Beyond School

Announcing…

ΨΨ The Winner
of the McCain Stump Speech Wordle
“Write Your Own Caption”
Competition © ΨΨ

I am pleased to announce the winner is the very talented Vincent Robletto, whose Kerblotto blog screams “Subscribe” for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Vincent’s submission rose above thousands hundreds tens ones of rivals.¹ So, without further ado [drumroll], first the unveiling, followed by Vince’s acceptance speech:

Robleto Acceptance Speech:

[Vince takes microphone. Voice trembling, blinking back tears, beaming:]

I landed a job as an advertising copywriter and won the McCain wordle today. It’s really been a stellar day.²

~  ~  ~

Okay, enough silliness. I do think it’s wonderful, though, how little whims like the lead-balloon Wordle contest ³ can still lead to new connections in this new world. I went to Vincent’s site and discovered some original Photoshop remix goodness he’d created, and got his permission to share. Two of my topical favorites:

A couple last examples of why I suffer from Photoshop Envy on a massive scale, from different posts on Vincent’s blog:

and finally, for something completely different:

"Mmm...Ham face." Vincent Robleto.

And if you just want to laugh, find more than one, guaranteed, at Vincent’s selection of “A Few Bad Logo Choices.” (And congrats on the writing job, Vincent!)

Obligatory “Educational Relevance” Ending: On Photoshop Free Open Source Gimp as a Literacy Skill

Seriously: Have you, or has anyone you know, ever told students that original Photoshop (or, as Vincent corrected me, and used to make these images, the free open source software The Gimp) illustrations are encouraged – not instead of writing, but supplementing it – for essay assignments? I think it’s clear they should be. It’s a skill that sets a person apart. This whole post is all about that, in a way.

1. And Diane Cordell was close on his heels. [↩]
2. This from an actual email. [↩]
3. It happens to all of us, Terry! [↩]

A reader last week mentioned this “Wordling Political Speeches” as a NYTimes lesson plan, so I Wordled McCain’s stump speech in Colorado this week.

I thought I’d have fun with it by turning it into an open thread for readers to play with.

Here are the rules:

Write your own caption in the comment thread, based only on words in the image (click image for larger view). I’ll select the winner and add the caption, with credit, in a couple days.

Example:

“Applause: McCain people going Obama.”

There are zingers galore in here, but I hope you’ll have fun with them, so I’ll leave the pickings to you. Please lighten your day and ours with a laugh.

[Update: And the winner is: one very creative Vincent Robleto, whose Kerblotto blog screams "Subscribe" for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Really, check it out. (And Vince, I can only imagine how honored you must feel, considering the vast field of competition you edged out for this award. ) Thanks for playing to both you, Diane, and the thousands of others!]

These are common Google search terms from visitors.

Can the web help students who, when school is making them feel suicidal, turn to Google for support?

I must see five or ten Google search hits like the above each week from students. What advice would you give? Do counselors help? Parents? Teachers? Organizations? Preachers or secular social workers? Early graduation/GED? Home-schooling? Books? Poems? Films? Songs?

Perhaps better: Do you have any success stories or experiential advice to share? 

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.

It’s almost 6 p.m. here in Seoul, and that’s bedtime for this nocturne. Before curling up in Morpheus’ arms, I want to throw this screenshot of my Tweetcloud up here (thanks to Cathy Nelson for sharing that one). It’s an interesting little thing, this tag cloud of your most frequent tweet words. The largest words are most frequent from your tweet history, the medium fairly frequent, the smallest less so, but apparently still frequent enough to gain a space on your cloud.

The temptation to see it as a window to your soul – or your Twit-soul, anyway – seems a respectably objective hypothesis that, better still, opens up a bit of fun. So here’s the cloud, followed by a little playful (but sometimes pregnant?) poetasting:

The “self-promoter” (i.e., guy who likes to share his thoughts and seek yours in reply) inevitably tops the cloud with “New Post.” (Shamelessly) Guilty. (But note: We can promote others too, as below )

But I’m happy to see the next most frequent tag is “Thanks,” next to the thanked-for “@dmcordell.”

There’s lots of poetry there too. I especially like:

From the obsessive AP Lit teacher:

Check classroom – college coming.

From the secular naturalist mystic:

Day’s delicious design.

