217 years ago last week, Louis XVI’s head rolled from a Paris guillotine. One of my students emailed me to tell me that, because we’d discussed that event on the very day of its anniversary. A few years after that bloody blade gave death to feudalism and birth to modernity, the French Revolution became so radical it tried to uproot the Christian church in France and replace it with what it considered a better alternative. This reminds me, sidewise, of a story I heard years back, and want to embellish in the telling. I’ve been using this space too much lately to merely blog, and tonight I feel like writing. It’s hard to get back into that swing, but harder not to swing in it.

Pride and Prejudice, Revisited

He was lower-middle class economically, above most of the “upper” class culturally, and long past much belief in, or need for, most things church-related.

But he was engaged now, and meeting his future family-in-law for the first time. They were opposite him in almost every way, but in two ways, above all, that made him nervous: they were unimaginably wealthy, and they were regular church-goers.

During their first meeting the day before, through several subtle signs — their exchange of glances when he told them he’d never golfed, and when he had to ask how to mount that horse at their estate; his future mother-in-law’s quick scold of her husband’s questions about his (non-existent) investment portfolio, followed by her pained change of subject — he had gathered that he had little hope of overcoming their disappointment in his lack of silver-spooned pedigree.

(Truth be told, he wished his girl lacked it too, so that they could leave this Jane Austen re-run, dispense with the class difference dramas, rely on their own talents and hard work for any future success, and just live and love more simply — as, when they were on neutral turf, they did. Like that day at the river the week before, when she was just her, and he was more than enough for her. She’d dropped her gold ring and watch, heirlooms both, off the rocks and into the river, and given them up for lost beneath the rapids. He told her to keep the faith, found a long branch in the forest, and told her to hold it straight down from the rock to the river-bottom. He dove in, followed the branch down, and felt his way along the silt in the dark, then rose fist-first from the depths, exultant and beaming, jewels in hand and glowing gold in the sun.

They’d told that story to her family later that day, but none of them seemed to think it mattered. He knew it didn’t either, but also knew it very much did.)

His friends didn’t believe him, but he really did regret that she came from wealth.

But if the wealth gap was spilt milk, he still had a fighting chance, he knew, to overcome that other difference. He told himself he would be a good sport about his in-laws’ faith, and go to their Sunday morning service with the open mind he prided himself on, and with his own version of faith: “good faith.” He would withhold judgment, and give their church the benefit of the doubt.

At the same time, he was honest enough with himself to recognize that he fully expected the service to be a pained, “smile until your lips bleed” affair.

Sunday

The colonial red-brick church was exclusive, for Virginia’s bluest bloods. Several of America’s Founding Fathers, who had lived in the neighborhood over two centuries earlier, had worshiped in these very pews. The Sunday morning parking lot was filled with the Saabs of the Old Money families, the Lexuses and Mercedes of the less secure and more self-conscious nouveau riche. His clothes and shoes were a couple of notches below the apparent Sunday standard here. He smiled through the doorway handshakes, the class inspections posing as introductions; then he smiled down the aisle and into the pew. His mother-in-law’s perfume seemed a thing made in heaven. He never knew perfume could so intoxicate, and could only imagine how dear the price tag.

To the podium came the pastor, a powerfully-built but kind-faced old man. He liked the old man instantly — naturally mild and at ease, much the mold of old man into which he hoped he’d ripen himself.

The opening remarks told him he’d come on a special day for this church: it was the old man’s last sermon. He’d given his first one in this church a full four decades ago, a much younger man with a long future ahead of him. The old man spoke of his imminent departure, and of the passage it marked to his life’s Final Stage, and all the while spoke like a man at peace with life’s impermanence, with the natural cycle of life and death that spins us all. Only the slightest sadness could be sensed; more palpable was the old man’s obvious concern that he’d chosen a suitable topic for his final performance on this sunny morn.

The Sermon

He’d chosen, the old man announced, to speak of a story surely known to all the faithful in the house, a story that had surely gripped them all in childhood, such were its wonders and beauties, such its gifts of wisdom and hope.

And that story, he said, was this: the Tale of the Frog and the Princess.

The groom-to-be scanned the faces of his in-laws-to-be and others in nearby pews for signs of scandal. Surely the congregation would find this choice inappropriate — it wasn’t from the Bible at all, and worse yet, it was a childish fairy tale! But all he saw on the all those faces was soft smiles and eyes aglow with an anticipation both childlike and mature. He smiled too, and with no lip-bleeding grit. While he fully expected the old man to somehow, by the end of the sermon, tie the fairy tale to the predictable narrative he’d heard so often when small, he nonetheless adored the idea of letting the old man lead him, along with the rest, back to those days of childhood.

