Beyond School

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)

(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

[Note: "Talking Story" is an expression we use in Hawaii to set the tone for a conversation. Instead of focusing on solving a problem, coming to a conclusion, or debating an issue, talking story means to share experiences and anecdotes that relate to the issue at hand. I think it's an appropriate expression for web 2.0 too, since this is a place for stories to be shared and new thinking to emerge.]

I work as, what we call here, a Technology Resource Teacher. Essentially, I’m an English teacher who’s been willing to experiment with integrating technology into curriculum, and I’ve been asked to only teach one class so during the rest of the day I can collaborate with other teachers on all things tech. The high school side of my school has a brand new 1:1 program this year, and there are four others who do what I do to help 150 or so faculty (we have 3700 students K-12). What I quickly learned this year is that no matter how many and what kind of workshops we run, how many emails with links and descriptions we send, or who we bring to speak at our curriculum days (these are all amazing resources!), what works best and what people seem to appreciate most is one on one time to work together and talk story about classes, students, curriculum, and where the laptops fit. So I thought I’d do a little of that here in my first guest post.

Two years ago, I hardly knew what a blog was, and, frankly, I didn’t feel the need to spend any more time in front of my computer than absolutely necessary. Then, at the beginning of last school year (06-07), I was assigned to teach an upper level Composition course. Pretty generic title, which really should have read: creative non-fiction essay writing. In an English department of nearly 30 teachers, there was only one other person teaching the course that semester. Our weekly meetings were talking story about writing, student writing, the purpose of writing, authenticity of audience, amongst other Englishy (not schooly) topics. At some point Lisa, my colleague, started to tell me about having her students blog their compositions and journals. She explained the idea of a blogosphere, a network of writers interested more or less in the same topics, reading and commenting on each others’ posts. Then, it was the concept of the blogroll, something called del.icio.us. Organically, the next move seemed to be to try this thing out for myself and my students. Where blogs seemed like they’d fit best was as digital commonplace books; we ask all sophomore to keep an analog version for a quarter to follow and reflect on essential questions and critical thinking exercises. That sounded good, and Watsoncommon began.

I realized a lot of things during the first few months of blogging. Namely, it could easily take over my life. But I welcomed the intellectual insurgency. I didn’t write great stuff, but I had a reason (and an audience of one, maybe two) to pay patient attention to what happened during my day, in my class. I needed material. This went on, and in early 2007, my wife stumbled on a wiki where edubloggers and blogging classes were listing themselves. (Do you remember this one Clay?) Near the top: “B”eyond School, where there was a call for blogging classes to collaborate. I replied.

Creating our own 2-class blogosphere was a noble first effort, and some really interesting conversations emerged here and there. What became apparent after this collaboration was that the web 2.0 tools were more powerful than we knew, yet the challenge was the same as ever: getting students to be active participants in their own education. Clay’s 1001 Flat World Tales writing project on a wiki came next. Being far more teacher-driven, the students had an easier time moving through the project. But Clay, Michelle, and I spent many weekends skyping at respective odd hours and driving the wiki for the kids. Not to mention we had committed ourselves to a grueling 6 week time frame. In the end, we had an annotated and podcasted trail of breadcrumbs, an ebook, some good stories, some engaged students, and a lot of new ideas for the next collaboration. Now, I’m a week deep in 1001 Flat World Tales #2 with Deb Baker’s class in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, and I’m getting far more sleep this time around.

Since that semester of enlightenment, it’s been Moodle, Twitter, Diigo, Ning, the list goes on. Not to mention planning and implementing the vision for our 1:1 program. At some point a couple months ago, I found myself coming full-circle, away from the tools, widgets, and gadgets to stories. The story of collaboration, the story of communication, the story of empowerment, the story of sustainability and stewardship, the story of apprenticeship, the stories of learners. And the stories have me asking these questions:

What is an education?

How can we engage the emotions, passions, and original ideas of students more?

How does a large, successful independent school become a culture of technology?

How can we empower students with an understanding of the way they learn and then nurture it daily?

Tis the season to be jolly. We only live once, so let’s end this most amazing year with some well-crafted, twitterary prose.

Don’t know what a Twittory is? Yet another amazing OZucator, Mike Seyfang, turned me on to this with his most excellent post today (from his most explosively creative edublog), in which he writes:

The story was underway and it appeared that I might need to write something on Wednesday. I could hardly get to sleep - my mind raced on long complex sentences comprising no more than 140 characters. About 2am I hit on the idea of using the minimum number of words to cause maximum disruption to the plot line. (I have always hated writing, was self branded as slow learner at school because of my hate of serialised text). I thought I could kill off the main character and maybe shift time in a very short sentence.

–and for which you must see his post for the rest of this gripping story.

