Beyond School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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danah boyd just posted a “request for brain-fodder” from her readers, and I played along by posting the below (or trying to - maybe it’s being moderated, maybe it was spammed, maybe some cyber-Cerberus ate it on the banks of the thread).  It’s a question I’ve been turning over for a while now, and enough of us have jumped into collaborative classroom projects now to share our reflections on the question I asked danah.

Let me preface this by saying that I think Julie Lindsay and Vicki Davis deserve monumental statues on Cyber-Main Street for their pioneering work in the Flat Classroom Projects.  They sparked my own plunge into the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling.  So I’m not dissing anything here, but rather critically reflecting on our own assumptions about our students’ psycho-social developmental readiness to catch the buzz we’ve all caught from this so-spiked digital koolaid.

As I say below, in horribly confused prose, danah’s presentation of her research on teen networking practices made me question whether teens are as impressed by the potential of global collaboration as we (rightly) are.  I’ve gone through two of them now, and am fairly certain that once the unit was over, so were any connections that those teens made with other teens flung wide around the globe during that unit.

Faceless Flat, Huggable Round?

And that leaves me wondering if local collaboration - within a school (and my, does that hurt Mr. Unschooly to say), or a comfortably snug geographic zone like a town or city - might be more engaging for the students.  Face to face is possible across town, and less so around the globe - and face to face seems, if I get danah right, to matter more to teens. The world may indeed be flattening, but round may have its own excitement for them.

Another anti-koolaid factor for teens might be that generally, they’re too busy with schoolwork to have developed any passionate, intrinsically compelling causes to collaborate about. Beyond schoolwork and school society, neither their identities nor their concerns extend. So . . . . you know, “Collaborate about what?  Why?  Don’t you realize the football game is Friday and the prom is Saturday?”

I’ll only add that part of all of these reflections involve the levels of engagement I saw in two different types of collaboration I’ve done in the past two years: one was global (wiki workshop here, anthology of best stories here), but the other was within the school-building. That second one involved all the students in world history - five classes shared between another teacher and me, meeting at different times, but all working on historical fiction set in the French Revolution on a wiki, all linking to the characters’ diaries created by their friends, all creating encounters of their own characters and their friends’ characters in a wildly promiscuous way.  My takeaway, when I compare, is that the collaboration that had the most zing to me was obviously the global collaboration: come on, my students in Seoul were writing with students in Colorado and Hawaii.  But my students?  They were way more zapped (in teacherspeak, I mean “engaged”) by the work confined to the fourth floor of our high school.

It makes me want to pull out my “Child Development” textbook from my education classes for more input.

But in the meantime, I’ll ask you for input too: Here’s the question for this Open Thread:

If you have led students through a global collaboration project, are you aware of any permanent change in your students’ networked lives?  Have they sustained any of the relationships formed then?  Have they used the experience to start their own independent collaborations?  Or have they climbed back out of the rabbit hole and resumed teen life as usual?

I really hope some of you - and Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, especially you students out there - will throw some observations in comments letting me know your thoughts. My Korean student population may be anomaly, for all I know.

If they’re not an anomaly, though, it bears asking: with all the incredible labor that goes into teacher design, planning across time-zones, and managing of these projects (not to mention the same demands the students have to face when participating in them) - if local is more developmentally appropriate, just think of all the crows’ feet and raccoon eyes we escape by scaling things down to local size.

*    *    *

I embedded danah’s presentation in a footnote to my post last week about getting students to learn the story of history, but here it is again. She starts around the 8 minute mark, wearing the wool cap.

Here’s the comment I left her, but I won’t hate you if you stop reading here. I said it all above.

Okay, this k-12 educator who drank the “global collaboration” edu-koolaid a couple years ago will bite:

I saw your preso on YouTube (where, Berkman? Berkeley? I forget), and your summary of your research on teen practice online supported a creeping suspicion from my own experience that teens just aren’t yet psychologically developed enough to “get” the power of global networking. Their maturity levels - and thus their online practices - are still local and somewhat narcissistic. So while their teachers expect all sorts of vistas to expand in their students’ understandings, the students are pretty uninterested in the fact that they’re doing project work with other students a pole away, and far more interested in working online with their schoolmates in a classroom down the hall.

So: a) Do you think “flat classroom” projects (global collaborations) in high school assume a psycho-social developmental level that teens largely lack, and thus might be a largely wasted effort on the part of their teachers (who do grasp the significance of the shifts)?

b) At what age do you think such experiences will enhance education?

Sheesh, this feels as woolly as my grey matter right now. Hope it makes sense.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That Networked Learning elective “English Seminar” class I taught last semester ended two weeks ago. (Sift through the archives for related posts.)

For new readers or simply people not tuned in here during the last six months, here’s a recap: Ten students of mixed grades (9-12, ages 15-18), each with a MacBook laptop (the school is 1:1), were given the most open, autonomous, swim-or-drown class experience they’d probably ever had, and are likely to ever have again.

The idea was simple:

This is a language arts course: writing, speaking, communicating.  If you spend this semester communicating about topics that “teacher” assigns, you will not be real writers. You will just be doing homework.  Writers write of their own interests and ideas.  That means you will have to find your own topics, in order to experience being a writer, speaker, film-maker, etc.

