Beyond School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s 12 minutes from 2008 here in Seoul. It’s also 12 minutes from the One Year Anniversary of Beyond School. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m spending New Year’s Eve with my beloved B.S. (I do have an uncharacteristic glass of wine next to me as I write.)

I want to steal a trick from my favorite political video blog, Crooks and Liars (whose link to my “Truly Critical: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Goodness” post last week opened this blog to readership beyond edubloggers – to the tune of almost 1,000 visits to that post – in what I hope becomes a wedding of educational and political blogging, and another escape, like Students 2.0, from the echo chamber), by creating a regular “Open Thread” feature.

The idea of an Open Thread is to pose an issue, and then let the comments come. The thread – and that means the conversations in the comments – is the thing, not the post. It’s crowd wisdom – it’s blogging – at its best.

The question I propose for this thread comes in response to the following recent posts in the ’sphere:

• The 33-and-counting comments to my “On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher“
• Will Richardson’s “Some New Year’s Dreaming” from Weblogg-ed, and its 24-and-counting comments
• Graham Wegner’s “Parable 2.0,” and its 11-and-counting comments
• Jeff Utecht’s “One Door Closes….Where Does That Leave You?” (Jeff announces he’s leaving his job here, without a new one to go to), and its 25 comments
• Taylor the Teacher’s “You Got Punk’d: An Open Letter to American Parents” and its 11-and-counting comments.

And the question is this:

If you dream of starting a new school, what are the reasons you don’t try?

If you’d prefer a positive framing of the question, how about:

How would your dream school look, and how would you make it a reality?

or, to get really outside the box:

If you believe it’s time for schools to end, how would you replace them?

Happy New Year, everybody. Since realities begin in dreams, maybe this thread will make it really happy.

(Stay tuned for the next thread: “What are the biggest obstacles to education reform that you would like to campaign against?” – But again, that’s next time. Just priming the pump.)

Photo credit: …utopiacere… on Flickr

Here’s a fun Traveler’s IQ test for you. Timing counts! Report back here with a comment. Let’s get Diane Cordell and Steven Downes in the ring again – time to “flip another goat-sucker”!

My score, first time:

And see “related links” below for a few other challenges you can take!

Photo Credit: Stuart R Brown

First, a completely original video and music production by a few high-speed students around the world – specifically for you as their audience:

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

This is a special post for me, and a special request to you. I hope you’ll find it as exciting as I do. It has the potential to create fairly seismic effects, over time, in the edublogosphere – by elevating student edubloggers.

I have watched this handful of impressive students young adults from around the world working tirelessly for the last three weeks on an endless Skype chat to prepare the launch of the new Students 2.0 edublog. And I’ve been amazed at how much more they know than any adult I know about many things technical and pedagogical.

As you can see in the badge above (hand-designed, and with an automagic surprise when the countdown clock strikes zero), they’re ready to launch in three (see countdown badge) days. They would like that launch date to make the splash such an evolution of the edublogosphere deserves – and they’d like your help.

How? Any (or all) of four simple actions would be nice:

1. Write a post announcing the launch date, and embed the video and badge above in your post. Get the badge here and support them by spreading the word!

2. Embed the smaller widget-sized badge (150 x 92) in your sidebar.

3. Mobilize your networks – Ning, Twitter, and all the rest – to spread the word, and ask them to also do steps 1 and 2 above.

4. Bookmark the site on del.icio.us with the tag “education” – help them make the “most popular posts” page!

They want a groundswell built before the launch, in short.

The staff writers and editors of Students 2.0 are serious about maintaining high quality standards for content and design. They believe we adults will give them a listen, a read, and more than one comment in conversations of equal quality.

So please take a minute in this busy week to give them a hand, and help the edublogosphere evolve into a more student-centered discourse.

All you have to do is look at a picture and you’ll find out. Report back here?

(After that last post, I need a bit of fun.)

The blog readability level site is getting a bit viral. Diane Cordell got genius on her own blog, while her A Hundred Echoes quotes-only archive of Shakespeare and Other Great Writers earned college undergrad, I think (right, Diane?).