As things stand at this moment, the roster for Twittory #2 is at about 34 people - a good 106 short of the required 140 for a properly-written twittory.

My new twitterfriends from Australia (@heyjudeonline) and the U.K. (@digitalmaverick), as well as the most excellent Minnesota scrivener Scott “Rip van Edison” Schwister (@sschwister) have all decided to join this Twittory #2.

Please jump in with us! What a fun, creative way to end the year. All you have to do is add your 140-character-maximum tweet to the story when your number comes up, and watch the story grow as others add their own tweets.

One tweet per person for 140 tweets will add up to a very interesting literary experience - maybe something we can find a use for in the classroom (or staff development room) after trying it ourselves.

Seriously: I’m so full of the love for my twitterverse and other networks, it would be a thing to remember. I’d love to see old friends and new jump into that Twittory roster, to usher out one wonderful year.

Photo: “‘Tis the Season” by (nz)dave

Here’s an 8-minute promo movie I made for my school over the last few hours. I share it in case anyone wants a resource that talks through a couple of class projects we did last year in my grade 9 history and English classes - and shamelessly boasts about how special my school is for being the first 1:1 Laptop School in Korea.

The first project is “A Broken World,” a student-created wiki textbook and companion whole-class reflective blog about world history from World War I to World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War. (There’s lots of frustration in the sphere right now about blocked sites in schools, so this might be a useful demonstration of how valuable YouTube, wikis, and blogs are for enhancing creativity and learning.)

(By the way, I’ve been scratching my head lately about what to do with that Broken World wiki textbook. It’s really good stuff, and I’m proud of my students for making such an impressive resource. It seems a shame to just abandon it like one of Graham Wegner’s “learning jalopies” or some piece of digital flotsam. Anybody have any ideas of how to put it to use? I’m open to others fact-checking, extending, editing, using, donating, whatever. I just feel like there’s some experimentation possible here on how to put the “legacy products” we so easily talk about in the theoretical to the much-harder-to-pull-off practical use. In other words: help?)

The second project shown in the video is the first annual 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom writing workshop on Wikispaces: 130 students at my school, Chris Watson’s school in Honolulu, and Michele Davis & Karl Fisch’s school in Denver. The promo walks through not only the wiki, but the (damnably) still-under-construction but worth-a-peek anyway 1001 Flat World Tales blog and website, featuring the prize-winning stories selected by our international student editorial board, plus author profiles, author podcast readings, editor profiles, student testimonials, and more.

Those student testimonials are highlighted in subtitle bars on the movie, which might be effective for persuading your admin to unblock these sites, again.

I really went over the top promoting my 1:1 Apple Laptop School as being “on the 21st century map,” since the point of the thing is to entice parents to send their kids to my school. It might produce a motivating jealousy in your own admin or school board to go 1:1 so they have such bragging rights themselves.

Or maybe the thing’s just a piece of junk. You tell me. (If nothing else, I got some iMovie practice out of it. Still trying to hone those skills.)

(And if you click on the video, by the way, it’ll take you to my AP Literature class Ning, which is open to the public. Sylvia Martinez of the Generation YES blog, and Diane Cordell of Journeys have both joined my students for literary discussions in the forums. You’re welcome to come inside yourself. Interesting talks about “schooliness” and literacy in there.)Find more videos like this on KIS AP Lit 07-08

Twitter has definitely shifted my networking and online writing habits. A case in point: Since I’m 14 hours ahead of the American east coast, I mentioned how lonely it was to be awake on Twitter when most of my compatriots are asleep. Graham Wegner in Australia, whom I’m recently enjoyed getting to know, answered my lonely tweet with a private email of New Zealand and Australian twitternames to check out. I did. My Twitbin is awake now when I am.

Two days later, “NZchrissy” tweeted a need for some student blogs to direct her students to visit and comment on. I added a few of mine from last year, but within ten minutes on Twitter we ended up somehow saying, in effect, “Hey, let’s just talk and desktop-share with Skype-Yugma and set up an ‘active student blogs’ wiki.” We did, and here’s the result: Young Writers ‘07 on Wikispaces.

Feel free to add your own student bloggers, and visit those already there. The links are listed by age group. Lots of Australians, New Zealanders, Americans, and Koreans there. (Jeff Wasserman, I hope this fulfills my promise to “flog” your HS English class blog in Connecticut.)

By the way, it occurs to me too late that this might be either redundant or needlessly competitive with the Support Blogging wiki. That wasn’t the intention. Instead, we just wanted to bang out a wiki of student blogs we know are active this year, and keep it free of burial under all the adult edubloggers out there.

So give it a visit, bookmark it, link to it, add your own. One-stop shopping for a student blogosphere only wiki, conveniently labeled with “‘07″ to communicate to all that that means still alive this year.