From the army veteran who ain’t above a little spicy naughtiness now and then:

Doing @dswaters? Easy.

(Sue, I think I know you enough to know you’ll ROFL at that one! )

From the 1001 Flat World Tales and Project Global Cooling guy:

Getting global, going google.

From the best teacher in me:

Learn learning.

From the guy who loves passionate students worldwide:

Life, @lindseak! Look! Love!

From the guy who likes the virtual cocktail parties:

Need network! Play, pln!

From the blogging evangelist:

Post posts, ppl!

From the Church of Poetry acolyte:

Reading real right.

From the guy who pines from Korea for his life’s love, China:

Send Seoul Shanghai.

From the guy who reads Dean:

Share @shareski.

From the guy who reads Sylvia’s tweets from late-night jazz clubs:

Sleep, @smartinez.

From the guy who tried to pull his network into his classroom:

Sorry, @sschwister: story (student stuff). Sure.

From the guy who knows a true teacher:

@taylorteacher, teach teachers teaching.

From the guy who knows a smart librarian of the futur(a):

@technolibrary: tell.

From the guy who knows mashups:

Things think.

From the guy who blogs (almost) daily:

Thinking time today.

From the guy looking for young fires wanting kindling:

Wait. Want. Watch.

From the lonely groom in exile:

Wedding week.

From the guy who Will makes chuckle:

Weird wiki, @willrich45!

From the wannabee Whitmanesque bard:

Wish! Wonder! Work, world!

From the guy who just passed 500 posts in 16 months, after 25 years of writing almost nothing:

Write years.

If you want to play likewise, call it a voluntary meme. Link back here so we can also see your “twit soul.”

Short and sweet, that’s the question. I find it fascinating from the angles of psychology and sociology. Lots of talk about “self-promotion” on Twitter around the blog-hood these days. I frankly don’t know what it means. I say as much in this reply to comments on my last post:

I also wonder about all the “self-promotion” talk going on. If by that we mean announcing a new post we just wrote, it seems most people do it (me included), and I actually like it. It gives me a chance to discover more about the personalities in my Twitbin. I actually use Twitter far more than my RSS reader these days to read new posts. (I also like the writerly aspect of it: Tweeting a New Post announcement requires the ability to write a terse blurb that entices me to click the link.)

Is that what people mean by “self-promotion”? Posting links to new posts? I see it as inviting conversation on the blog, I guess.

If that’s not what people mean by self-promotion,what do they mean?

Can we get specific in the comments? What exact actions constitute “self-promotion” to you? I feel like a Beverly Hillbilly clueless about manners at Mr. Drysdale’s mansion.

Photo by Trainman74

I’m afraid this will sound presumptuous, when I intend it in the same way as when I ask students to give me feedback to help classes improve. What I’m talking about is this:

I’ve been invited to present three sessions at the Shanghai Learning 2.008 Conference next September. What I offer is largely up to me.

I have a few ideas, but really think that readers and people in my network can guide me to make the best choices. To me, “best” means something not offered by the other presenters.

So my question: What, if anything, can I offer that is unique, and most likely won’t make it into the conference mix if I don’t add it? What one, two, three topics should I bring with me to Shanghai Learning 2.008?

I would so appreciate feedback on this. My mind is too close to my head for me to see it clearly, and differentiate from other minds out there.

So please, again, help me make Learning 2.008 more diverse in its offerings.

Just sharing another quick writing exercise to follow up on the “titles and introductions” lesson using Alltop, since some writing teachers seemed to appreciate that one.

We did this lesson in my PLN/Networked Learning writing elective last week.  So many of my students, after 10+ years of writing in school, were writing post after post of the most monotonous, artless sentence structure – the basic Subject + Verb + Object or Complement – that reading them was like Chinese water torture.  Not good, when your classwork is a real-world blog project you hope will attract readers about your (presumed) passion, and will continue to be yours long after the school year is over.

So I adapted an exercise I learned from a Six Traits of Effective Writing workshop I  attended years ago in Shanghai by posting it on the class blog, and having students “turn it in” in comments to the post in class.  Here it is:

Leave a comment in which you write this sentence with as many sentence openings as you can – YOU CANNOT ADD OR SUBTRACT ANY WORDS. YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO MAKE AT LEAST FIVE DIFFERENT SENTENCES WITH DIFFERENT OPENINGS BY SIMPLY REARRANGING:

He was quickly and happily crossing the street eating a hamburger when the bus came out of nowhere and ran over him.

