Beyond School

One for the MiniLegends

[Update: I was out of the loop preparing for my wedding when Australian Al Upton's MiniLegends and Qatar's Jabiz Raisdana got hit by two shockingly reactionary hammers. Since this podcast features Noel Thomas, an Australian high school principal representing all that is most forward-thinking and impressive about Australia's educational system, I'd like to dedicate this podcast to Al, the MiniLegends, and Jabiz. Noel, I can't help but fantasize that you and Al discover each other and join forces. As you say in the podcast, most teachers will never get it. Al is a teacher who has impressed us all for years with how much he does get it. (h/t to John Connell for the miniLegends badge - John, I hope you don't mind me nicking it?)]

Love This Podcast, or I’ll Eat a Bug

As I say in the intro to this podcast, if you don’t find it the most interesting hour of podcasting I’ve ever done, I’ll eat a bug. (And yes, Los Angelenos, that is a quote from the old Cal Worthington used car commercials of the ’80s.) That intro was hard, by the way: I tried about 8 times to summarize why I’m so excited about the things happening in that podcast, but couldn’t, and did the “eat a bug” intro instead. In retrospect, it sounds silly. But I had to get the thing published.

Creative Destruction Abundant

What walls don’t come down in this hour-long talk? Bye-bye edu-caste system, bye-bye geographic and temporal barriers. My guests are from three continents and four levels of school hierarchy:

• High School Principal Noel Thomas, Toorak College, Melbourne, Australia
• High School Principal (and next year’s Director) Rich Boerner, Korea International School, Seoul, South Korea (my employer)
• Librarian Jenny Luca, Toorak College, Melbourne
• Lara H., high school student, Toorak College
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilber, Punahou High School student (and Students 2.o staff writer), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• and me, high school teacher and tool-guy, Korea International School

(Quicktime free download required)

(right-click and “save target as” here to download enhanced podcast for iTunes)

Table of Contents

If you download to iTunes, you can navigate by these chapter headings:

• Intro: I’ll Eat a Bug
• Audio Snapshots
• Welcome
• Noel Thomas, Toorak College, Melbourne Australia
• Toorak’s Dilemma re: Web Access for Students
• Rich Boerner, Korea Internat’l School, Seoul
• KIS’ Open Web Access for Students
• Factors Favoring Relaxed Filtering at KIS
• Toorak Librarain Jenny Luca: Toorak Change Agent
• Jenny’s Views on the Value of Blogging to Learn
• Toorak and KIS Connect thru Project Global Cooling
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur, Intro (Hawaii Student)
• Student Lindsea Teaching the World
• Lara H., Intro (Australia Student)
• Sustainability at Our Specific Schools
• Broader Issues of Connecting Schools for Learning
• Lindsea on Youthnet: Student-Initiated Global Collaboration via Twitter and Wiki
• How Clay in Korea has Known Lindsea in Hawaii for Almost 2 Years
• Getting Teachers to Accept Student-Led Collaborative Projects
• Getting Students to Rise to the Challenge of Laptop Learning
• KIS Student Patrick Nam as Model of Networked Learning
• Noel’s Approach to Keeping Students Responsible Online
• Jenny’s Approach to Pulling Students In
• Clay on the Importance of Same Time-Zone Partner Schools
• Rich on Importance of Collab AT SCHOOL, not home
• Acceptable Use Policy
• Toward an Eastern Hemisphere Schools Network
• Spreading the Word to Students about Youthnet
• Lindsea as Model for Student Imitation
• Lara: PGC Should Be Easy in Australia
• Difficulties with Projects in Korea
• Media Interest in Project Global Cooling
• Clay’s Parting Shot: This Tech is EASY
• Parting Shots
• Closing Comments: Project Global Cooling Growing: Seoul, Hawaii, Australia in, and Beijing, Los Angeles, and Bangkok Nibbling - Add Your School This Year or Next
• (Name Your Bug)

Links Referenced in Podcast:

