Beyond School

Yes, I’ve been following Clay and know exactly what he means. I too want to do away with all of the fluff and wasting of time in a public classroom.

Trouble is, I have this pesky student loan to pay off. And I absolutely love to share the joy of learning with kids, so I don’t want to lose that. I don’t know where I would go, if not the classroom. I’m watching to see what Clay does next.

I’m not quite as brave as him…yet.
Mindy | 06.13.08 - 7:01 pm | (comment on a fantastic defense of unschooling on The New Unschooler web log)

* * *

David Warlick was live blogging and I was intrigued by this that appeared:

Hummm! so what has to start getting closed down for educators to start realizing that education business is in jeparady?

Thinking about Virtual High School, as more and more students start signing up for online literature, or online history, and principals are going to be coming around and say, “Ms Johnson, our enrollment is down, as you know, and we’re going to have to let you go.”

Hmmm -made me think. Just what is Clay Burell up to??? (You’ve been so tight lipped couldn’t help but think this is where you’re headed!!)
–Jenny Luca, reflecting on NECC from Australia

–since people are talking and wondering….

It’s a bit after 8 a.m. Tuesday. Eunjeong is still asleep, and I’m enjoying my first cup of coffee in the enclosed little balcony off of one of the four bedrooms in our new apartment in Seocho-dong, a pleasant area in Seoul’s Kangnam district on the southern bank of the Han River.  The view I see as I type is the view you see in the photo I just took with my Macbook’s Photo Booth.

The story of our decision to find a new apartment is not unconnected to the story of why I left school-teaching.  Regular readers will know that Eunjeong and I married on March 8 of this year (and a wonderful percentage of those readers beautified that day by being “virtual guests” on the live uStream.tv webcast of the wedding).  The apartment we lived in at that time was provided by the school, and it was far too small for this new family’s tastes.  Had Eunjeong been a teacher in the school’s employ, we would have qualified for a larger apartment - but she wasn’t.  Had the school agreed to include better housing to accompany the new administrative job I’d accepted as Tech Coordinator, again, things could have turned out differently.  School administrations have their own agendas, their own reasons for doing and not doing the things they do and don’t do, so there was no need for sourness here. Negotiations simply didn’t work out.

This left Eunjeong and me with a classic dilemma: decent job without a decent home, or a decent home without a secure job?  It’s a common enough problem for international school teachers, whose packages include school-provided housing.  It’s all or nothing.  And all not being enough, we chose nothing.

I felt ambivalent, too, about that new job description as Tech Coordinator.  From the outside, it looked attractive enough: oversee the training and implementation of laptop learning in the 1:1 school, while still teaching one “experimental” class in multimedia communication, networked project-based learning, etc.  I’d worked in overdrive for four years to learn both the new tools and the new pedagogies for them. I’d spent a good number of hours, too, drafting the job description for the position that would make it worth the time. (We all know that office jobs alone don’t automatically mean “job satisfaction.”)  But when all was said and done, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that I would be spending more hours trouble-shooting administrative software glitches (”Why aren’t the grades exporting with the comments?”) than developing laptop learning pedagogies with teachers, which was my calling and my hope.  In the absence of any conversations about that part of the job description - or about that job description in general - I kept having visions of the old Maytag Repairman commercial: you know, the guy sitting in the office flicking playing cards at the trash can (or drawing monkeys on a banana) because he had no opportunity to leave the office and hone his skills.  Yes, he still got paid; but he didn’t get much job satisfaction with that office job.  I suspect that’s emblematic of many Tech Coordinators in schools worldwide.

Again, this was all subtext, indirect, non-explicit. It was more than anything a gut feeling, inferred from absences more than presences - absences of suggestions to begin conversations with the next year’s new high school principal about how to shape the staff development, about how to structure the work-week, about simply having a plan in place before the year began.  Readers of my post announcing that new job in the form of a little sonnet (forgive me, reader: the Humanities teacher in me  wanted to practice iambic pentameter and Shakespearean prosody) may have noticed the less-than celebratory tone of that little ditty, especially in the sentence following it:

Silly Twitter Sonnet

I tweeted to my twitterverse last week
From high up on a twig on my lone tree.
From that frail height I sang of what I seek:
A future free of grinding schooletry.

