Beyond School

"Old dogs" my mange-ridden tail. (I'm the guy with the receding hairline, inset lower left.)

I’ve been meaning to scratch this itch of a digitized reading/writing/speaking unit for any school with basic podcasting gear for a while, but have been too busy.

Busy with a new job, here in Seoul, writing and announcing radio news. I applied for it a good two months ago, and after a glacial hiring process, got the nod in mid-November. (Some of my fellow tweets know this.)¹

And while it’s obvious that I enjoyed the advantage of being a foreigner when it came to breaking into radio at my age, I want to add that it didn’t hurt to have a background teaching reading, writing, and speaking skills for eight years. The old joke I loved as a new Humanities graduate – “I have a Liberal Arts degree: Will that be for here or to go?” – seems less funny now, because less true.  The basic skills – reading, writing, speaking, listening, which really just mean communicating, in the end – have more value to them than we often credit.

That teaching unit I mentioned? I think about it most days as I drive home from work. In a nutshell, it’s this: invite your students to turn your content, whatever your subject matter, into five-minute “top of the hour” newscasts, applying the craft of writing for radio (great resource here), and then speaking for radio. Then have them follow up, at certain points, with “talk radio” in which they discuss and debate their “content news.” In addition to that work-flow’s simple progression from fact-mastery (identify the main ideas of each section of a chapter and distill them into a short, well-crafted précis) to higher-order thinking (analyze, synthesize, evaluate those main ideas in a natural discussion), there are two more bonuses: first, the technology slice is so simple it’s invisible (in live studio news broadcasts, you only get one chance to announce the news, so for students that means hit record, read for five minutes, then wrap by hitting “stop” and call it a day), and technology should ideally be as invisible as pen and paper; and second, the activity develops all the real-world skills that come with real journalism and broadcasting (or, as Wes Fryer puts it in regards to podcasting, “narrowcasting”).

Glancing back at my last post about Linda Darling-Hammond on performance-based assessment, this type of learning-while-doing workshop measures performance across a wide range of literacy skills: reading for main ideas, writing them with economy and accuracy (and no passive voice, mostly action verbs, citation of sources, distinctions between “alleging” and “charging,” and more), and best of all, speaking with proper pace, volume, inflection, emphasis, pitch variety, and all the other qualities radio announcers have to master to avoid losing their listeners to the next station on the dial.

It’s “real-world project-based learning” that uses the same skills as outlining, note-taking, and giving those schooly little front-of-the-classroom speeches.

The only glitch I can see is this: if you have 20 students that you put into pairs, they can’t all record at the same time in class, so they’ll have to do the actual recording outside of class. They can still have the class period as the workshop to read and write their news scripts, and practice announcing them to each other. They can also discuss and outline the questions and topics for the higher-order “talk show” piece.

Here’s the process we follow at my station. I really think it could be duplicated in an 80-minute block. At work, I do it as part of a team of two. Here it is:

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.: Read newswires (in class, this could be, say, a chapter from a history textbook), select ten articles (sections from the textbook) for the 5-minute 9:00 hourly, divide the labor, then condense those news articles – which read aloud would take two or three minutes each – into crisp little 20-to-30 second summaries of main ideas.

That means cutting about 90% of the length, without cutting the important ideas. (In other words, that means: critical reading for main ideas.)

8:30 to 8:50 a.m.: Practice reading the scripts, making last-minute adjustments where necessary. Focus on the oral skills here: breath control, pace and pause, acceleration and deceleration, words and phrases to emphasize (just consciously watch or listen to any TV or radio newscaster, and notice how different their speaking is from normal off-air speech).

8:50 to 9:00: Go upstairs to the studio, make sure your pages are in order.

9 to 9:05: Announce the news. No second chances.

Again, the reading, writing, and practicing take 80 minutes – a standard block period. The actual recording would have to be done outside of class (Skype, anyone?).