• Jenny Luca’s Lucacept (Australia)
• Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed
• Project Global Cooling
• Bill Farren’s Education for Well-Being blog
• Lindsea Kemp-Wilbur’s Love and Logic blog
• Chris Watson’s WatsonCommon blog
• Lindsea’s Youthnet post on Students 2.0
• Jabiz Raisdana’s Intrepid Teacher (stay intrepid, Jabiz)
• Jabiz’ Global Issues class blog
• Youthnet Twitter page
• “Natural” Global Collaboration (my networked learning elective class)
• Youthnet Wikispace
• The 1001 Flat World Tales global collaborative writing project
• KIS Sophomore Patrick Nam’s blog and podcast

Recorded on 3 March 2008

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As my 1:1 MacBook laptop school drives further into 21st century education - attempts to, anyway, despite getting stuck in the deep mud of 20th century teachers, parents, and students - I’m more and more realizing that it’s the early adopters who are the exponential change-agents.

Among the adults at my school, the early adopters fueling the shifts at our school are history teacher Jason Spivey (I posted about him on my guest-blogger post at Wes Fryer’s blog yesterday, and spoke of him in my Apple Distinguished Educator presentation video from Bangkok recently), middle school social studies teacher Anthony Armstrong, and my high school principal and vice principal, Rich Boerner and Robin Schneider.

But having a few adults that get it at school isn’t enough. You need students to get it too. The effects of over a decade of schooliness, I’m discovering, prevent most high school students from getting it at all. I’ve joked on Twitter about the need to create de-programming workshops for schoolified students along the lines used for ex-cult members (hm - school as cult: there’s a post idea). So I’m really pleased to see students who do see it, and rise above the herd who don’t.

Introducing Patrick Nam, a Quality Student Podcaster

Patrick Nam is one such student. He’s in Project Global Cooling, and he used Skype, ecamm’s $15 USD Call Recorder download (Mac only), and GarageBand to record and edit this podcast interview with my guest-blogger Bill Farren (see his two posts over the last eight days below), creator of the “Did You Ever Wonder?” video and “Education for Well-Being” website. Here’s the podcast embed:

I admire Patrick’s care for production values in his podcasts, as well as his ability to interview adults with the confidence that should belong - but doesn’t, as a rule - to young adults like himself. So many of our students are scared to relate to adults, to talk to them, to learn through conversation. Patrick is not socially stunted in this way. I hope other students at my school see how cool Patrick’s podcast projects are as real-world ways to learn and create. When was the last time any of them interviewed an expert on the other side of the planet, and published it for the world as a digital radio show?

He’s definitely our best school podcaster. For more, see his interview with Lindsea of Project Global Cooling, Hawaii (and Students 2.0) here. And check out Patrick’s blog here (he podcasts an interview with me there about Apple Remote Desktop and student rights to privacy at school - quite a scoop, since I explain how students can hide files from teachers’ prying eyes). His podcasts make good models to use for your students. Patrick knows a podcast is more than hitting “record” and then posting it. Patrick knows quality.

Me? I’m Asking, “What is Schooliness?” on Wes Fryer’s Blog

Come join the fun with a history of schooliness and a wicked invitation to some Open Thread goodness on Wes Fryer’s Moving at the Speed of Creativity. Help make a Schooly Devil’s Dictionary in the thread!

“What is Schooliness?” - Discursus and Open Thread (Clay Burell guest-post 2) » Moving at the Speed of Creativity via kwout

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[Update: Download link is fixed. Thanks!]

In this one-hour podcast (edited down from 90 minutes, and enhanced with chapter titles and quick navigation if you download it to iTunes), Dean Shareski, District Technology Coordinator in Saskatchewan, Canada, talks with me here in Seoul about NATURAL, “unschooly” global collaboration via student networked learning projects.