I sang of learning far beyond the walls
of bricked-in class, and space, and time, and age;
and students heeding all creative calls
that cried to them from their own chosen page.

An echo back from that lone song I heard
from fledglings, faint from some barred far-off cage:
“We hear you, and would fly there in a word,
Were we but free to heed our inner sage.”

A bell rang then, and my frail twig gave way,
And down I plunged, to just another day.

–

I signed the contract for one more year, but in a new position: 21st Century Learning/Tech Coordinator.  We’ll see how that goes.

(I have to add one of my favorite and, it turns out, prophetic comments to that post from the best friend I’ve never met, Diane Cordell, who wrote an alternative couplet¹ that may have done its little part in changing the course of Eunjeong’s and my lives:

Or, in another universe:

So off I flew to seek a newer land
That hope and dream and promise ably spanned.

diane)

Prophetic it became. All those things converged - the housing, the absence of evidence of any teeth for the Tech Coordinator position, and my general rejection of the tragicomedy of schooliness - to bring me to my decision not to sign that Tech Coordinator contract after all.

It didn’t feel great. I’d put so much energy into the school’s decision to go 1:1, to go Macbook instead of PC, to adopt blogs and wikis and bears, oh my, the whole nine yards.  And now, after only one year, my unwillingness to be a Maytag Repair Coordinator living in a crackerbox was going to end that relationship.  Wasn’t there a third way, beyond either-or and win/lose (or lose/lose, in this case)?

For a few days, I thought I’d found a solution and a “Yes” - a third way - in another example, like Diane’s comment above, of how life-changing simple online conversations can be. This one involves my reading of a post on the web log of that loveable “bitch, hellcat, and absolute doll” Taylor the [ex-]Teacher’s web log.  Taylor’s guest-writer, Daphne, wrote an open letter to schools in which she suggested, under the heading, “Want Us to Stay?”, the following:

Give us the option to teach online or in a more flexible schedule.

If those things don’t fit in education today, then neither do we.

Long story short, that comment reminded me of my own posts’ evidence that teachers no longer have to come to the physical building to do their jobs so much - see the “teaching from home with Skype” post, or simply think about how much tech coordinating can be done from home, instead of sitting in the Repairman’s office flicking playing cards at trash baskets. It’s not like I need to be a full-time office-sitter in a Seoul school-building to administer a Moodle and WordPress MU server in Virginia, or to work on school calendars, portals, and info-management systems online.

So I made a new offer: let me drive to school the two or three days a week to teach that one experimental class, as a part-time employee. Pay me by the hour, forget the housing and benefits:  I’ll spend my newfound freedom in the other 36 hours a week creating other ways to pay my bills. As Daphne suggested, those things can fit in schools today, with enough outside-the-box thinking.  Pay me for the occasional tech work you need by the hour, too, instead of hiring a full-time card-flipper at a massively more expensive rate.

Win-win, it seemed to me.  But it didn’t turn out that way (schools are boxes, after all). So it was, after all, to be goodbye.  Beyond School, here I come.

* * *

Eunjeong is awake, now, and we have to go to the immigration office one final time, so I’ll answer the “what are you doing now?” question in a follow-up.  I’ll only add, before closing, this short version:  I’m already teaching.  Will Richardson’s post in the wake of my On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher post last January is relevant here.  Will writes:

….[D]espite what the system takes away from good teaching, few write about teaching as if it is something that can be done just as meaningfully outside of the system. That’s obviously what Clay is struggling with. And it’s what my brain continues to be chewing on. How can we start to think differently about teaching? How can we teach in meaningful, important ways outside of the current construct? How can we give good teachers the opportunity to teach without the  inconsistencies and constraints of the system? And how do we do it in ways that can still serve all of the kids the system currently serves?

That last one is the really tough one…

–and that last one is a tough one for me, too. I’ve dropped out of schooling, so traditionalists and other moralists have a wide-open target to shoot me as a sell-out - because I’m now a private tutor, for rates any self-respecting academic and educator with the knowledge, skills, and creds I have would demand.