Me? As a proud eschewer of obfuscation and re-laxative preacher against constipated Latinate diction (ever notice how voiceless the Latinate, how forceful the Saxon-Germanic are? I’ll choose “kissing” over “osculating” any day), I have nothing but pride (okay, I’m lying) in this badge for BS:

But in the spirit of fun (and as a rematch of our “Edublogger IQ Live Wrestling Extravaganza” a couple months ago, which is my all-time favorite post on this blog) – and because I spent a well-spent hour this morning watching Stephen Downes’ recent lecture on Free Learning and Control Learning – I gave in to the impulse to enter Stephen’s “Half an Hour” blog. Stephen, congratulations – you’re a smarter writer than me. Here’s your grade:

Those college classes really paid off!

(– and Diane, congratulations: You’ve taken the title from Stephen and really “flipped the goat-sucker”!*)

–

Photo credit: ”flipping the goat-sucker” by upeslase

*My reward of 10,000 Korean won still stands for anyone who can enlighten me on the meaning and origin of this lovely phrase.

Scott McLeod from Dangerously Irrelevant tagged me with this interesting meme, so here are the rules, followed by the last five educational podcasts I listened to and/or watched:

Meme guidelines

1. Choose five of your favorite education podcasts. Any kind of education podcast is okay – students, teachers, administrators, professors, etc. – feel free to pick ones that you’ve made yourself! Try and pick specific podcasts, not podcast feeds.
2. Tag others for the meme. Feel free to participate even if you haven’t been ‘tagged.’
3. Please use a Technorati tag of educationpodcast or podcasteducation.
4. Please add your selections to the Moving Forward podcasts wiki page (and create categories as needed) so that others can benefit too!

My Last Five Podcasts or Videopodcasts:
1. David Warlick’s K12 Online Preconference Keynote, 2007: More on that in a later post, as a follow-up to this immediate take-aways post (just a k12 chatroom copy-paste) from a few days ago. You can also read the conversation about the keynote in the comments to the K12 page linked above.

2. David Warlick’s K12 Online Keynote, 2006: I loved watching last year’s keynote right before watching this year’s. I’m so new to the edublogosphere (only 10 months old), I didn’t know about last year’s event. Doesn’t matter: I went back in time 12 months and caught myself up on the K12 website.

3. Jessica Yun’s “audiobook” of “Roots,” her published 1001 Flat World Tales story: (from last year’s first edition – more to come from new schools and writers at the end of this school year, and every school year following). Jessica was 15 when she wrote this story, and podcasted it. She tells her stories as well as she writes them. Watch out for this one – she’s got a future as a writer, if she wants it. (And check out her blog, and tell her to get back to writing. Actually, she won’t have a choice: we’re launching our re-tooled schoolwide student blogging program in two weeks.)

4. Wesley Fryer interviewing Scott McLeod: Podcast 151: Dr. Scott McLeod on Administrator Idea-Sharing on Blogs, [etc], and Educating Others for the Transition to 21st Century Schools: on school 2.0 and school administrators 1.0: I sent this one to my admin. Wonder if they listened to it. Interesting on many levels, from Scott’s perspective on ivory tower educator-leaders’ oblivion and/or resistance to the edublogosphere’s vibrant and up-to-date discourse, to Scott’s own thoughts about the growing – but by no means new – irrelevance and inconsequentiality of much peer-reviewed academic publishing. (Lucky you, Scott: I’m not making this up. A free plug )

5. Robert Green Ingersoll: “Improved Man”: (Ingersoll podcasts channel on iTunes): Ingersoll was a late 19th century secular humanist – a better word than that strange “atheist” word (am I also an “a-horoscopist”?) who wrote powerfully and elegantly about all the ways in which religion is most often a tragically misguided attempt to “be and do good.” It’s frustrating to think that America and much of the rest of the world have only gone backwards in their heroic “March into the Middle Ages” since Ingersoll wrote his passionate, erudite, and “radically sane” critiques and visions a century and a quarter ago. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Friedrich Nietzsche readers really should subscribe to these podcasts. My favorite educational quote from Ingersoll:

“Schools should be today’s churches, and teachers, today’s preachers.”

He wrote this around 1890, and today I’m watching America’s Intelligent Design proponents attempting to expand their virulent attacks on science and reason around the globe – including here in Korean international schools. So I can’t say I’m hopeful about the future of reason in education. It seems America – the majority of its people and its disastrous political leadership – is intent on praying for an end to Global Warming (or indifferent to it, since heaven is the real world anyway), while at the same time continuing to ignore or attack science – and good, hardworking, life-saving, true miracle-working scientists.