Topics:

• Natural vs. “Scripted” global collaboration
• How we see Networked Learning working in the classroom
• Four global networked learning projects in my Seoul PLN/Networked Learning elective
• assessing networked learning
• networked learning is NOT “flat CLASSROOM,” but person-to-person global collaboration
• student addiction to traditional, inauthentic learning, and resistance to real project-based learning
• how so many teachers can only hear through “teacher ears”, and are deaf to natural learning
• how my open network 1:1 PLN class can serve as a useful example to show administrators
• on books versus digital texts: a nostalgic, romantic outro debate.

Many, many thanks to Dean for giving me the opportunity to clarify how radically different this approach is from anything I’m aware of. I think it’s hugely relevant to any evangelistic mission to pull resistant teachers into global collaborations, and more importantly, to keep them doing them. Because I think - and have experienced - how whacked out crazy and exhausting a heavily scripted, assembly-line global project can be for students and teachers alike.

Download the podcast to iTunes for chapter navigation, or simply listen to the player below - and enjoy. I put music and cool sound effects in there for you ‘n’ everything.

Referenced links in the podcast:

• 1001 Flat World Tales
• David Warlick: Is Pedagogy Getting in the Way of Learning?
• KIS PLN/Networked Learning Group Planning Blog
• A Sophomore Grades Himself
• Apple Learning Institute Project on Self-Assessing and Rewarding Valuable Failure
• Scott Schwister’s Higher Edison blog
• The Flat Classroom Project
• Diane Cordell’s Journeys

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I gave this presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok in December of 2007. The conference room was freezing, to explain the ski cap.

Not only does it tell the story of how the international school I work at went 1:1, how that groundswell was created, how admin was persuaded to choose Macs instead of PC’s (hint: comparing total cost of ownership destroys the expense myth), and the challenges of staff and student training; it also shows exemplars of digital teaching and learning in a biology and language arts classroom, as well as highlighting my own teaching journey since embracing technology in my language arts and history classrooms.

Added bonus: it also includes the first showing of the Students 2.0 promotional video produced and scored by Sean “The Bassplayer” Law of Scotland. ADE saw it days before the launch of s2oh, because the ADE Institute was during the fourth week of our pre-launch preparations for that experiment.

Finally, the presentation itself was a conscious attempt to model a minimalism I want my students - text- and bullet-junkies all - to emulate. And to provide information via not exposition, but metaphor and story. My goal was to inform without being a bore. (More on this presentation angle below the video, in a comment I left on an Anthony Chivetta post on Students 2.0 on teaching design to students - what I call “cutting the crap“.)

Here it is. It’s 30 minutes long. As you’ll read below, everybody else was stopped at 20 minutes. It’s not because I was better. It’s because my slides were. And my story.

The Backstory: It Takes a Story. It Doesn’t Take Bullet Points.

Storytelling is prior to and higher than design. Who wants a well-designed crappy story? (And maybe we should call this narrative, not storytelling, to open the frame wide enough to accommodate expository presentations?)

Here’s a story: I was one of three teachers asked to give a presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educator institute in Bangkok last month. We all were asked to address issues in 1:1 laptop schools.

The first guy gave a slideshow about his 4-year old laptop school. Lots of slides, lots of text, lots of pictures, lots of information. When he reached the alloted 20 minutes, he was told to finish up within a minute.

The second guy gave a slideshow with lots of examples of digital student work (much of it, I’m sorry to say, in need of crap-cutting and worse, to echo Dan, ideas worth watching in the first place - probably as much the teachers’ fault as the students, since the teachers assign this stuff). He also got fetishistic, predictably, about tools he uses. Jing this, Skitch that, blah blah blah.

When his 20 minutes were up, he was asked to wrap up in one minute.

(His school was an 18-month-old laptop school, by the way.)

It was my turn next. Imagine my joy at continuing the Chinese water torture with 20 more minutes of my own dripping slideshow.

I gave the presentation. When it was over, I said, “Was that shorter than my alloted 20 minutes?” The Apple guy said, “No - you went 30 minutes.”