Sticking with a bankrupt system to pay your bills is another form of selling ourselves, so by that logic, I can at least comfort myself that, either way I go, I’m still selling out.  I’m just trying to get - and give to my students - better terms in the bargain.

I have a lot more to say, and will, but in regards to that “tough one,” I’ll just point to the Eggers post I did a few months back as the direction that pulls me: teaching, like law, can include a pro bono arrangement. That’s what I’m looking at, in a very outside the box way.

And now, free of that same blasted school bell that stole so many potentially productive hours from me over the last decade, I’ll have hours and hours to freely play with tough questions like that.

A quick close: This post is shot through with how transformative the new world of writing and reading and conversing is. I’ve long meant to post about how, since starting this blog, my writing, reading, and conversing seem to literally create new futures for me. It started from the very beginning, day one, when I chose the title of this blog in December 2006. What was then hyperbole is now literal. It’s all still so very amazing.

Sorry for the length. Happy summer.

Photo credit: Monkeys on a Banana by furryscaly on Flickr (love it!)

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1. metrically spot on, the English teacher adds with a smile [↩]

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our new apartment on Tuesday - after which I hope to be able to think clearly.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying simply sharing some of the amazing free resources I’m discovering these days. Today’s offering:  Celtx (click screenshot for full view).

From the Celtx site, a partial overview of the scriptwriting, storyboarding, collaborating, production scheduling, and on-and-on-ing it performs:

Celtx is the world’s first all-in-one media pre-production software. It has everything you need to take your story from concept to production. Celtx replaces ‘paper, pen & binder’ pre-production with a digital approach that’s more complete, simpler to work with, and easier to share.

Multi-Media Friendly: Celtx helps you pre-produce all types of media - film, video, documentary, theater, machinima, comics, advertising, gaming, music video, radio, podcasts, videocasts, and however else you choose to tell your story.

All-In-One: Unlike scriptwriting software, you can use Celtx for the entire pre-production process - write scripts, storyboard scenes and sequences, develop characters, breakdown & tag elements, schedule production, and prepare detailed and informative production reports for cast and crew.

Fully Integrated: Celtx is designed to help your entire production team work together on a single, easy to share project file - eliminating the confusion of multiple project files, and the need for ‘paper and binder’.

There’s more, too: a Project Central community site for global Celtx users, and more beyond that. Check out the site for the goodness - and don’t miss the screencast tutorials to get the full effect.  Just wonderful - hats off to Celtx.

It’s cross-platform, by the way, so goodness for all, PC, Mac, and otherwise. (h/t to Ostatic for the excellent Six Essential Open Source Apps for Mac Videographers post. Go there for five more goodies beside!)

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That Networked Learning elective “English Seminar” class I taught last semester ended two weeks ago. (Sift through the archives for related posts.)

For new readers or simply people not tuned in here during the last six months, here’s a recap: Ten students of mixed grades (9-12, ages 15-18), each with a MacBook laptop (the school is 1:1), were given the most open, autonomous, swim-or-drown class experience they’d probably ever had, and are likely to ever have again.

The idea was simple:

This is a language arts course: writing, speaking, communicating.  If you spend this semester communicating about topics that “teacher” assigns, you will not be real writers. You will just be doing homework.  Writers write of their own interests and ideas.  That means you will have to find your own topics, in order to experience being a writer, speaker, film-maker, etc.

So you will develop a web-based project based on your interests; use whatever modes of communication you desire - writing, podcasting, screencasting, movie-making, etc; launch and grow your project over six months, and apply the principals of quality - in whatever “language art” mode you’ve chosen - from the mini-lessons and sitting together conferences we had; do your project singly or in teams; extra credit for using Twitter, Skype, Facebook, YouTube, and the rest to network, go global, and “imagine big.”

If you “try big” and fail, you can still receive an A, if you articulate and apply the lessons your failures taught you.