It’s not easy, and certainly not fun, risking alienating my religious readers out there. But a commitment to science, enlightenment, education, and the fate of our planet make me feel it’s a duty. As a former Baptist and lifelong student of religious texts and religious history (see my LibraryThing widget in sidebar), I feel more qualified than most to confidently take on that duty. I’m just trying to do good by my own lights, not tradition’s.

More on Ingersoll from James Carr’s Ingersoll Podcasts page on Podcast Directory – a magnificent resource, with dozens of Ingersoll’s works, which Carr delivers with sterling quality:

Robert Green Ingersoll was an eloquent spokesman for free thinking, reason, and science in 19th century America. His intelligence, logic, humor, and clear thinking still speaks to us today. This podcast will include readings from his speeches and writings. Robert Ingersoll has an important place in American history, although, due to the weakness and politicization of our educational system, most of us have never heard of him. [emphasis added]

I tag (and apologize to, if inopportune):

Darren Kuropatwa (nice to talk to Darren for the first time in Warlick’s Fireside Chat)
Stephen Downes
Wesley Fryer
Will Richardson
Kim Cofino
Vicki Davis
Clarence Fisher
Doug Noon
Graham Wegner

Scott, this meme is a good idea. I’ll be checking out that wiki for human-filtered podcasts by the minds I admire the most. Thanks for the opportunity.

Technorati Tags: educationpodcast, podcasteducation, k12online, k12online07

Dana Huff tagged me for this Teaching Meme.

1. I am a good teacher because… (sez who???) if this is true, it would be because I’m an “anti-teacher.” I pity students for being stuck in school, for too often being treated like inmates, and having to sit through what they have to sit through for 12 critical years. I try to mitigate this by a) re-naming myself “learner,” and them “learner” too; b) trying to make them conscious that they’re young adults who deserve to be treated as such, despite the infantilization they’re subjected to by school, family, society, custom; c) not shying away from controversial issues; d) emphasizing problem-solving and frustration-tolerance as key real-world virtues; e) giving them an anonymous feedback forum year-round to criticize anything they don’t like in our classroom, and responding to it; f) replacing homework with relevant projects. (I really should get my students to address this question.)
2. If I weren’t a teacher I would be a… I have no idea. A starving filmmaker? Writer? Singer-songwriter? Founder of an unschool? Full-time blogger?
3. My teaching style is… relaxed, non-authoritarian, relevant, high-energy, philosophical, wonder-aimed, and encourages principled non-comformity and laughter.
4. My classroom is… a complete mess, with most of my favorite books from home on classroom shelves for students to check out, desks in different arrangements every day and, if I had my way, no desks at all.
5. My lesson plans are… open, loose, often thrown out the window in favor of spontaneous ideas, constant revisions, and/or student input. I’ve never understood how people can follow lesson plans made more than a couple days in advance. “The map is not the territory.” And I tend to get creative in the midst of units in ways I can’t when they’re at abstract distances.
6. One of my teaching goals is… to create space for self-discovery and self-direction in my classroom, so my learners may become writers, and find both themselves and a self-selected expertise through long-term classroom blogging.
7. The toughest part of teaching is… resisting institutional pressures. And resisting an all-consuming love for the world of “teaching.” I’m totally unbalanced, but love it. So it’s not a problem for me.
8. The thing I love about teaching is… my job is to share my love of literature, history, writing, learning, questioning young minds, and self-discovery. And to be teaching in the most revolutionary moment in the history of literacy since Gutenberg 500 years ago.
9. A common misconception about teaching is… that it’s easy. Another, possibly, is that it’s effective. I more and more wonder what young people would learn over 12 years if they were free to choose their own pathways in life, instead of being coercively incarcerated in schools. Schools are not natural, so they may not be healthy.
10. The most important thing I’ve learning since I started teaching is… without projects and creativity, learning is probably temporary. And to trust my nose: if it smells boring or schooly, it probably is.