Here’s why I think he didn’t make me finish:

1. I did have a story. I knew the age of the other two presenters’ laptop programs - again, 4 years for one, and the other 18 months - and I knew my own school’s 1:1 program was only 4 months old. So I gave this expository speech a metaphor: “Our 1:1 Baby Book.” The narrative thread of this informational “story” was: Conception - Labor - Birth - Potty Training.

To riff off some academic I read years ago in a literary theory graduate course, by giving the information some “narrative rails,” the audience enjoyed the ride and kept anticipating what was coming next.

And the occasional use of “ass” and “poopy” didn’t hurt, either. Somehow we need to mention emotion and voice in all of this. I didn’t talk like some constipated suit trying to impress. I was a guy in love with his story, telling it like the playful, caffeinated, silly bastard I enjoy being. I used my voice.

2. Also, Dean’s “design matters” and other explorations I’ve done since influenced my visual design. I had my story, but I wanted visuals without words. Pictures only. I didn’t quite succeed. I used slide titles and single-word lines of text. But to know my story and receive its information, you had to listen to me tell it. You couldn’t read it along with me.

A picture of a pregnant belly rising from a bubble-bath, of a new-born still gooey and umbilical in a doctor’s hands, of a poopy diaper-changing moment in some Flickr’d household - that was the bulk of my slideshow.

–

I still have a headache, but will try to sum up:

1. As Dan says (and hasn’t Warlick been stressing “telling a new story” for about a century?): storytelling first. I would add - and this was the point of my story - even expository can be transformed into a story via metaphor, extended analogy, allegory, etc. I got ten extra minutes to blather because people wanted to hear how my school is raising its baby. People like babies, generally (”especially with a little salt and pepper,” as WC Fields said ).

2. Visual design: I go back to Dean’s thrust - throw out the templates, eschew text, and arrest with less.

Oops. My twenty minutes was up a long time ago.

People referenced in the presentation: Jason Spivey, Justin Medved, Kim Cofino, Anthony Armstrong, Chris Watson

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[This is from an email I just sent to everybody who signed on, over the last several months, to participate in this year's 1001 Flat World Tales world writing workshop.  I put it here as a "lessons learned" about "flat classroom" global collaboration projects.  Just in case anyone wants to learn from what I feel were my mistakes, last time around.

Because trust me: bells, whistles, and gushing geeky wows aside, flat classroom projects, like any other educational exercise, are as valuable - or as worthless - as their design and method make them.  They're gaining popularity now, so more and more schools and teachers will be trying them. And it's the nuts and bolts of these efforts that will sink or swim them - for teachers, administrators, and students alike.  Here's my word to the wise: wipe the dazzle from your eyes, and try to think beneath the surface of these shiny new shindigs.  All that glitters is not worth the gold.  And remember the emperor's new clothes.]

—-

One New Zealand, two Australia, three continental USA, one Hawaii, and one Korea school: that’s our roster at the moment for this year’s 2nd annual high school 1001 Flat World Tales world writing project.

Strangely enough, that Korea - my school - is tentative. I’m not teaching any classes that lend themselves to a creative writing unit this year, but two of my colleagues who are teaching such classes have expressed interest. We’re on Lunar New Year holiday right now, so I won’t hear from them a final yes or no for another week or so.

Regardless, I want to find an outside-of-the-box way to stay involved in the project anyway - perhaps as a commenting audience giving feedback or making appearances via Skype or other video-conference in different places to talk about writing and such. Something to talk about.

Australia and New Zealand in the current sunny South are just finishing their summer break and returning to school, so the late-February or early March time-frame sounds a good one to begin. (That doesn’t have to be set in stone, though.)

I’ve been thinking about the experience of the first 1001 Tales wiki workshop last year, and writing and podcasting pretty frequently about possible pitfalls and improvements for this year, so I hope you don’t mind if I bullet a few thoughts here:

Pitfalls / Solutions (?):

* Pitfall: massive time-zone differences in long-term collaborations
* Solution?: partner classrooms form by nearest time-zone for most stages of the peer feedback/revision process, and change partners for only one or two stages to have global feedback. Ex.: Assuming a Six Traits process, near-partners would give feedback for first two traits, global partners for trait 3, near partners for traits 4 and 5, global partners for trait 6.