A six month project in absolute freedom will bring you to brick walls, slumps, quagmires, that may last for weeks.  As long as you push through them, and come out the other side, you don’t need to fear for your grade. I want you to experience the difficulty of not being able to quit in the face of adversity, the difficulty of freedom and responsibility, of keeping an idea alive.

If you’re lazy, unproductive, unimaginative, unconcerned about quality - you won’t do well.

You will be given almost the entirety of each 77-minute class to independently work on your project. I will occasionally give whole-class mini-lessons on authentically good writing, audio- and video-production, and will also check in with each of you by simply pulling up a chair next to you and talking about your progress, challenges, and thoughts. But the rest of the time will be yours to work. So you have no excuse for not getting that work done.

You will grade yourselves, by the way, based on your monthly production and reflection on lessons learned. You’ll have to justify your grades with evidence of your work.

Since it was the most “radical” (per Dean) “releasing of the hounds” (if I have Chris Harbeck’s gist right) and “edupunk” (if Lindsea is right, since I didn’t jump on that meme) thing I’ve done in my teaching career, and since I wrote about it regularly throughout the semester, I want to honor my contract with a final report to whatever readers out there wonder, “How did that ever turn out, anyway?”

The problem is, I’m overloaded right now. I just got back from Hong Kong yesterday, still have immigration issues to deal with, a career transition to navigate, and a new apartment to move into in ten days.

So I’m going to share with you excerpts from the final reflections some of the students wrote during the final exam, in a series. I’ll preface each student with my own summary of his/her project, and anecdotal impressions of his/her journey. A caveat, first: I wasn’t on top of my game in setting up these reflections. In the past, I’ve always created an anonymous user account on Moodle, and had students evaluate the course using that account in order to ensure maximum honesty via that anonymity. I didn’t do that this time. You’ll have to decide how much weight to give the following lines.

1. Younsuk and Jaeho: Basketball without Borders:

Younsuk, a sophomore, has been featured a lot on these pages over the last six months. He teamed with senior Jaeho to launch the Basketball without Borders project, which evolved into a beautifully networked series of podcasted Skype interviews with Asian college and professional basketball stars in the US and elsewhere. This project was the dark horse of the whole class, and it exploded in about month three to win the race by several lengths.  These guys astonished me with their ability to use their own personal and family networks to arrange interviews with players in Japan, Korea, and the US.  Nothing comes close, in my teaching experience, to seeing them enter the classroom so many times to say, “Mr. Burell, we have a Skype interview scheduled with [this or that player] for this class. Can we go to a quiet room?”  And then to see, at the end of the class, these successful audio producers come back in with grins wrapped so infectiously around their heads. (I videotaped them for Youtube in one such moment on this post.)

I had Younsuk as a freshman in English 9 the prior year - the first class I ever did classroom blogging with. I can tell you that his writing has gained impressively in ideas, in voice, in rhetoric, in style.

The irony? At the beginning of the class, Younsuk insisted, in no uncertain terms, that he had no interest in podcasting. Click here for all the posts on this blog with Younsuk and/or Jaeho.

Here are some excerpts from his reflection:

• This revolutionary course that I took this semester, revolutionized me as a person. I certainly became a better writer that cares. Through my project, I had real audience. In order to succeed, I had to have a good writing that catches people. I’ve learned to make the title catching, and I’ve learned to make sure the audience wanted to read. To do that, I had to think about the sentence styles, order of what I write about, and maybe throwing some nice metaphors. I’m starting to care about what I write a lot. And one can observe my improvement in writing if one reads my own blog. [note: this is not his PLN basketball blog, but his personal blog for his English class, now in its second year]
• As a thinker, I’ve learned to think. After doing a project about something I’m interested in, I’ve learned to think in my own way, that things  I like can turn into something like this [note: this is his basketball project blog]. After realizing this, I’ve learned to write about things that I like. And to me, writing is just like thinking. When I write about something I like, then I feel good. I’ve learned that ultimately, I would want to please the audience, but it all starts from pleasing myself with my own thoughts.
• I’ve learned that I’m a producer now.  I produce things. I’ve produced my website, I’ve produced the interviews, and I’ve produced the productivity. I never turned in anything. Everything I did in this class, was what I produced. I’ve learned that by producing, I can learn more.
• As a networker, I’m not a big user of twitter. But using our connection, we’ve reached three big-time interviewees. One of the tools that helped us was facebook. There are many “non-educational’ ways to use facebook, but it still keeps people in touch. It’s easy to contact people, and it’s easy to expand my network by becoming friends with my friends’ friends. This method led us to interview three big basketball figures in Asia. Connection is important, because with one, you can have a million.
• Again, I thank Mr. Burell for this revolutionary class. It was the only real experience I had at school.

