad infinitum. A perfect “teachable moment” about media literacy.

Or so I thought.

Long story short, when I showed this class everything dubious about this site, they pushed back something fierce: the “A” students fiercest of all. I opened it up for debate on a Ning forum, saying “persuade me this source is valid for academic research,” and the push-back continued.

Discussing that second debate in class, I was gob-smacked to hear, again, the “A” students draw conclusions that if this site was not credible, it logically followed that no site was. “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.” One student pushed back against my example of peer reviewed academic journals with an alleged case of the tobacco industry publishing “smoking is healthy” research in peer-reviewed journals, and seemed to glower at my request that she substantiate that claim — I had no doubt that the tobacco industry funded and published “scientific” studies of this sort, but did doubt whether she was correct about them being published in peer-reviewed journals — and also at my response that she was only confirming, if correct, my position that several evaluative criteria must be satisfied in order to judge a website credible.

I can only hope the quick demo of the “link:url” Google search, which showed that no site linked to this page but other pages on the same site, by the same author, brought home to some students that there’s something to be learned. But they’re at that dangerous age, and due to the imperative to cover the content, I can’t spend time taking this lesson any further. I can only hope the seed was planted and they’ll remember it differently in the future — hopefully not after a professor reams them for using a website written by a dog in its underwear.

Anyway, the take-away: students shouldn’t reach age 16 or 17 and still be shocked that Google can be wrong. It seems to have hit them worse than the news that there is no Santa Claus.

Piano image by poportis
Life of Brian image by tnarik

46 Comments

• At November 26, 2009, cburell wrote:

  [New Post] "The Rumors of My Death..." - via @twitoaster http://beyond-school.org/2009/11/27/the-...

• At November 26, 2009, holismskincare wrote:

  @cburell what a great read! I must say I was plsd w the ref to smoking; I am the same - study, coffee, cigs! Now 2 undrstnd the eval request

• At November 26, 2009, holismskincare wrote:

  @cburell try this one http://www.csu.edu.au/division/studserv/...

• At November 27, 2009, Jenny wrote:

  Don't know if you've heard from others yet, but this post showed up in my reader.

  Glad to hear your voice again.

  .-= Jenny´s last blog ..Math Is Hard =-.

• At November 27, 2009, Pat wrote:

  I was so excited when this popped up in my reader and I'm glad to see you again. In fact I was just talking about you with a friend who reconnected with me through facebook. Her husband was transferred from SC to Singapore and her son attends the International school (I'm not sure if there is more than one). I told her about watching your wedding online and how exciting that was. So, if a boy named Brent or his mom Barbara come up to you, it's my fault! :)

  .-= Pat´s last blog ..Useful Information In and Out of the Classroom 11/27/09 =-.

• At November 27, 2009, Paul C wrote:

  I had been wondering about a 'demise' of this blog when 'Beyond School' popped up in my Reader. Teaching surveys of Western and Chinese civilization sounds wonderful. Enough to get all those meaningful perspectives into focus with exciting applications.

  .-= Paul C´s last blog ..Rediscovery of Children's Books =-.

• At November 28, 2009, Mike Ritzius wrote:

  What a treat seeing "Beyond School" pop up in my reader. Your survey courses sound fantastic. Have you thought about collaborating with a science teacher on this? This could make for an interesting study on how the evolution of human beings influences the development of civilization and vice versa.

• At November 28, 2009, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Someone say "science teacher"?

  Great to see your words back here--we've missed you.

• At November 28, 2009, Lynne wrote:

  Your new post showed up just fine in iGoogle. Good luck with your smoking habit and your teaching job. (I used to be highly addicted to smoking, but now I consider myself a "social smoker." I understand your vice.) I hope to be reading more from you soon!

  .-= Lynne´s last blog ..$4000 =-.

• At November 28, 2009, Harold Jarche wrote:

  Glad I didn't dump you from my aggregator, Clay (not that I ever would).

• At November 28, 2009, oreneta wrote:

  You showed up on my bloglines, no problem.

