Beyond School

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

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

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.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

(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.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

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

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