So you will develop a web-based project based on your interests; use whatever modes of communication you desire - writing, podcasting, screencasting, movie-making, etc; launch and grow your project over six months, and apply the principals of quality - in whatever “language art” mode you’ve chosen - from the mini-lessons and sitting together conferences we had; do your project singly or in teams; extra credit for using Twitter, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest to network, go global, and “imagine big.”

If you “try big” and fail, you can still receive an A, if you articulate and apply the lessons your failures taught you.

A six month project in absolute freedom will bring you to brick walls, slumps, quagmires, that may last for weeks.  As long as you push through them, and come out the other side, you don’t need to fear for your grade. I want you to experience the difficulty of not being able to quit in the face of adversity, the difficulty of freedom and responsibility, of keeping an idea alive.

If you’re lazy, unproductive, unimaginative, unconcerned about quality - you won’t do well.

You will be given almost the entirety of each 77-minute class to independently work on your project. I will occasionally give whole-class mini-lessons on authentically good writing, audio- and video-production, and will also check in with each of you by simply pulling up a chair next to you and talking about your progress, challenges, and thoughts. But the rest of the time will be yours to work. So you have no excuse for not getting that work done.

You will grade yourselves, by the way, based on your monthly production and reflection on lessons learned. You’ll have to justify your grades with evidence of your work.

Since it was the most “radical” (per Dean) “releasing of the hounds” (if I have Chris Harbeck’s gist right) and “edupunk” (if Lindsea is right, since I didn’t jump on that meme) thing I’ve done in my teaching career, and since I wrote about it regularly throughout the semester, I want to honor my contract with a final report to whatever readers out there wonder, “How did that ever turn out, anyway?”

The problem is, I’m overloaded right now. I just got back from Hong Kong yesterday, still have immigration issues to deal with, a career transition to navigate, and a new apartment to move into in ten days.

So I’m going to share with you excerpts from the final reflections some of the students wrote during the final exam, in a series. I’ll preface each student with my own summary of his/her project, and anecdotal impressions of his/her journey. A caveat, first: I wasn’t on top of my game in setting up these reflections. In the past, I’ve always created an anonymous user account on Moodle, and had students evaluate the course using that account in order to ensure maximum honesty via that anonymity. I didn’t do that this time. You’ll have to decide how much weight to give the following lines.

1. Younsuk and Jaeho: Basketball without Borders:

Younsuk, a sophomore, has been featured a lot on these pages over the last six months. He teamed with senior Jaeho to launch the Basketball without Borders project, which evolved into a beautifully networked series of podcasted Skype interviews with Asian college and professional basketball stars in the US and elsewhere. This project was the dark horse of the whole class, and it exploded in about month three to win the race by several lengths.  These guys astonished me with their ability to use their own personal and family networks to arrange interviews with players in Japan, Korea, and the US.  Nothing comes close, in my teaching experience, to seeing them enter the classroom so many times to say, “Mr. Burell, we have a Skype interview scheduled with [this or that player] for this class. Can we go to a quiet room?”  And then to see, at the end of the class, these successful audio producers come back in with grins wrapped so infectiously around their heads. (I videotaped them for Youtube in one such moment on this post.)

I had Younsuk as a freshman in English 9 the prior year - the first class I ever did classroom blogging with. I can tell you that his writing has gained impressively in ideas, in voice, in rhetoric, in style.

The irony? At the beginning of the class, Younsuk insisted, in no uncertain terms, that he had no interest in podcasting. Click here for all the posts on this blog with Younsuk and/or Jaeho.

Here are some excerpts from his reflection:

• This revolutionary course that I took this semester, revolutionized me as a person. I certainly became a better writer that cares. Through my project, I had real audience. In order to succeed, I had to have a good writing that catches people. I’ve learned to make the title catching, and I’ve learned to make sure the audience wanted to read. To do that, I had to think about the sentence styles, order of what I write about, and maybe throwing some nice metaphors. I’m starting to care about what I write a lot. And one can observe my improvement in writing if one reads my own blog. [note: this is not his PLN basketball blog, but his personal blog for his English class, now in its second year]
• As a thinker, I’ve learned to think. After doing a project about something I’m interested in, I’ve learned to think in my own way, that things  I like can turn into something like this [note: this is his basketball project blog]. After realizing this, I’ve learned to write about things that I like. And to me, writing is just like thinking. When I write about something I like, then I feel good. I’ve learned that ultimately, I would want to please the audience, but it all starts from pleasing myself with my own thoughts.
• I’ve learned that I’m a producer now.  I produce things. I’ve produced my website, I’ve produced the interviews, and I’ve produced the productivity. I never turned in anything. Everything I did in this class, was what I produced. I’ve learned that by producing, I can learn more.
• As a networker, I’m not a big user of twitter. But using our connection, we’ve reached three big-time interviewees. One of the tools that helped us was facebook. There are many “non-educational’ ways to use facebook, but it still keeps people in touch. It’s easy to contact people, and it’s easy to expand my network by becoming friends with my friends’ friends. This method led us to interview three big basketball figures in Asia. Connection is important, because with one, you can have a million.
• Again, I thank Mr. Burell for this revolutionary class. It was the only real experience I had at school.