  It is stunning to me sometimes what people will believe...stunning.

• At November 28, 2009, Harold Shaw wrote:

  Hi Clay

  Glad to see you back stumping around in the weeds again :). Like you I left education for a while and am now happily back in the classroom. I am glad I left, but am even happier I came back.

  I hope you are able to beat your addiction in the age category, but if you don't you will your life on your terms :).

  I look forward to seeing your new sites as I always have enjoyed your writing

  Harold

  .-= Harold Shaw´s last blog ..YELLOW BRICK ROADS - =-.

• At November 28, 2009, diane wrote:

  While you've been wrestling with change and intimations of mortality...so have I!

  I'm now retired, searching for ways to remain involved and relevant. And having fun.

  Be sure to keep the fun in your life.

  Nice to hear your voice again.

  .-= diane´s last blog ..The Prevailing Common Sense of the Field =-.

• At November 29, 2009, Kate wrote:

  A lovely thing to see in my reader this morning as the last of the family departed after our extended Thanksgiving celebration. I'll add my wishes for health, happiness, time and inclination to write, and (as Diane reminds us) fun.

  .-= Kate´s last blog ..Quilting with middle school students =-.

• At November 29, 2009, Jodi wrote:

  "If any kind soul out there can reply and tell me if they got this post in their feed-reader, I’d appreciate it."

  Yup -- loud and clear. Missed your feed! Though, of course, since I've been travelling, not teaching, for the past few months, it's been hard to keep up on feeds anyway, and I didn't have time to do much more than skim this post for the time being and mark it "to read" instead of "to delete." I'll get round to it soon, I hope! Looking forward to it.

• At November 29, 2009, Hellen wrote:

  I am so glad to read you again. You are my fav blogger and I was inspired by so many of your posts and your irreverent attitude. However, often as I read your posts I felt a "burning the candle at both ends" sensation that I likened to my own pressured teaching situation. I could not understand how so many educators that I was reading in my reader could teach all day and then find time to share great ideas and opinions on their blogs. It left me breathless and feeling inadequate.

  I had felt inspired by the promise of 21st Century learning, web 2.0 and the energy of educators such as yourself. But then the reality of the Neanderthals that run my educational world, took a toll on my zeal.

  Then you disappeared and I realized that we are all working under pressured situations and feeling that we have to do it all. Your post confirmed to me that we all must come to terms with the new demands of educations, and make intelligent decisions about what constraints and outmoded ideas need to be discarded to make room for the new. That is the point where I am at and it feels encouraging that I still have the power to make such decisions, even though I sometimes think I am hamstrung by admin policies.

  By the way, I just read the book Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the first of a trilogy), but was saddened to hear the story of its writer, Stieg Larsson. After his trilogy great success, he passed away at age 50. I read that he was a great consumer of cigarettes and coffee.

  I understand your point about living the way you want and to hell with living a long and boring life. All I can say is that I hope you can find some balance, so the rest of us can continue to enjoy your ideas. If you have to live at high octane speeds, so be it and maybe that is what makes your posts so enjoyable for those of us who travel a bit slower.

  Welcome back.

  .-= Hellen´s last blog ..NEW BOOKS =-.

• At November 29, 2009, Tom McLean wrote:

  Great to read your post after the long absence.

  1. Yes I also get your RSS feed now

  2. Smoking. I feel your pain.

  3. Very interested in your approach to teaching East/West cultural evolution. I teach an external assessment free (woo hoo) high school course on Anthropology and World Religions which I have found to be eye opening joy. Opportunities for a collaborative project I wonder?

  4. Totally understand your need for a break from blogging. Interesting that you were cornered into the style of industrial blog output that you are so critical of. Your reflection on how your experience has led to an awareness of blogging in your own classroom had me nodding my head and remembering how your critique of 'schooliness' helped me move from a quantitative to a qualitative approach to student led evaluation on our class Wiki.

