Beyond School

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

My homey Dean Shareski, whose name fits Saskatechewan perfectly, tagged me for some sort of meme about something like “7 Things You Might Not Know About Me.”

Like Dean, I already did a similar meme about eight things, so pardon me for fiddling with this one for the sake of self-pleasuring.

I’m going to give it a musical bent.

7 Things You Might Not Know About My Musical Tastes

1. Joni Mitchell Slays Me

Blue Goddess.

I’ve been listening to almost nothing but Joni Mitchell’s Blue on my drives to and from my weekend work at the radio station for the past two months. I would marry Joni in a heartbeat for the mere pleasure of looking over her shoulder as she wrote her lyrics. They stand right up there with Keats and Shakespeare, *hrumph-hrumph*, mutatis mutandis,  in my book. Add to that the purity of her voice as it navigates the crushingly brave but fragile melodic lines of her songs, and you can add me to the list of those who are, to quote Keats in the “Ode on Melancholy,” “among her cloudy trophies hung.”

God, Blue is perfection. Where to start? “All I Want” should be sung at every wedding:

All I really, really want our love to do
Is just bring out the best in me and you, too….

I want to talk to you
I want to shampoo you

(–that “talk to you” / “shampoo you” rhyme slays me in rhyme, image, and whim.)

I want to renew you
Again and again
Applause, applause,
Life is our cause.
When I think of your kisses
My mind see stars.

I could go on and on, and will a bit more. (But you’ll have to click to read it below the fold:

Read the rest of this entry »

My Australian friend John Larkin privately advised me to share some slices of Korean life in this space, and when John talks, I listen.¹

So here are a couple of videos from a very creative trio of English teachers here in the greater Seoul area. I’m too old and too married to have their sort of life, so I’m happy for the chance to live it vicariously through their songs and videos. They’re wonderfully creative and thoroughly whacked – and they do a fine job of getting close to the line without crossing it.

Enjoy:

1. Even if I don’t always answer. [↩]

This is pretty amazing.

From Jenny Luca and the students at Toorak College, an all-girls high school in Melbourne:

Yes, today is Friday and time for the customary school’s out post. This week it’s different, because school is definitely on for me and my students tomorrow as we stage our Project Global Cooling concert. Tune in to ustream (streaming live 3.00pm to 5.00pm Melbourne, Aust. timezone) to see the result of my student’s efforts. The concert has been organised with a budget of zero; our students have convinced artists to appear for free and many people in our school and wider community have given their time and donated goods to ensure that the concert can take place. The students are pumped – one has even just posted a comment on this blog to let me know how excited she is. Today we received an email from Peter Garrett, environment minister for our Australian Labor Party (current party holding government) and former lead singer of Australian iconic band Midnight Oil. Here’s what he had to say to us . . . . [click here to read the rest]

They only started organizing this event less than two months ago.  Here are the world times for the uStream of their two-hour event. I hope you can find time to give them a visit, check out their event, and leave a “well done.” (We’ll be posting the concert video on the PGC website World Music Gallery soon, knock wood.)

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

Tuna’s Aquarium via kwout

Christina Kang is a senior in my AP Literature class, a leader of Project Global Cooling, a Flixn star of a summer post (see her discuss a David Sedaris short story in a video embed here), and one wonderfully creative and natural student blogger.

I want to introduce her blog to anybody who enjoys reading sharp, creative, pleasant young writers. Christina started “Tuna’s Aquarium” as part of the “Visionary Student Blogging” AP Literature project in October/November, and in the three months since then has climbed to my list of favorites.

The email I just sent to my colleagues at my school gives an idea of why she’s worth showing, in my view, as a model of authentic (“unschooly”) classroom blogging:

Senior Christina Kang’s blog is four-months old and comfy as your favorite childhood treehouse.

Check out what she does:

• links to blogs she reads out of shared interest (medicine, art and design, computer graphics, more) – which will surely lead to a personal network and relationships with many of these people
• posts her own artwork as illustrations for her posts
• shows she’s ‘cultured’ by writing about literature she’s reading (not for school, thank god)
• posts original film-making experiments she’s created
• posts podcasts of original songs she’s recorded with her classmate on Garageband (she sings backup)
• posts radio-show type podcasts
• writes wonderfully well – strong voice, relaxed, smart, witty, natural
• shows a good sense of visual design in choice of blog theme

If your students (or you!) need a good model of multimedia blogging, it doesn’t get any better.  You should subscribe to Christina’s blog – you’ll love getting updates of her new content.