Now for the testimonial: When training for this gig, my first few attempts at speaking were disasters. Adrenaline would make me read too fast. I couldn’t control my breath, so you’d hear huge whooshing sounds as I came up for air after long sentences. My voice and hands shook. I couldn’t meet the 5-minute final out deadline. I couldn’t turn pages skillfully – you’d hear rattling paper or, worse, page one seque to page three because I’d lifted two pages instead of one, resulting in an economy article ending with a surreal sports score followed by a brain-frozen omigod pause. My vocal style would start strong, but during the underwater feeling of the third and fourth minute, I’d drop into a monotone without realizing it. And more.

But my partner’s constructive feedback and encouragement, and self-critique by listening to the performance, and imitation of newscasters online and on air, soon – within a week – led to massive improvement in both writing and speaking, by all accounts. I still have the job, so that must be the general consensus. My point here is that, done regularly, giving students time to stumble and fail, then try again until they succeed and become finally comfortable with all this literacy, will, I’m convinced, make them much stronger readers, writers, and speakers than ye olde schooly lecture-outline-take notes-summarize-give a speech drill.

It was the same with the reading and writing. My partner and I took forever, the first few days, to be able to hone in on the main ideas in all the articles we re-wrote, leading to no practice-time before going live and worse. But now, our speed has at least doubled. We’ve developed the skills, in other words, of skimming, evaluating, separating central from supporting information, and re-writing those quickly and clearly.

So, when I re-enter the classroom next year (yes, you heard that right), this performance-based workflow will be one I introduce early in the year, and sustain throughout it.

I know it’s not original, by the way, and I’m sure many teachers are doing this type of thing. I’m just struck by it because I’ve experienced it from the other (and real-world) end, as a learner.

1. The station is the first all-English radio station in Korean history, and launched December 1. La-de-da. [↩]

He wins in a Democrat landslide. Hopes are high for a progressive agenda unseen since the New Deal, and he delivers, in the first days of his presidency, an avalanche of legislation meant to fulfill those hopes.

But he also inherits a military conflict that his advisers are counseling him to escalate – with a “surge,” we might say – and the president follows that advice. Things go downhill from there.

“He,” of course, is President Lyndon Baines Johnson – LBJ. But the parallels with President Obama are obvious. Just substitute “Afghanistan and Iraq” for “Viet Nam.”

LBJ on PBS (click image for larger view)

What an amazing time to be a US History teacher – especially with resources like the “American Experience: The Presidents” documentary series from America’s Public Broadcasting System (PBS) available, free and online (and many available for free download, with close captions ideal for ESL students – get ‘em while they’re hot!).

I just watched the LBJ episode and can’t wait to watch more. Coupling Obama’s presidency with LBJ’s in a compare/contrast discussion would surely enliven any US History classroom this year.

Whether you’re a teacher, student, or life-long learner, you can’t go wrong with this adventure in education. It beats the pants off of textbooks.

(And teachers, be sure to notice the teaching resources and podcasts also available for free on the site.)

‘Nuff said.  I hope it puts the emotion in history for you as it did for me. It’s tragic how emotionless schools can make such an intense subject.

I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose – voluntary, as usual – could have more social value than the bevy of “Stop Bullying!” messages we most often see in response to this ugly subject. Here’s Jack:

Clay,

I googled bullying stories because I wanted something to help me through troubles that I am currently facing in ninth grade. “Stop bullying!” sites really didn’t help me. This was just the kind of story I was looking for. I get called names feverishly because I didn’t make the best impression first semester. I try not to care what other people think of me but it feels like I am always watching my back.

Anyways, this story was very interesting indeed. Thanks a lot for sharing. It helped substantially. [Emphasis added.]

I’ve already thanked Jack, but I want to thank him again. He confirms that for him, at least, “Stop Bullying” messages may be nice and all, but they don’t do much to comfort those trying to cope with being bullied.

I’m not saying anti-anything messages have no positive value. I’m just saying they often fail to help the victims of the thing being opposed. Telling bullies not to bully may be worth the effort, though it’s apparently predicated on the dubious belief that it’s effective to appeal to the compassionate side of bullies, who in my experience have almost always been a pretty heartless bunch. Bullies enjoy psycho-social benefits from bullying – profits, in a sense – in the same way arms dealers do from selling weapons. Appeals to delicate instincts require delicate audiences, and delicacy is a thing usually absent from these hardened types.