You’re it: Anthony, Cindy, Jo, Vivek, Doug, James, Christian. (And no hard feelings if you opt out. This one’s tough, the timing is tougher, and I wonder how much I’ll agree with what I wrote when I read it tomorrow

Patrick Higgins tagged me. Here are the rules:

First, the Rules:
1) Post these rules before you give your facts
2) List 8 random facts about yourself
3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them
4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged

So here we go:

1. I graduated in the bottom third of my high school class, with a school record for absence and the third highest SAT score. I remember almost nothing from high school.

2. I discovered literature after high school, outside of college, by sharing a reading list with a friend.

3. At 20, I moved out of my apartment and lived in my VW Van for six months, parked along the beach in Malibu every night, so I could work less hours as a waiter in West Hollywood and spend that time reading the complete works of Plato.

4. I tried to be Jack Kerouac in my 20’s, hitchhiking coast-to-coast alone, in meandering patterns, for several summers in the 1980’s. I read Don Quixote at nights, sleeping along the side of the interstates and rural highways. It wasn’t quite “Beat” in the Reagan ’80s, but I’d do it again, starry eyes and all.

5. When I took enough graduate courses to realize the English professor’s life wasn’t for me – too much theory, not enough heat – I didn’t have a Plan B. I did have USD $40,000 debt in college loans, so I joined the US Army, which paid off my loans, taught me the Arabic language, and sent me, finally, abroad to live in Germany for 4 years. I’ve never lived in the States since.

6. I took a year off college to read the complete works of Nietzsche, because it felt right. He blew my fuses, but my brain slowly rewired itself over the next couple of years.

7. My girlfriend told me last night that as she was driving back into town from her parents’ summer home, she was laughing in her car as she thought about how in the world she could have ever gotten involved with somebody as strange as me. I don’t see what she means, but I think other people do.

8. I wish people (myself included) were more like dogs: quiet, friendly, playful, more than willing to be stroked behind the ears and lick a friendly hand.

Now I’m supposed to tag eight more people, so here goes:

1. Chris Watson
2. Kim Cofino
3. Anthony Armstrong
4. Sylvia Martinez
5. Diane McCordell
6. Patrick Aroune
7. Barbara Barreda
8. Carolyn Foote

Image credit: Copyright free from everystockphoto.com

In my last post I neglected to pass the “5 Secrets of Success” meme on (partly out of the curmudgeonly mood).

But I want to use the meme to practice that “true edublog democracy” I kvetched about slightly in my last post. I want to “tag” a few of my ninth-grade bloggers whose personalities and minds scream success to me.

It’s high time their blogs were promoted, too. Give them a visit. Here they are (all with code names):

“Lane Euler“: meteoric growth in critical thinking and weblogging, and a person to trust to the grave–I can tell already.

“Fashion Freak“: a rare honesty and decency, a mind alive in this one. Somehow seems an “old soul” (in a good, mature way).

“Ace Husky Uno“: makes me think of Nestor’s injunction to the young in The Iliad: “Be a man of eloquence and action.” (He was telling Achilles not to be just a jock, but a literate man as well. If only our modern “he-men” valued the tongue as much as the bicep.) Husky Uno is an amazing basketball player and thinker. He handled Swift like he handles lay-ups. And macho peer pressure doesn’t keep him from talking in class. Too cool.

“Ha! Enjoy“: another one whose sincerity and ability to reflect and enjoy it makes me happy.

“Pick Man Track“: another athlete strong enough to lead instead of follow–a real role model who breaks the “thinking ain’t cool” mold for weaker young jocks around him.

“Just Yell“: a born writer and giant-killer.

Finally, I’d like to tag James Linzel, whose lunchtime conversations in Shanghai were literally some of the finest hours I spent there. He’s begun a science teacher’s blog recently, “Remove the Walls,” and I look forward to continuing the old conversations in this new way. (What is it about science teachers that make them such polymaths? James’ curiosities and explorations radiate in so many directions, and always with passion and a good heart. I love the guy.)

Here’s the meme:

“List the top 5 to 10 things that you do almost every day that help you to be successful. They can be anything at all, but they have to be things that you do at least 4 or 5 times every week. Anything less than that may be a hobby that helps you out, but we are after the real day in and day out habits that help you to be successful.”

I encourage all of you to break any arbitrary rules of this meme if your critical judgment so inclines. (And “students,” remember to pass it on by “tagging” those you think are admirable.