* Pitfall: unmotivated students muck up the process by feeble or absent work
* Solution?: a couple of options seem worth considering: 1) make it voluntary only to students who like the idea; 2) develop a policy that eliminates students from the project who can’t be relied upon by their peer writers.

* Pitfall: Duration too long: last year, we spent a couple months on the project, devoting at least one week to each of the six traits, and having global peer feedback exchanges each week. It felt too long and too labor-intensive for teachers and students alike, I think (Chris Watson, do you agree from Honolulu?)
* Solution?: Shorten it, condensing two traits into a week for a 3-week project, for example; and/or reduce the frequency of peer feedback from partner classrooms, blending them with some weeks of in-class, local peer feedback.

* Pitfall: Global Student Publisher-Editor Staff: Last year, we hired students from within the classes (after formal interviews) to review and select the best stories for publication on the blog. This created conflicts of interest in which (surprise!) these students all selected each others’ works. Some of those works were not sterling.
* Solution?: “Hire” students from upper grades to be editors and publishers, and give them real-world credit for the experience on the blog.

* Pitfall: Quality of writing prompt: The “Alien King” frame story modeled after the Arabian Nights was a fun idea, and some sort of frame story, either the same or a new one makes no difference to me, seems desirable for giving the message that a storyteller has to tell a good story to “survive” and be published. But last year’s prompt - “Write a story that shows a critical insight about your specific culture” - seems in need of a very creative and more-inspired overhaul.
* Solution?: Decentralize it. Let each classroom determine its own prompt? Or keep it uniform, but give it more cutting teeth? (I fantasize about stories that show some critical insight about what it means to be a student in today’s educational system, and what it means to be “smart” and “educated,” from the students’ p.o.v. Call it “Students 2.0, the Fiction Version.” Tasty satire could come of that, and much catharsis from the students who finally are invited to express their views on schooliness. But that’s just me. I’m no dictator.)

* Pitfall: Text-only bias. Students only wrote (and some recited in podcasts) their stories last year. That automatically puts some students who are not verbally/writerly gifted at a disadvantage.
* Solution?: Open it up to multimedia. Digital storytelling mashups, films of interpretive dance, spoken word, photo-essays, musical compositions, whatever. Not a writing project as much as a multimedia variety show!

* Pitfall: Prose fiction/creative writing bias. We prescribed that last year.
* Solution?: Invite non-fiction as an option. (But this would make teaching the unit messier. As would, it occurs to me, allowing mutlimedia. Which isn’t necessarily insurmountable. We could invite adults with an interest in the different media to guest-mentor from the edublogosphere or other real-world communities, for example.)

* Pitfall: Assessment. Last year, we tried to assess each stage of wiki feedback and revision, and it was damned difficult to manage all of that.
* Solution?: Have students self-assess, keeping reflective records of their creative production, their feedback contributions, and their lessons learned. Have them use this reflective record to justify the grade they propose to the teachers that they receive.

That’s about it. Any thoughts?

Two parting creative ideas:

* Project movie trailer: For any of you who work in 1:1 Apple Laptop schools - Chris, Cindy, Tim? - promotional videos for the project would be a fun idea. One-minute trailers mashing up flying saucer and alien invasion footage from, for example, archive.org (I’ve downloaded gobs of footage of UFO sightings from there) could be intensely fun to edit into an “Alien King Invasion” trailer.

* Flat world teaching: It might be fun - I mentioned this above - for Cindy to video-skype into a Korean classroom to discuss how to brainstorm for a good idea, or for Chris to skype in to St. Louis to discuss the perils of excessive adverbs, etc. Without over-planning, such options should be sought for “Quick-in, Quick-out” guest-teaching to keep things interesting and explore new pedagogical possibilities.

Sorry to be so long. I’m done Anybody up for a skype conference call in the coming week or two? Any other suggestions?

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