In this return to the “teachings of childhood” — his favorite line from Gone With the Wind, and his favorite silver moment in all of Clark Gable’s celluloid immortality — what meanings would he hear in this story now, as an adult, that he couldn’t hear as a child? He’d forgotten much of the story. What were the details?

He was ready to listen to the old man with the best of his own “good faith.”

The old man eased into his tale. “You remember the story,” he said. “How the Princess had a golden ball she loved to throw into the air and catch — how it so glowed in the sky she imagined she was catching the very sun.

“And you remember,” he continued, “how her parents told her never to go beyond the palace walls into the forest. It was full of dirt and, worse than dirt, of the lowly people of the realm — the ‘commoners.’

“But we know how the old tales work,” he went on. “Of course the Princess was fated to transgress her parents’ boundaries.

“One day, she threw the ball too high, and over the palace wall it went, with her in hot pursuit. She exited the gate just in time to see her golden ball bounce down the hill, bounce high once, and again, and then plop into a deep, dark well. Of course that well was dirty — too dirty for our Princess. All she could do was kneel there by the well, the silly bird, crying and crying over that stupid golden ball.

“She was at least lucky in one respect,” he added with a pause long enough to look a good half of the congregation in the eye: “There were no dirty poor people around.”

A faint laugh came from the faithful.

“You remember too, I’m sure, that the Princess stopped her blubbering when a frog approached her, all slimy and wet and, in a word, dirty — and she recoiled from it in disgust that soon turned to wonder. Because it spoke to her.

” ‘What are you crying about, Princess?’,” it croaked.

“She answered it the way a Princess should answer a dirty thing: dripping with disdain. ‘I’m crying because my golden ball fell into the well, you dirty frog.’

“But the frog’s next croak caught her attention: ‘What if I can get your ball for you? What will you give me?’

“The Princess’ life was so stuffed with gold, she knew she could give him a small fortune without noticing its absence. ‘I’ll give you my golden crown,’ she said.

“Now it was the frog’s turn for disdain. ‘What would I do with a golden crown? All it would do is drag me to the bottom of the pond and drown me.’

“The King’s little girl was dense enough to follow with an offer of a perfect pearl necklace — she surely had dozens of them, so no worries there,” he added. “But the frog explained they’d just tangle around his legs and, again, cause him to drown. No thanks, said he.

“The Princess huffed and, like our friend Mr. Pooh — Of Very Little Brain — said, ‘What about my ruby ring, then?’ And again the frog croaked out a snort: ‘It would fall off my finger and I’d be left with nothing at all.’

The old man stopped the story to observe that so far, the girl had failed to recognize the frog as a “person” at all. It was just a thing to be bought off, a laborer to do the dirty-work and get her back her gold. It never occurred to her to ask the frog what he needed; never occurred to her to think of the frog as another living “person” at all. He sighed and shook his head, and as he took a breath to continue, the groom thought, “Here comes the pivot to the preaching.”

He was wrong.

“But in the classic ‘Rule of Threes’ pattern so common in stories, it seems our Princess, after hearing the frog three times try to tell her that what she valued for him had no value, finally — though probably dimly, for our dear princess is a dimwit  — finally, I say, she begins to catch on: she’s talking to another living soul. How do I know? Because her next offer is different: ‘I’ll give you one of my silk slippers,’ she says — wait for it, now….ready? — ’so that you may sleep in it and keep warm.’”

Another gaze into the pews, then: “That’s more like it,” he said. “There’s always hope. A warm place to sleep is something we all need. It’s a lot more important than jewels to our cold, clammy frog. Our Princess is waking up.” His eyebrows arched above his bifocals, and he smiled.

The groom smiled back.

“Mr. Frog still wasn’t sold, though, but — if you’ll pardon this old man for saying so — the offer seemed to bring out his kinky side: ‘I don’t want your slipper,’ he says. ‘But it gives me an idea. What I do want,’ Frog continued, ‘is…’ — and pardon me, ladies — ‘to sleep in your bed. With you.’”

[I hate to do this to you, but it's late, so: to be continued. Soon.]

1 Comments

• At January 25, 2010, TonySearl wrote:

  TBC soon I hope! …left hanging by The Frog & a princess RT @cburell Sunday – a Story at Beyond School http://tinyurl.com/y9dewsx

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China.

From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.¹

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

1. I’m teaching the Enlightenment right now in European history, alongside my Chinese history course, and Han for all the world sounds like a Chinese Voltaire to me. And good god, just think if Voltaire could have blogged.

2 Comments

• At January 13, 2010, Jenny wrote:

  The idea of Voltaire blogging has made my evening. Thanks!