Re: that last bullet: Man, if only students realized how much teachers need to hear that from their students. My morale would have been so much higher this semester if I’d only known he was getting what I was trying to deliver. Hear this, students: your teachers need positive feedback more than you realize. Give it to them, if you want them to stay in the classroom.

*    *    *

Jaeho was a senior, and Younsuk’s partner. As I said in a comment to Jaeho’s final reflection before graduating, “Thanks for making this vision worthwhile. It’s been amazing to know you as a student in this class, and as a different student in AP Lit. I much prefer this class.”

Because my wife just got home, and writing is a completely different endeavor as a married man (and this is light-years from a complaint, as I’m very, very happy), I’m going to simply paste Jaeho’s entire final post here (being on the school server, the entire pln blog will probably be deleted soon, so call this an archive):

Signing Off

Photo by: Jarrellish

“It is a small world after all”. The past five months truly taught me what this quote meant.

As with most other cases, the start was not so great. I did not want to make this into a academic, insignificant project. Deliberating desperately to figure out a way to make this work, I came up with a risky idea of focusing on the stereotypes about basketball. Due to the relatively long time that took us to decide on what we are going to do, the group went on a slow start.

Connecting to the world.. It was not so far away from us after all. After I chose the focus, things started to work out for us rather quickly. Luckily for us, the Columbia University basketball star Keijuro Matsui accepted our interview request. “Maybe this could actually work“, I thought to myself. Then Ko Yada, then Kelvin Kim. In approximately 4 weeks, we had interviewed 3 basketball sensations. The empty parking lot started to fill when visitors started coming to see the show and naturally the show began to flourish..

Writing… This was an inevitable part of the class. The primary problem was not knowing my weaknesses. It wasn’t too long before Mr. Burell pointed out that my sentence structures are always the same. (Subject verb object). Clearly, I had to change this style to make people want to read me. As time went, luckily for me, my writing improved to a level where Mr. Burell said “That was good!” I have not completely grasped the art of organic writing yet, but started to notice where to pause, where to put in the funny stuff. Looking back, my lack of confidence about writing was preventing me from trying out different things in my writing.

At this point, I can honestly say that the English Seminar Class has taught me two valuable experiences that I did not experience anywhere else. It has taught me the power of technology, and the techniques of creative writing.

For the ending, I want to thank Mr. Burell for having faith in us when we were lost in the Sahara Desert and helping us find something that can be extended into the world.  Thanks.

Stay tuned for a few more student reports.

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I promised in an earlier post to give the link when Teachers Teaching Teachers posted its podcast with students weighing in on “How to Be Unschooly” in blogs, Twitter, and more. Consider it done. It is so worth a listen.

There’s something to say, too, about the back-story on this. Soojin, the Korean student who generated the tweet that triggered the podcast, was a student of mine - but from last year. As Soojin discusses in the podcast, my efforts to push him, as a member of my classroom, to turn on to connective writing didn’t work. A year later, he’s out there doing it independently - I see him on Twitter all the time, and read his blog - and out of nowhere, from Korea, Soojin is causing educators in New York to invite him to a podcast, and invite me as almost an afterthought. I love that.

I also loved finding the other student pioneers on that Skype call and chat - especially, and for reasons similar to the Soojin story, Lindsea. A Hawaii student, I “met” Lindsea last year through my classes’ collaboration on the first 1001 Flat World Tales with her class with teacher Chris Watson. Lindsea is now, like Soojin, a part of my network, and a student pioneer.

You’ll meet other pioneering students on the podcast as well:

• Hannah, a student at principal Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia (and an excellent writer and speaker I “pray” will contribute to Students 2.0 regularly, and pull Philadelphia into Project Global Cooling next year). Hannah’s been blogging intensely about environmental issues in her region, and mentioned she’s received little to no encouragement from comments. Can we remedy that?
• Ben, from the excellent New York City Students group blog - another fantastic model of real student blogging. (Ben, as I told you on the podcast, I invited you all to Students 2.0 when I was seeking recommendations from my network, and Diane Cordell pointed me to you. That offer is still open as an additional, less frequent, non-competitive megaphone for your group.)

And then, manning the chat channel with his usual good questions and helpful hands, was another Philadelphia student I’ve come to know over the past year: Tyrone Kidd. Tyrone, I’ve wanted to give a shout-out about how impressive you’ve been as another pioneer since you popped up on my radar (and in my Seoul Networked Learning class blog) a few months ago. I love your pioneering spirit.

All the students above are noteworthy for showing they can navigate these networks, and prudently and maturely learn along with us.

They’re also noteworthy for teaching us how to make blogs and social networking “unschooly” to them. But for that, you’ll need to listen to the TTT podcast. (And Paul Allison, it was nice to finally make contact, so many months after discovering your blog.)

Photo: Pioneer Aviator Bessie Coleman, First African American Pilot from PingNews on Flickr

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