Re: that last bullet: Man, if only students realized how much teachers need to hear that from their students. My morale would have been so much higher this semester if I’d only known he was getting what I was trying to deliver. Hear this, students: your teachers need positive feedback more than you realize. Give it to them, if you want them to stay in the classroom.

*    *    *

Jaeho was a senior, and Younsuk’s partner. As I said in a comment to Jaeho’s final reflection before graduating, “Thanks for making this vision worthwhile. It’s been amazing to know you as a student in this class, and as a different student in AP Lit. I much prefer this class.”

Because my wife just got home, and writing is a completely different endeavor as a married man (and this is light-years from a complaint, as I’m very, very happy), I’m going to simply paste Jaeho’s entire final post here (being on the school server, the entire pln blog will probably be deleted soon, so call this an archive):

Signing Off

Photo by: Jarrellish

“It is a small world after all”. The past five months truly taught me what this quote meant.

As with most other cases, the start was not so great. I did not want to make this into a academic, insignificant project. Deliberating desperately to figure out a way to make this work, I came up with a risky idea of focusing on the stereotypes about basketball. Due to the relatively long time that took us to decide on what we are going to do, the group went on a slow start.

Connecting to the world.. It was not so far away from us after all. After I chose the focus, things started to work out for us rather quickly. Luckily for us, the Columbia University basketball star Keijuro Matsui accepted our interview request. “Maybe this could actually work“, I thought to myself. Then Ko Yada, then Kelvin Kim. In approximately 4 weeks, we had interviewed 3 basketball sensations. The empty parking lot started to fill when visitors started coming to see the show and naturally the show began to flourish..

Writing… This was an inevitable part of the class. The primary problem was not knowing my weaknesses. It wasn’t too long before Mr. Burell pointed out that my sentence structures are always the same. (Subject verb object). Clearly, I had to change this style to make people want to read me. As time went, luckily for me, my writing improved to a level where Mr. Burell said “That was good!” I have not completely grasped the art of organic writing yet, but started to notice where to pause, where to put in the funny stuff. Looking back, my lack of confidence about writing was preventing me from trying out different things in my writing.

At this point, I can honestly say that the English Seminar Class has taught me two valuable experiences that I did not experience anywhere else. It has taught me the power of technology, and the techniques of creative writing.

For the ending, I want to thank Mr. Burell for having faith in us when we were lost in the Sahara Desert and helping us find something that can be extended into the world.  Thanks.

Stay tuned for a few more student reports.

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In my third month of writing here about 21st century education, way back in March 2007, I put the pom-poms down, stopped cheerleading, and started thinking about all the ways schools can kill the learning that is possible when students have a simple laptop and a blog. This snippet from a post from back then says it all, and my views haven’t changed on this one. (Add “and laptop learning” whenever you see “student blogging”):

[My] last two or three posts–and the comments, thank you – have conjured depressing visions in my head at random moments. I’m a bit worried about the future of student blogging.

I fear we teachers are going to ruin it for the learners.

“Blogging is just another way to turn in homework.” That’s the sentence that scares me. Because that’s how non-blogging teachers, and perhaps those unfamiliar with literacy pedagogy – communication across the curriculum, writing to learn, authentic writing, and more – will probably use blogging in the classroom.

And it will become drudgery. And the students (not learners here, because “teacher” can’t let go of being “teacher,” dominating, squelching, and dictating to students) will bang out the minimum for “blog homework,” as in old days, and turn to something authentic. Like their MySpace.

Toward a solution (or at least mitigation): train teachers in the philosophy of blogging before letting them use it in their classrooms.