But as Jack testifies, just hearing Bullied Success Stories – that survival is worth it and life gets better? That’s a speech-act worth performing.

So the Meme: Share Your “Bullied Then, Successful Now” Stories

I did it in my podcast, a 30 minute story – literally, a story – of my experience of three years of bullying in high school. It’s actually just an mp3 of the class session in which I told the story to my students (there was bullying going on in that grade). I just fired up GarageBand and recorded it as I shared it with my class.

That’s one way to do it. Other ways:

• a blog post
• a webcam video
• a Skypecast
• a Comic Life or photo-essay
• a VoiceThread
• [your idea here]

If none of those work for you, but you have a story to tell, you can also leave a comment or drop me an email volunteering for a Skype conference call, where we can take more of a group story-telling session. I can do the editing and turn it into a podcast.

I hope this makes sense to you. It does to me. Jack’s comment strengthened my belief that, short of somehow stopping bullying – and come on, it’s been with us as long as war – one of the most helpful things we can do is offer ourselves, and our stories, as living proof that the nightmare can be survived, and this dream called life can become sweeter as it moves into adulthood.

I often throw dreamy ideas like this out on this blog, and they land with a thud. This one seems a likely candidate as the latest in that series. But I hope not. My bullying podcast gets a surprising number of visits from people googling “real life bullying stories” and such, and it gets downloaded quite a bit too.

So there is a need.

And instead of putting more energy into “stop bullying” sermons (which I’m not saying we should stop), we can maybe devote it to stories of hope.

I know it’s a busy time, so if you can only get around to it later – this summer, even – that’s fine. Just link here whenever it’s done. If we get enough of these, we can make a permanent site for them on a wiki, or even a dedicated blog.

And by the way: this offer is open to any students out there with anything to say as well. I’d love to host a Skype conference call about this topic.

Photo: Locker by Steven Fernandez

I promised in an earlier post to give the link when Teachers Teaching Teachers posted its podcast with students weighing in on “How to Be Unschooly” in blogs, Twitter, and more. Consider it done. It is so worth a listen.

There’s something to say, too, about the back-story on this. Soojin, the Korean student who generated the tweet that triggered the podcast, was a student of mine – but from last year. As Soojin discusses in the podcast, my efforts to push him, as a member of my classroom, to turn on to connective writing didn’t work. A year later, he’s out there doing it independently – I see him on Twitter all the time, and read his blog – and out of nowhere, from Korea, Soojin is causing educators in New York to invite him to a podcast, and invite me as almost an afterthought. I love that.

I also loved finding the other student pioneers on that Skype call and chat – especially, and for reasons similar to the Soojin story, Lindsea. A Hawaii student, I “met” Lindsea last year through my classes’ collaboration on the first 1001 Flat World Tales with her class with teacher Chris Watson. Lindsea is now, like Soojin, a part of my network, and a student pioneer.

You’ll meet other pioneering students on the podcast as well:

• Hannah, a student at principal Chris Lehmann’s Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia (and an excellent writer and speaker I “pray” will contribute to Students 2.0 regularly, and pull Philadelphia into Project Global Cooling next year). Hannah’s been blogging intensely about environmental issues in her region, and mentioned she’s received little to no encouragement from comments. Can we remedy that?
• Ben, from the excellent New York City Students group blog – another fantastic model of real student blogging. (Ben, as I told you on the podcast, I invited you all to Students 2.0 when I was seeking recommendations from my network, and Diane Cordell pointed me to you. That offer is still open as an additional, less frequent, non-competitive megaphone for your group.)

And then, manning the chat channel with his usual good questions and helpful hands, was another Philadelphia student I’ve come to know over the past year: Tyrone Kidd. Tyrone, I’ve wanted to give a shout-out about how impressive you’ve been as another pioneer since you popped up on my radar (and in my Seoul Networked Learning class blog) a few months ago. I love your pioneering spirit.

All the students above are noteworthy for showing they can navigate these networks, and prudently and maturely learn along with us.