  5. You have just stolen about 45mins from my marking time. 15 IB Geography IA's, 3 class sets of grade 9 social studies semester exams and a class set of fieldwork research papers. Not sure whether to thank you or curse you :)

  6. Good to hear from you

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Wow, Pat. Small world. Haven't bumped in to them yet, but will be a hoot if we do.

  Nice to hear from you and hope you're well!

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Good to hear from you, Paul, and thanks for the moral support. The "meaningful perspectives" part is the challenge. I'm drowning in coverage, but what do you expect your first year in a new school?

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Mike, I'm going to steal a line from Ghostbusters and "buy you a nice fruit basket" for the kind words.

  Are you a science teacher? If so, you come up with the pitch and I'll consider it -- though really, next year seems the time to catch this train, at the beginning of the school year when we can visit the Paleolithic and Neolthic again.

  I've got some tables from Guns, Germs, and Steel that beg for use in the classroom, but by the time I'd scanned them, it was too late.

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Doyle,

  Thanks, first, for the old nudge. I was too busy sweating to acknowledge it, and I duly apologize.

  Good to hear from you and hope you're well.

  Re: Science teacher, see reply to Mike above!

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks Lynn. Can we do a brain transplant? How does anybody go from "addict" to "social smoker." Envy.

  Take care ~

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  I've been dumped so many times I've got permanent stains, but it would still break my heart if it was you, Harold.

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Stunning is the right word, and thanks for the confirm!

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Glad to see you're still the same old cheerful Harold, Harold. With the economy in the tank, teaching takes on a new light, that's for sure.

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  I have the feeling you'll make up for the fun I'm not having (but I bought a Wii yesterday, does that count?).

  Good to hear from you, Diane, and I'm honored to be your first Twitter follower :)

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Fun, schmun. Bah humbug and cough cough.

  But it's fun to hear from you again.

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Where are you traveling, Jodi, and how and why? Hope it's enjoyable. If you're passing through Singapore, give a buzz and the guest room is yours.

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hear hear, Hellen. I just gave a keynote speech at a tech conference in Australia last week (video soon), and I touched on that very subject: demands that we add new pedagogy without subtracting the old. Overload, in short.

  Let's both hope I got Grandma's genes.

• At November 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Good to hear from you too, Tom. I hope I can compel you to waste more time sharing that "student-led evaluation" approach?

  World religions class sounds wonderful. We should talk. You know the fifth largest war in history (in terms of deaths) was the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), a Chinese civil war in which around 25 million people died because a Chinese guy who'd heard a Southern Baptist missionary preaching the gospel from my neck of the Tennessee woods had a nervous breakdown in which he was told in a vision he was Jesus' Chinese little brother? And that the peasants swallowed it and followed him into war?

  I feel your pain too. But it's such a pleasant pain.

• At December 1, 2009, Lynne wrote:

  Not easily… it involves a lot of teeth gritting and telling yourself no most of the time. Then, occasionally, you let yourself relax with friends by allowing yourself a few cigarettes. Over time, it gets easier. Unless I see someone smoking, I usually don't get that bad of cravings anymore…. usually.

  .-= Lynne´s last blog ..$4000 =-.

• At December 1, 2009, Shelly Terrell wrote:

  Glad to have you back! I'm excited to hear about your new adventures, challenges, and thoughtful reflections. I always look forward to your posts. I like that your students feel comfortable to question and debate with you only because teachers are seen as "authoritarian figures" on everything which isn't what learning is about. I admire that you provoke your students to question and challenge!

  .-= Shelly Terrell´s last blog ..Cool “Collaborative” Sites by Özge Karaoğlu =-.

• At December 1, 2009, Sean Nash wrote:

  I just noticed your "last blog" post, and thought you might appreciate these words on the difficulty of math: http://twurl.nl/mfmv3u

  .-= Sean Nash´s last blog ..When The Empire Makes The Rules =-.

• At December 1, 2009, Sean Nash wrote:

  Wow. I just now popped in due to some odd feeling you'd been here recently. Sortaweird. I've largely abandoned my reader a way back. I can't keep up. I barely have time to keep up with Doyle when I get the time. For me, the blogroll is my RSS in addition to folks linking to a new post on Twitter.