  .-= Jenny´s last blog ..Confession =-.

• At January 13, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  I <3 people who read footnotes.

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I was going to delete this spam, but upon reading it realized it could have been written by so many students new to commenting on blogs.

So students, if your comments sound like this, consider them an epic fail:

Easily, this article is really the most informative on this deserving topic. I agree with your conclusions and am eagerly look forward to your future updates. Just saying thanks will not just be enough, for the extraordinary clarity in your views and writing.

And thanks to the spammer for the inspiration. It’s a perfect example of how words can add nothing to a text.

2 Comments

• At December 28, 2009, Derrick Kwa wrote:

  I think this is a great lesson, but I think it's a useful lesson for more than just students, and about more than just blogs.

  1) Lots of people make those kind of comments on blogs. Look around, there are tons of blind parroting of agreement with no additional value, by everyone, not just students. Lots of people could gain from learning not to do that.

  2) Students should also learn not to do this in class. At least here in Singapore, I've seen lots of classroom "discussions" which seem to go that way. Blind agreement which adds nothing to the discussion.

  Great point, definitely, but I think it's much more applicable than you let on. ;).

  .-= Derrick Kwa´s last blog ..What Are You Hiding? =-.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Derrick,

  Fair points all. The post was a lark and a whim, and I'm glad you took it where you did. Gave it value.

  I checked your blog, wondering if you were a student at SAS, where I'm teaching now, but seems that's not the case. Too bad.

  But fyi, I'm in Singapore now if you're up for a meetup of any sort. I'd like a geeky group to play with film, audio, TED-type stuff, whatever, locally. Live in Chinatown, if you're interested.

  I'm trying to place you. Did you give me the comment feed plug-in a year or two ago? Or did you do the viral Top Twitter Users by Country post? How do I know you?

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This editorial from our high school student newspaper is a must-read for its criticism of the school-wide technology integration initiative. It’s a must-read for other reasons too — and other readers — but read it first, and we’ll get to that very different party afterward.

The first thing I did when I read this was mentally applaud.

The second thing I did was wish I could reply to it and, better still, promote it for a wider audience than the guaranteed one in the schoolhouse (I’ve always thought school newspapers were a bit like busywork, since they were monopolies without real-world competition, and had no incentive to earn a bigger audience through superior quality — especially silly in the Information Digital Age).

I wanted to start a conversation with the writer, share ideas and viewpoints, extend the topic — you know, basically learn more from her,¹ and ideally give such quality feedback in my comments that maybe the author would learn more too. Surely she knew that authors have far less authority in the Information Digital Age, that the nature of those things called texts and authors has been revolutionized by the ability of readers to write on the same page, to (in the language of AP exams) “challenge, qualify, and extend” the author’s ideas and words and worldview.

Surely she knew that the 21st Century writer learns as much from the 21st Century reader as the reader does from the writer. (Because 21st Century readers — the best ones, anyway — write with the writer. Just look at Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman’s blog, all the references he makes in his writing to what his readers are saying in comments. Look at Rolling Stones’ Matt Taibbi having conversations with his readers in the space beneath his articles — you know, those silly “forum”-like things. Just look.)

So yeah, I wanted to respond to it, and share to the world here on my (real) blog. I thought the writing and the critique of the rush to laptop use in the classroom were that good.

But the editorial was on that precious resource and traditional tool called — what was it? It’s been so long since I’ve written on it — oh yeah, paper, so no luck there (for me, or the forests, or the atmosphere, or the students’ future environmental situation).

The third thing I did was figure, since the student says her “generation is more than adept at using technology,” that she would surely know that journalism lives more and more online now, that print news is dying.² Since she says, after all, that she’s a “member of the Information Age,” she would know that the Huffington Post — a newpaper that has never been in print — eclipsed the venerable old Washington Post (that traditional newspaper that actually still uses paper) to take the number 2 spot, after the New York Times, in total traffic last September. I figured she’d know that the, what shall we call it?,  traditional NYTimes itself is taking out loans on its headquarters building, due to its almost nonexistent profit margins³ in this post-Gutenberg age. But surely this student knew all this stuff too, because I’m sure she uses an RSS reader, and reads links from the thousand smart people she’s built up in her Twitter network — surely Tweetdeck is one of the applications open at the bottom of her screen, and surely it’s populated not by people who share her blood or her table at the school cafeteria, like most of the silly Facebook crowd, but by like-minded peers (and unlike-minded ones) around the world.

Surely she uses these by-now old tools to stay more informed about the world than people who don’t use them.