They’re also noteworthy for teaching us how to make blogs and social networking “unschooly” to them. But for that, you’ll need to listen to the TTT podcast. (And Paul Allison, it was nice to finally make contact, so many months after discovering your blog.)

Photo: Pioneer Aviator Bessie Coleman, First African American Pilot from PingNews on Flickr

Jaeho and Younsuk were gracious enough to give me a half hour of their time this Monday night for this Skype interview about the Basketball Without Borders blog and podcast project. I’ll go ahead and re-embed the video interview I shot with them directly after their Skype interview with their college basketball hero KJ Matsui a month ago (see the original post here):

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXFiBlLD2yk[/youtube]

A month later now, they discuss with me how having their own real-world, self-selected blog project for our English Seminar elective feels (click here for all posts about this “networked learning” class). As I say in the podcast, this class is far from perfect, but Jaeho and Younsuk give some very interesting feedback on how this real-world project-based learning approach has improved their speaking and writing skills – and motivation – differently than what they’ve experienced in a traditional “writing and speech” class.

Again, this is my first attempt for this type of teaching. Listening to Jaeho and Younsuk makes me want to stick with it beyond this “beta” version next time around. I can’t urge Language Arts teachers strongly enough to give these guys a listen. It’s a half hour, edited, with nice music for you and everything.

A request: I begged these guys to let me link to their site for a preview – they want to finish editing and post a couple more interviews with basketball stars they’re working on before unveiling it to the basketball world – and they gave me permission to give a sneak preview to you educators. So go ahead and take a look at Basketball Without Borders (love that alliteration!), listen to their podcast with K.J. Matsui, and show them some comment love.

The podcast is enhanced with chapter headings for easy navigation in iTunes (right-click here and “save as” to download). Click the player below to listen to it here:

I just got off a live webcast with Teachers Teaching Teachers – permalink forthcoming when they post the podcast – that was entitled, I think, “How to Make YouthTwitter Less ‘Schooly’.”

The really cool thing about it?  There were as many students on the episode as teachers. “Students Teaching Teachers”?  I like it.

I learned a lot, seriously, by listening to them discuss how blogging, Twitter, global collaboration, and the whole nine yards felt to them.  What worked, what didn’t.

Kudos to TTT for making it happen. I hope it’s the first of many more.

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)
[quicktime]http://ia311303.us.archive.org/3/items/ClayBurellPodcast_ThreeSchoolsDiscoverthe21stCentury/PGCAustralia.m4a[/quicktime]

(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

[This is guest-post number two by my long-time global partner Chris Watson in Honolulu, with whom I've collaborated in Seoul for over a year now. See Chris' first guest post here. -- Clay]

Remixing Curriculum: An Interview with Lisa Stewart

Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the Learning and the Brain conference in San Francisco. The areas of focus were: brain plasticity, learning styles, reading development, emotional responses, and mindsets. If you’re interested in more details in these areas, I’ve been posting my notes, albeit slowly, to Watsoncommon. What I want to write about in this post is a question I asked at the conference for which there wasn’t a research-based answer.

It goes like this:

I was in a session about engaging students’ emotions with curriculum and leveraging their brains’ social needs with activities in class. As you can imagine, the examples covered in the session were things like group work, task-specific stations, anticipatory sets that give students the opportunity to generate the essential questions for a unit. And there was all kinds of brain research to show that these kinds of activities trigger the best hormone balance for long-term, meaningful learning to happen. My question was if virtual social environments and activities also create the same ideal brain chemistry for learning.

Apparently, there is no research in this area yet, according to the presenter. So at my school, this has become somewhat of a guiding question. What are effective practices with technology and what are the results? And there are a handful of teachers who are purposefully employing and reflecting on new kinds of activities with these questions in mind. To frame the creation of these activities, we’ve been using Marzano’s research on effective instruction as structure: Identifying similarities and differences, Summarizing, Reinforcing efforts and providing recognition, Practice, Nonlinguistic representations, Cooperative learning, Setting objectives and providing feedback, Generating and testing hypotheses, Cues, questions, and advanced organizers. Let me know if you’re interested in the full article.