As in the titles and introductory “hooks” lesson, I had students revise their previous posts to vary their sentence openings.  Again, the differences after revision were evidence that this quick lesson helped students to see the monotony of their own writing styles.

It’s a pretty fun exercise, by the way.  Should we turn this into an open thread and see who can write the most variations, without changing the meaning of the original sentence, or adding to or subtracting from the original words?

(P.S. I dashed this sentence off spontaneously, because I lost the sentence used in the workshop. If any of you writing teachers out there have done something like this and have a sentence that works better, please share it for the good of all.)

Photo credit: martha madness on Flickr.

As the title says, short and sweet: What are your favorite blogs for 21st century teaching, by subject matter? 

As a classroom teacher myself with a 3/4 teaching load plus unofficial tech coordinator duties for k-12 at my school, I don’t have much time this year to stay abreast of all the great teacher bloggers out there. I think this thread can be useful for others like me, for teachers looking for others in their subject area, and for professional development types looking for models to share in their workshops.

So real simple, again: At a minimum, list the blog name, blog address, teacher name, and content area, and age group they teach (primary, middle, secondary is fine).

I have a project in mind that will use your recommendations to, I hope, move things forward.

And if you’re a teacher yourself, don’t be shy: list yourself

I haven’t done an open thread in a while – still chewing on that last one on “designing your dream 1:1 school elective”. But here’s a question that’s been nagging me for a while, and that I’ve wanted to put to as many people out there that will weigh in. Because I can’t tell if my case is normal, or the exception.

It has to do with this: of my four years of high school education back in the late ’70s, here is the “knowledge” I remember:

Psychology Class:

“Functional Fixedness” is what I’d now call “inside-the-box thinking.” People with functional fixedness don’t realize, for example, that with a candle, a match, and a fishing hook, you actaully have a “wall-mounting kit.” (Melt the wax on the wall and embed the hook in it. Let it dry and solidify. Voila: hang a picture on the hook.) I never watched the old TV show MacGyver, but whenever I heard about the cool things he could jimmy with the random objects at hand, I always thought: “MacGyver gets functional fixedness.”

Story: A guy knocked on my door once asking for a coathanger. He’d locked his keys in his car. I went out with him to help. The lock peg was one of those chrome deals with no lip or head – nothing for the coat-hanger to grab on to. And the chrome was too smooth to offer traction to the hanger. I pulled the chewing gum out my mouth, fixed it on the hook of the hanger, and sure enough, it grabbed that chrome peg and pulled it up, unlocking the car door, in a second flat. Thank you, MacGyver. And thank you, high school psychology class.

Oh. I remember genotype and phenotype, too. And phrenology. And something about Freud. And Maslow’s Hierarchy.

English Class:

I remember writing an essay on the Iliad based on my reading of the Classics Illustrated Comics version. And getting an A. I remember “Et tu, Brutus?“ I remember writing some lurid report on the serial killer, Son of Sam. (It was fun trying to get the horror of being his victim in the opening paragraphs. That I remember that is noteworthy. This was 1977.)

Social Studies:

I remember absolutely nothing from high school social studies. I didn’t fall in love with history until far into college.

Math:

I remember finding geometry fun and easy. I remember failing Algebra because I skipped too much school.

Science:

I remember nothing from high school science. And I’m trying to right now. Something about cells, mitochondria, metastasis, cancer. Something about kingdoms and phyla and other taxonomic categories.

Art:

I remember making a block print. I remember having a painful crush on cheerleader Cheryl Newman, who always sat with me, but whom I was too shy to pursue. But I digress.

Physical Education and Health:

I remember absolutely nothing. Oh wait: four food groups. And I am what I eat.

I’m really trying here.

Other Disciplines:

If I took any other classes, I’m darned if I remember them at all.

Valuable Life-Skills I Learned in High School:

Don’t hate me. I can’t think of one. Other than “Fight bullies early, or suffer them for years.” And “Friendship is pretty important. It gets you through the high school years.”

So my question for this open thread: What value did high school have for you? What knowledge do you a) remember at all from all those hours of studying and testing? and b) find useful today? Expand if you like.