[Update 6 hours later: I misspoke when I said "my views haven't changed" since I wrote this. They have. I don't think any longer that "training teachers in the philosophy of blogging" (or 1:1 learning) is enough to make it work, if they're not also mentored by someone who is immersed in the 21st century learning movement - and that mentor is acknowledged and supported. Teacher training is no evidence of teacher learning.]

Since writing this, our school has become a 1:1 Apple laptop school. All the students have blogs. They have iLife, so they can podcast, make iMovies, the whole nine yards. One of the students in my PLN class, Younsuk (you may have read about his Basketball Without Borders project, in which he and another student have arranged Skype interviews - in class - with Asian college and pro basketball players, and podcasted them on their Wordpress.com blog), recently wrote the below on his “schooly” (required) blog. It’s just a snapshot, and I wish he’d have offered a possible solution for getting students to write on their blogs without somehow requiring it. I also wish he’d have the opportunity to learn that visual communication, the language of film, is a valuable (and not easy) skill to develop as well. But still, there’s much to learn from him. And he makes me wonder if my “prophecy” is coming true. Here it is:

[Our school] thinks we’re cool because the students carry around MacBooks. But carrying around a laptop doesn’t make a school cool, although it will certainly make the school look cool. Did [the school] get MacBooks so we can look cool? I hope not.

What are some of the cool things we do with our laptops?

[Most] students would be shouting, “iMovies!” right now. It is unique that we don’t write papers for our English final exam. Instead, we make movies using iMovie. But, is that really cool? Because I think there’s more potential to this than making a funny iMovie just to get grades for English class. I would understand it if it was for a movie making class. But does making iMovie enhance our skills in English…?

[Our school] is just trying to look cool by trying to use MacBooks whenever we can.

I’ve had too many teachers assign us to “make an iMovie” for this and that. I had to make an iMovie for my World Geography class and Asian Studies class. I was surprised when even my Spanish teacher told me to make an iMovie. It is obvious [our school] is trying too hard…to look cool.

And out of all my classes, Writing Seminar is one class that I think “is cool.” Yep, you guessed it right, it’s his class.

Personal Learning Network, or PLN is what we’ve been doing the whole semester in this class. We use our MacBooks to interact with people from all over the world, and learn how to write for [a] true audience. Not just that, we learn how to accomplish stuff through networking and meeting new cool people.

I have done some big things in this class. I have interviewed Asian college basketball players, uploaded the interview on our website to spread their words and break the stereotype of “Asians can’t play ball.” Some of them play professional basketball right now. I’ve interacted with some real people.

It’s much easier to see what I’ve done if you click here.

Now that’s the right thing to do with these laptops.

Macbook gives us “true audience.” In other words, it is real world out there.

While the MacBooks in the Writing Seminar classroom are shining, the other MacBooks in other classrooms are crying. They say, “what the hell am I doing here?”

I replied to Younsuk on his post, and will share that here as well:

I have a fantasy that, because you and others honestly express yourselves about your educational experience on your blogs, you eventually have an influence on how your classes are conducted - in other words, you teach your teachers and admin how it feels to be their student.

It’s delicate. You shouldn’t attack individuals or be too harsh, but at the same time shouldn’t mute your criticisms out of fear.

This medium can be powerful. Student voice can be powerful if it uses it. I’m thinking you and Soojin Lee and a few others could intentionally create change by focusing your efforts on starting discussion online about what changes you’d like to see.

I’ve read your entire blog tonight. I’ll be using some of your quotes in an upcoming post, and possibly in a book I hope to write this summer.

One last word, in defense of teachers: they’re new at this. Many of them don’t get it at all. So patience is only fair. They’re trying. But you can help them get it through good-willed criticism and instruction. You can teach them.

Stay in touch, Younsuk. You know where to find me.

I share this for many reasons, but primarily this: it’s not enough to “give professional development workshops” to teachers about 21st century education, and equate that teacher seat-time with effective training. Let’s be honest about that. We all know seat-time and certificates are no surer proof of learning for teachers than they are for students.