Lisa, mentioned in my first guest post, is one of the teachers (she’s a technology resource teacher too) designing and implementing activities in her class that not only use the technology but explore these essential questions. The other week, I subbed her class and learned about a remix project that she’d given to her students. It was an opportunity to create a nonlinguistic representation of their understanding of Holden Caulfield. In this podcasted interview, Lisa describes the design of the assignment, some observations of the products, and how it led to a different kind of essay. Also embedded below are some example projects, one of which she references in the interview. The Voicethread blew me away! Enjoy.

Shifts are happening more and more quickly in my world. I’ve seen too many inspired visions crash on the shoals of reality to celebrate these shifts yet, but they do make me hopeful.

They’re happening with a few select students: Lindsea in Hawaii (I often want to call Lindsea “my favorite student,” but I’ve never met her outside of Skype, Twitter, blogs, and the 1001 Flat World Tales workshops where we met a year ago) and Patrick in Seoul are becoming the 21st century students I (we?) need to point to as examples, for teachers who need to see what we can only talk about. I’ve already blogged about them recently, and will return to them soon in more in-depth posts. (But see Jenny Luca’s post about their visits from Hawaii and Seoul into a classroom in Melbourne today to discuss Project Global Cooling with the Australian students: Connecting, creating, collaborating on real-world global citizenship.)

I’m equally tempted by hope because shifts are happening with my school administration. My principal, Rich Boerner (next year’s director), approved my course proposal for an elective class next year – the only one I’ll teach, as I spend the rest of my time as K-12 21st C. Learning Coordinator. I want this class to be a showcase of what the students with the right stuff – confidence, creativity, motivation, vision, courage, playfulness, outside-the-boxedness and beyond-schooliness – can do, given a classroom with an open network, MacBooks for all, and a certain kind of teacher (which means, for better or worse, me).

I was just on “Shanghai Jeff” Utecht’s and “Taiwan Dave” Carpenter’s Shifting Our School’s podcast with Chris Betcher* from Sydney, Australia. I shared my course description there, and Jeff said some listeners on the Ustream chat asked me to post the course description.

So here it is, without any claims to it being a silver bullet. Any feedback between now and next August when this class starts is more than welcome. So are any offers to connect our students next year, without teachers, by simply saying: “There are students in Korea, Hawaii, Australia, and elsewhere following Youthnet on Twitter (and on the Youthnet wikispace). You students wanting to find others to do collaborative projects can find each other there. Let me know if you need feedback on anything.” And then we teachers just focus on the quality of those projects, assessing by “sitting with” and guiding in whatever ways we can. (And in my class? Students will suggest their own grades, and justify them by showing what they learned about creating, collaborating, learning, and communicating, as well as by showing me they were not lazy or dull.)

Here it is:

Advanced Writing and Multimedia Projects:

For real writers and creators: Love to write, to speak, and/or to make films? Wish there was a class where you could work on your own ideas, your own projects, and learn advanced podcasting, film-making, writing/blogging, social networking? This class is for you. You design your project(s). You develop them however you want them to go. And you get feedback from your teacher on the quality of your writing and other multimedia (radio/podcasting, movie-making, blogging, social networking strategies). If you choose, you can learn to market your project for world attention. It will be yours to continue in coming years, when class is over.

Projects can be: creative or non-fiction, text-only, multimedia-only, or mixed. Interaction and collaboration with world students in Australia, the USA, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America via Skype, Twitter, and other tools is encouraged, but not required.

Pre-requisite: By interview only. Bring evidence that you actively write, podcast, make movies, etc; and be able to describe the project idea(s) you want the freedom to work on in school.

We’ll see how this goes. Realistically, I only hope it adds a few more “lighthouse students” to the world stage, like Lindsea and Patrick.

–

Photos: Biandronno’s trampoline by otomatuah; Isle to Red Door by StephanosP

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:

[quicktime]http://ia311320.us.archive.org/0/items/PatrickNamEducationforWell-Being_AStudentInterviewwithBillFarren/AnInterviewwithBillFarren.m4a[/quicktime]

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