I’ll be sharing more exemplary student work in the coming weeks. As Konrad Glogowski also knows, it takes time to help students “grow” a blog.  After four months, some of my student blogs are ready for the harvest.

I’ve chronicled my ups and downs with turning my students onto passion-based, self-directed learning via “Visionary Classroom Blogging” since starting the project back in October or so.  In saner moments, I’ve also reminded them and myself that blogging magic doesn’t happen overnight.  My own experience, stumbling about like a drunk through my own first month or two on this blog, was my teacher.  Then one day things clicked, and I wrote a post called “Sharpening the Focus.”  And I was off.

I hoped and hoped – expected is only barely too strong a word – that the same thing would happen with a percentage of my seniors (who are we kidding? Teaching is always a success with only a small percentage of students, isn’t it?).  All it would take is time.  With all the pressures to grade everything quickly, allowing that time for learning to happen by not grading at all, but simply giving time and space for regular blogging, was the hardest part of this whole project, by the way.

Anyway, it did happen with one of my seniors, Jung Hee, recently.  He found his “mission moment” in his post, “My High School Dream: Finally in Action.”  I hope you’ll visit his blog, listen to the posts of his music-CD-in-the-making, and support this visionary student blogger in his self-directed learning journey.

Moreover, I hope some of you who share his interest in music will drop a comment – only if sincere – and simply invite him into your twitterverse, blog, facebook, whatever, in the interest of helping him discover how all these things can serve as more than social fun, but as Personal Learning Networks (and JungHee, you know about Trackbacks and Technorati reactions, so you should find this post. Here’s a gift: join my own MusicGeeks Ning network to play with global song-making).  Expect more on PLN’s soon – I’m obsessed with it.

Here’s a clip from his mission moment. Significantly, it came during winter break, when schooly homework receded and gave some breathing room to his own spirit:

Ok, so senior first semester is coming close to an end. And so comes the second semester. Maybe the first thing that we would face would be the scary “senioritis”. It wasn’t long ago that I even heard about senioritis. But actually, I think I had already been experiencing it a little, when I’m not supposed to.

One day, our AP Literature teacher mentioned senioritis very briefly. He just had one comment. “You guys are going to face senioritis anyway, so wouldn’t you want to do something that’s outside of classroom, yet meaningful?”

This conversation arose because there is an audition for a play, “Waiting for Godot,” going on in our school. Well, people who have been around with me for a long time would definitely know that I am not an actor.

But I can do something with music. In fact, I had this plan in mind since the beginning of 9th grade. It’s just that I never had consistent time to complete it. So maybe this is the actual time to put it into action.

Here is the plan.

I have been composing songs, most of which are incomplete, since 9^th grade. I will complete viable ones, and also make some new songs over the winter break and first part of the second semester. I will pick maybe around 12 songs and record them. I already have two songs that I recorded in 9^th grade and 10^th grade, but I will rerecord them anyway because my recording sound quality has been improving significantly over last four years. After recording all the songs, I will figure out some places where I can make CD jackets and cases. That will become my personal album that contains all my history as a high school musician.

I mean, wouldn’t it be really cool if inside a CD player is a CD with a picture of me?

That last post was supposed to report this:

1. Since those first two fragments I composed on GarageBand, I spent a couple or three hours watching Atomic Learning’s GarageBand screencast tutorials (paid subscription required), and they taught me a few things. Most importantly, they taught me how to change the key of different loops and parts of the song so you’re not stuck on one chord the whole time. (You can only go so far on the tonic.) Hint: “Tracks > Master Track.” That’s where you can take that C major tonic chord to the F sub-dominant (the “IV”) and the G dominant (“V”), and voila, instant blues or rock songs. You can do more than that, of course.

2. Wes Fryer showed us his midi keyboard, an M-Audio Axiom 29 model, in Shanghai. I found a dealer here in Seoul, chose to get the 5-octave Axiom 49 plus an Axiom SP-2 sustain pedal (total cost: USD $380 or so), and my soon-to-be better half helped me order it on the phone, and it’s going to be delivered tomorrow. That’s a picture of it, above. See those square black pads on the upper right? They can each be programmed as a different percussion instrument (probably other things too), and are touch-sensitive.

I can’t wait to play with this baby. If any of you are fans of Leonard Cohen’s later works – say, I’m Your Man and on – you know that he has done some beautiful stuff setting voice and lyrics to very simple music tracks. I’d bet money that he didn’t use much more than GarageBand (or something as simple) and a keyboard like mine to make his Ten New Songs cd in 2001.