Younsuk’s situation brings up another important issue as well: laptop schools that don’t truly, really, really have true, true, true “coordination” of instruction risk burning students out with “three iMovie final projects,” as is Younsuk’s case, all due the same week. A good movie takes an hour of editing for every minute of the final product. I wonder how many minutes these students are expected to produce for their finals. It’s scary. And the solution is a real tech coordinator who monitors the load of production the same way a bus coordinator coordinates a workable bus schedule. You can’t leave this up to chance.

Finally, Younsuk’s mention that Macbooks help learning by allowing students to connect and network with the world is something no teacher or administrator is going to understand without doing it. It’s 20th century education with a shiny bell and whistle otherwise. Just a new way to turn in homework. The immigrants in power will think it’s cutting edge, but the students will think otherwise.

I’m curious what all of you read into this. I give credit to my school for trying to pioneer this territory, and expect that things will improve. But it’s not an easy task.

—

You can see all those old “Saving Classroom Blogging from Teachers” posts from Spring ‘07 here. The ideas there are arguably more relevant, now that blogging and digital storytelling and all that are spreading, than they were a year ago when I wrote them. The comments, as usual, hold the gold:

• On the Uses and Abuses of Student Blogging
• Teacher Think-aloud on Student Blogging (a Fresh Start)
• Post-script on Student Blogging Think-Aloud
• On Classroom Blogging 3: Sucking It Dry: Teachers as Vampires
• Blogging 4: Seeking Stakes for Dracula’s Heart–Moodle for “homework,” blogs for “real work”?
• The Conversation Begins: Saving Learner-Bloggers from Teacher-Vampires
• More on Protecting Classroom Bloggers from Teachers
• The Silver Bullet? One Idea for Saving Blogging from the Werewolf
• Phoenix, Blogging: Writing Beyond School
• “Teachers as Blogging Vampires” and “Blogging as Conversation” Gone a Bit Surreal

Photo credit: “Portrait of a Monkey” by s-a-m

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In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“

–the logic of the above quote is sloppy, in my view. Both sides are right: How can we argue with the Postmodernist insight into the basic “constructedness” of all (yes, all) texts? Textual narratives are written by individuals with biases, blind spots, no direct experience, limited sources, and other imperfections. So any historical or biographical narrative, from Gilgamesh to the Gospels to Tacitus to Thomas Friedman, is indeed, as the postmodernists claim, “based on the personal interpretation of sources,” and thus should be read with a healthy dose of skepticism and the need for evidence and logic.

But Evans is also right to “defend the worth of history.” It’s silly to think otherwise. That historians are neither omniscient, neutral, or infallible does not mean that history is unknown or unknowable. The evidence from the past - those letters, journals, books, artifacts, ruins, buildings, maps, and all the rest that we call “primary sources” - attests to the basic facticity of a person or event. Socrates existed and was executed in Athens: this seems safe to say, based on evidence from various sources of the time. But the person of Socrates, his character? Plato says “hero,” Aristophanes says “charlatan,” and a modern philosopher says “anti-democratic villain.” One person, Socrates, is defined differently by three different narrators’ personal (and “scholarly”) interpretations of him. And thinking about those interpretations, and ideally creating our own, does have value for us. Pity any democracy, for example, that is ignorant of Hitler’s fear- and anger-mongering manipulation of German voters to get himself legally appointed dictator. (In other words, pity Bush/Cheney’s United States?)

Again, the point: We need history, but we also need to understand the methods and practices of the historian - the search for evidence, its evaluation and selection, its literal “weaving” into, or omission from, narrative “text.”

Schools, as usual, generally score an F-minus in teaching students this “constructedness” of history. They’re too busy stuffing their victims’ heads with the names, dates, and summaries - the “facts” - that those victims will then be tested on. (In most cases, said victims will remember their test grades far longer than they’ll remember the content, since schools largely teach that grades are more important than learning.)