  So yeah, there's far too much in this victory tour post to comment on right now. But I did want to welcome you back here. I think it's probably evident that a few feel the same way.

  Let us soon share Ning discussion forum tips & tricks. Where else can you reply with the full range of media embeds to back up your words?

  And hey- what are these... books... you speak of? I'd say "welcome back" but man, after this comment thread, I don't want it to go to your head.

  ;)

  Sean

  .-= Sean Nash´s last blog ..When The Empire Makes The Rules =-.

• At December 2, 2009, Adrienne wrote:

  Clay, so good to see you writing again. And love hearing your new stories in the new school, though I will admit I cringed when I read "due to the imperative to cover the content, I can’t spend time taking this lesson any further" -- some teachers may lament the apparent lack of tech in your classroom, but not me. I will lament that you (we?) still teach in systems where content is valued more highly than such important lessons about media literacy. I hope that lesson stays with them for a lifetime. Or at least Google's lifetime.

  And your post showed up just fine in my reader too. I'm wondering -- is it really necessary to separate into different blogs? I guess it depends on your audience. I have considered doing the same thing, but I feel almost as if in an attempt to organize my thoughts, it is in some way fragmenting my whole self. I suppose it's different for everyone.

  At any rate, I do look forward to more bits from you in the future, wherever they turn up. :)

  .-= Adrienne ´s last blog ..Classroom Practicality =-.

• At December 2, 2009, Media Literacy for Google Fundamentalists | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] of some resources I made optional for the “In Google We Trust” students I mentioned last time.  Transparency is all, so enjoy, quibble, supplement, whatever: Optional Media Literacy Readings: [...]

• At December 4, 2009, Charlie A. Roy wrote:

  Viva Clay! Glad to hear you are in deed alive and doing well. I'm glad to hear your foray into being the worksheet king will end with the 1:1 next year.

• At December 15, 2009, Jose wrote:

  This is one helluva way to come back, Clay. Thanks for that read. I'm often befuddled when people see Google as the Oracle of everything. Granted, the ease of use and algorithms often lead us to a quick and dirty version of the truth. Yet, as The Art of Seduction said once (or so I think it was that book,) it's the more intelligent ones that are easiest to seduce because they think too much about it, reasoning it out, and finally want to see why someone would believe what they do.

  Santa Claus is real, by the way.

  .-= Jose´s last blog ..Short Notes: I Wish You Insight So You Can See For Yourself =-.

• At December 15, 2009, Bob wrote:

  Just curious, Clay - besides your obvious qualms about the veracity of your student's source, you also seem to disagree with your student's criticism of a glowing portrayal of Mao. Is this accurate?

• At December 17, 2009, Chinese v. Western History: A Few “Mental Party” Highlights | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been swimming, on alternating days throughout this closing semester, in [...]

• At December 17, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Bob,

  Not accurate at all. We could get into a discussion of Mao’s strengths and weaknesses during the LM, and probably agree on most of them, and ditto his performance during the PRC years. It was the site itself that was problematic, because it was _all_ weaknesses (silly ones, at that) and no strengths. Have you looked at it?

  (I deleted the repeat on the other thread. Once is enough, no?)

• At December 17, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nice to see you, Jose (through all the semester final exam papers on the desk).

  If Google can lead a kid here, that's proof it shouldn't be trusted.

  And there is no Santa Claus. His job was shipped to China.

• At December 19, 2009, Aquinas Meets Darwin on YouTube: Evangelical Professor Teaches Creationists Genomics | Beyond School wrote:

  [...] bit of historical background makes it all the more interesting. I mentioned in my “back from the dead” post that I’ve been reading a good bit on the history of science, and that one of [...]

• At December 21, 2009, Short Notes: I Like Living This Way, I Like Loving This Way wrote:

  [...] Burell makes his triumphant return to blogging with this random yet well-prosed musing about where he’s been for the last … ever. [Beyond [...]