OMG. I hope the manual isn’t in Korean.

I posted recently about learning from Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop how easy it is to compose original music on Apple’s GarageBand. I posted my first two fragments (one funk, one trance), both of which I made in less than 20 minutes, and made in front of a student audience during a demo. More interestingly, that post includes what Jason, a teacher down the hall, strutted into my classroom the next day to show off – his own very first composition, a catchy little hip-hop piece.

Carolyn Foote put a tweet out on my Twitbin yesterday

If anyone wants to twitter “One trait of a good staff development workshop” for my teachers, that’d be great–doing this workshop all day!

Remembering Patrick Higgins‘ typically innovative approach a few weeks back of rounding up any edublogger volunteers to join his teachers in New Jersey on a Skypecast, in which teachers asked the questions and led us (Carolyn, Konrad Glogowski, and me) into discussions about classroom blogging – and remembering Will Richardson’s “unconference” approach to a workshop he led in Shanghai this month – I replied to Carolyn with this: “Interactive, unconference – let them guide (like Patrick’s Skype session with us and Konrad).”

Now, I know this requires a Mac with GarageBand, but I’m going to pass this little anecdote on, anyway, because you may be able to adapt it with cross-platform things. Here it is: I put an “allstaff” email out labeled something like “Be a Songwriter in 20 minutes with GarageBand.” In the email, I attached the mp3 of my first composition, and shared that anybody could learn to create a song on GarageBand in a flash. And I invited all-comers to let me know if they wanted me to show them how.

I got six replies (out of 30 teachers, not bad) the first day. And again, Jason had already started composing within 24 hours of seeing how easy it is now.

So my gut says – and I’m repeating my previous post here, because I think it bears repeating: Workshops that present technology as a teaching tool – something “schooly” – might be less effective, as Wes Fryer and Gary Stager would probably agree, than presenting it as a creativity tool.

We’ve read a million times (and should write it a million more) that teachers cannot understand blogging, much less use it effectively in their classrooms, if they haven’t experienced doing blogging themselves (and even that’s too simple, since they need to do more than just write online to really understand blogging – but that’s a later post). That’s a similar sermon to what I’m preaching here. But anybody who has tried to persuade teachers to begin blogging knows it’s an up-cliff battle almost all the time. All the teachers (and administrators) I’ve encouraged to begin blogging have resisted with such claims as, “But I don’t have time to write every day” (rebuttal: Moses included no Law saying “Thou Shalt Blog Daily”), or “I’m not a good writer” (a response worth its own post, later, or addressed sort of at the end of my last one), or “I don’t have anything to say” (a cause for weeping).

These are all responses we have to respect, because well, there they are: cold hard realities.

But the easy seduction of six teachers into creating their own music with GarageBand suggests that maybe we should remember that, like our students, our teachers and admin too possess multiple intelligences (and check out this great interview with Howard Gardner at Edge.com, my favorite science/philosophy/culture online mag).

And maybe we should approach Staff Development Workshops by having a menu of “digitally creative activities” grouped under headings for all those multiple intelligences.

So: a sketch of the process that I might try out next week for our own workshop:

Step One: Take a multiple intelligences inventory and discover your strongest intelligence.
Step Two: On the “Digital Arts” menu, select an activity you want to learn under your specific intelligence type.
Step Three: Alone or in groups, go at it, and ask for help whenever you need it.

Uh-oh. This calls for a wiki to host that menu.

Often when I have ideas, I tend to stall and falter, out of some perfectionistic strain that says, “Don’t commit to trying this until it’s perfect.” But somebody’s remark recently – Doug Noon’s, maybe? who has some great thoughts and comment-resources about staff development on this post, by the way – that learning and teaching are “always in beta” helps. I’ll make the wiki and invite all-comers to comment and contribute.

Has anyone else tried the “personal creativity” intro, instead of the “classroom tool” one, for staff workshops? Anybody have anything to report on that?

Because I can’t help but say it: Even if we love our jobs, the word “job” is still aversive – especially in comparison with the word “creativity.” Don’t we all have creative yearnings? And isn’t satisfying them more possible now than ever before?

And wouldn’t discovering that possibility by unlocking your own creativity be a much more powerful motivator than being told you’re expected to use this stuff in your class?

I can’t help but think that, once teachers find themselves making music, films, photo-collages, whatever, creatively, then the creative classroom use of these tools will follow.

Photo Credits:
Photos 1 and 3 by Darwin Bell
Photo 2 by Auntie P
Photo 4 by Robby Garbett
Photo 5 by urban penguin