Anyway, this is a round-about intro to a comment thread I’ve been enjoying on Will Richardson’s recent “My Blogging Legacy” post. In that poignantly mind-bending post, Will imagines his children, after he himself has passed away,

. . . . turning to the computer and accessing an avatar representation of me who carried in him the compilation of all my writing, blogging, photos, movies, oral histories and more that I had created while I was alive. And that avatar was able to sort through all of that information and answer their questions, have a conversation with them in fact, in my voice. At some point in the dream, I realized that the avatar was not only feeding back historical data, but was also using the sum of my work to offer advice and counsel in ways that I most likely would have offered were I alive. Even though I wasn’t there physically, it’s like a piece of my brain lived on, one that was able to provide for my kids a richer understanding of their histories and legacies.

At a certain point, I riffed off Will’s idea, then Christopher Sessums chimed in with this:

I’ve been reflecting on the notion of ghost blogs, i.e., blogs of users who have died. I imagine this phenomena will begin to take on “new life” as the first wave of bloggers move on to that “undiscover’d country, from whose bourn/No traveller returns–” (Shak. Hamlet).

I think about how in meatspace we have a place to go to, to mourn, remember, reflect, pay our respects. What will this look like online?

Your post provides a wonderful vision of how it could be.

Given my own sense of mortality, it makes sense to start thinking/planning now, if only in a brainstorming-sense.

I shot back,

And Christopher, to throw the irresistible local flavor from East Asia in: how will these “ghost blogs” meld with Confucian ancestor worship? The laptop (or holograph) next to the photo of the deceased blogger-ancestor on the altar, behind the incense and candles?

Then Chris wrote:

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Where do blog posts go when we die? They never cease (provided your ISP is still in business).

. . . . I also like the fact that my identity is dispersed in tiny bytes across the ether. Being a puzzler, i.e., one who enjoys puzzles, I like the idea of searching across multiple forms of representation to create a picture of a person’s life. So I’m not sure I would want my identity isolated in one space, but instead distributed thus requiring those interested in me to explore and put together their own picture of me.

Then I riffed back with a fantasy history or non-fiction writing assignment - biographical writing, specifically. Since Chris then offered - threatened? - to “kiss” me in response (and though I virtually slapped him, I was flattered), I figure I’ll post that assignment idea here. I do think it’s cool enough, honestly, to pass on to any history or non-fiction writing teachers out there. Here it is:

A History Assignment I’d Like to See:

Chris, A belated Eureka-riff re: your “distributed identity”: a creative, project-based biography-writing or historiography teacher or professor could do some cool stuff treating our already-distributed online personae as “primary sources” from which student historians or biographers had to draw to construct a representation of us.

*INHALE*

What I mean is, like, “Write a biographical sketch of X in which X’s public blog represents his/her public life, but X’s comments on others’ blogs represents his/her (more) private life. Construct a narrative of X’s personal life, tastes, and thoughts by analyzing their Flickr photos, LastFM playlists, YouTube favorites, etc.”

I know I’m freer in comments than I am on my blog posts, for example. And that a good reader could infer a lot about me from those other “primary sources” listed above.

It would be even more interesting, from a literacy perspective, to have more than one person construct a biography or history of the same individual. If you and I, for example, had to sift through the same “legacy” Will has confetti’d the web with, odds are we’d construct significantly different identities due to our different selection/omission choices and subjective bents.

Interesting, anyway. Just playing around, whiling away the writer’s block.*

Wouldn’t that be cool? And wouldn’t students learn just how slippery history and biography are by comparing their different narrative constructions? And wouldn’t they learn, sidewise, about how revealing they can be with their online identities, when others decide to sift through them like this, and possibly think twice about what they reveal in all future posts?

—

(*Speaking of that writer’s block, it’s due to many factors: the Project Global Cooling concert went off quite successfully in a downtown Seoul nightclub last weekend, but was exhausting to pull off; I’m in the midst of moving into a new apartment; the last-weeks-of-school madness is full swing; my Airport Express wireless is wonky in my apartment; I’m changing my immigration status; my mother-in-law is still recovering from her stroke; and I’m leaving my school to take a year’s sabbatical, without pay, which necessitates its own host of preparations. Can you say “full plate”? But life is full, anyway, and I’m excited.)

Image: Quite Puzzling by Cayusa

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