• At December 21, 2009, Jennifer wrote:

  Nice to see you're blogging again. I can relate to the need for smoking, although for me it's coffee that fuels my blogging, not cigs (thank G-d, emphysema is only something you can dismiss casually if you haven't had someone die from it who's close to you) (but I digress), I discovered real coffee doesn't agree with me and have switched to decaf ... ergo, no blogging. For at least a year. We all need to find healthier ways to keep awake I guess. :) Good luck & best wishes for continued health.

• At December 25, 2009, On Using Technology Without Understanding It at Beyond School wrote:

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

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Announcing…

ΨΨ The Winner
of the McCain Stump Speech Wordle
“Write Your Own Caption”
Competition © ΨΨ

I am pleased to announce the winner is the very talented Vincent Robletto, whose Kerblotto blog screams “Subscribe” for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Vincent’s submission rose above thousands hundreds tens ones of rivals.¹ So, without further ado [drumroll], first the unveiling, followed by Vince’s acceptance speech:

Robleto Acceptance Speech:

[Vince takes microphone. Voice trembling, blinking back tears, beaming:]

I landed a job as an advertising copywriter and won the McCain wordle today. It’s really been a stellar day.²

~  ~  ~

Okay, enough silliness. I do think it’s wonderful, though, how little whims like the lead-balloon Wordle contest ³ can still lead to new connections in this new world. I went to Vincent’s site and discovered some original Photoshop remix goodness he’d created, and got his permission to share. Two of my topical favorites:

A couple last examples of why I suffer from Photoshop Envy on a massive scale, from different posts on Vincent’s blog:

and finally, for something completely different:

"Mmm...Ham face." Vincent Robleto.

And if you just want to laugh, find more than one, guaranteed, at Vincent’s selection of “A Few Bad Logo Choices.” (And congrats on the writing job, Vincent!)

Obligatory “Educational Relevance” Ending: On Photoshop Free Open Source Gimp as a Literacy Skill

Seriously: Have you, or has anyone you know, ever told students that original Photoshop (or, as Vincent corrected me, and used to make these images, the free open source software The Gimp) illustrations are encouraged – not instead of writing, but supplementing it – for essay assignments? I think it’s clear they should be. It’s a skill that sets a person apart. This whole post is all about that, in a way.

1. And Diane Cordell was close on his heels.
2. This from an actual email.
3. It happens to all of us, Terry!

5 Comments

• At December 11, 2008, Lindsay Price wrote:

  That ham face freaks me out! I too have photoshop envy. How interesting a thought to have some create an essay in a completely different medium. I think that would have some admins in a complete tizzy....

• At December 11, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  There's more where that ham-face comes from :)

  Mind you, I didn't say replace essays with graphics, but reward the addition of graphics that enhance the writing. (Though at the same time, there is a long tradition of photo-journalism/photo essays that it seems to me could make room for the concept of Photoshop-essays....)

• At December 12, 2008, Sean Nash wrote:

  Yeah.... I agree. PS is software that has a bit o' learning curve. I remember the day in '94 that a graphic arts teacher (rare technologically-comfy soul that he was). I have upgraded that sucker to 5.5, 7.0, CS, CS3, CS4... it is serious bidness.

  However, though for the past year I have largely used it for the first paid photography gigs I have done... I am waiting for the day I have time to upload all of my silliness from the early days of FARK.com

  Those were fun times (not that they don't still do this, but-) when they would upload a nondescript image and let the masses have their will with it. We would then upload again into the same thread and wow... good times.

  Clay- perhaps you should start some sort of nonschooliphotoshop contest with a theme.

  Yeah?

  ;-)

  Sean Nashs last blog post..Inspire First, Instruct Later

• At December 13, 2008, Vince wrote:

  I am honored. I'm no photoshop wizard. In fact, I actually use GIMP - a free open source alternative to PS.

  Vinces last blog post..HO, HO, HO! Merry Christmas!

• At December 23, 2008, Carlos Ferrer wrote:

  How about using the open source prgr. Audacity as means to deliver your thoughts as a student?

  Carlos Ferrers last blog post..The Christmas We Deserve

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