I figured, in short, that I could find an online version of the editorial — since the student surely knew that that’s not only writing’s future, it’s its present — and be able to respond to it, and promote it to all of you readers dotting the six inhabited continents on my nifty Clustrmap at the bottom of the right sidebar. A simple select, copy, paste, and link to her site so my blog’s readers could follow the link, join the conversation, share their praise (and their experience).  Maybe offer her an internship if they’re in the publishing biz, since I figured her blog would surely have a “Contact Me” page for just such possibilities. I mean, she’s technically adept, after all, and so used to troubleshooting Internet Explorer for her parents. (She surely dropped IE long ago with most geeks in favor of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, or whatever. It’s a parent thing, surely.)

The fourth thing I did was search for the online version of the paper and, sure enough, I found it — in pdf. You know, the format where, as I saw Will Richardson put it, “good ideas go to die.”

And that almost totally changed my view of the editorial. I couldn’t comment. I couldn’t read other students’, teachers’, administrators’, parents’, and purely authentic Readers-from-the-Brave-New-Web’s ideas about the text. I couldn’t copy and paste the most interesting ideas in the text for fine-grained commentary here, and link to the article to send you there. Instead, I had to take screenshots of it and upload it here. All of which suggested to me that, contrary to the claims of “adeptness” and expertise in the editorial, the editorial writer(s) have much more to learn than they realize.⁴

Parting shots: Last month I took three days off of school to fly to the beach in Australia, all expenses paid, in order to give a talk to an educational technology conference. I got the offer via the “Contact Me” page on this blog, from a reader of this blog I’d never met (because while she did read, I’m not aware of her ever commenting). She invited me to speak simply by virtue of the fact that she said she was a long-time reader who liked what she read here.

Here. On a simple blog.

That wouldn’t have happened if I thought pdf was good enough for the 21st Century writer.

A couple months before that, I got another “Contact Me” bite from a PBS TV documentary producer asking if I’d be available to be a talking head on a show they were doing about classic literature — for the first episode, to be exact, which was about none other than Gilgamesh, about which I’ve written about 20,000 words over the last year here, on this simple blog. She’d read my take, and said it was exactly the kind of approach and tone her team wanted for the show.⁵

That, too, wouldn’t have happened if I thought pdf was good enough for the 21st Century writer.

But at that Australia conference, much of what I said actually agreed with what the student editorial said: I agree that teachers can be excellent at what they do without technology. I agree that, worse still, pushing teachers to use technology before they’re trained, experienced, and ready can indeed lead to worse teaching and worse learning. I really do think the student writer’s criticisms along these lines should be taken very, very seriously. I’ve been in this world long enough to believe that we can’t push the reluctant to use it, and that that’s a fool’s errand. The best we can do is “pull,” I said in Australia. But even that word is wrong, since it still requires more energy than is sustainable for teachers. Now I believe the best we can do is simply attract. The sun isn’t getting muscle fatigue keeping the planets in orbit. It’s simply attracting them, effortlessly, because of its impressive mass. Teachers should be suns in this way, and students the planets worth keeping in orbit. Those with ears, let them hear.

But. What I hope I’ve given the writer pause to reflect on in all of the above is that having “six or seven apps” open on your computer, doing Facebook, and helping Mom with IE is nothing special. It’s about as impressive as publishing to pdf.

And: Here’s my pitch, and it’s to you, student editorial writer, whoever you are:

Our school is going 1:1 next year whether we like it or not. And I’m not sure I like it myself, since I’ve taught at a 1:1 laptop school before, and really wonder, as I wrote lately, if “the Web is too beautiful to waste on the young.”

Because just as you’re arguing that admin shouldn’t force teachers who don’t want to learn new ways to do their job, I’d much rather not force students to learn what I’ve learned after three or four years of self-publishing, podcasting, networking, and more. I’d much rather invite the “three out of a thousand” I see every year to come by after class so I can say, “You’re a great writer (or speaker, or artist, or photographer, or whatever), and if you want my support in sharing your uniqueness with more than the school hallway or your bedroom file cabinet, I’ll show you some things that have worked for me. They might lead places for you.”

Moreover, I’d much rather you use the laptops at home to watch podcasted lectures and whatnot, and come to school to discuss, write, plan, create in a workshop-style setting that applies what you learned on your laptop the night before.

And I have no interest in playing cop to your generation’s Facebook addiction in the classroom. Sometimes I wonder why I should have to. Students who choose to spend their school time writing graffiti on Facebook (and not, in the traditional way, on their schooldesk) instead of learning from the web activity that the teacher, after all, ideally has judged as worth their time  — that’s their choice. It’s a choice not to rise. Maybe they shouldn’t rise, then, and they should go ahead and practice their spelling of “LOL,” “wtf?”, and “rotfl.”  Meanwhile, the teacher can focus on the students in the room who want to learn, and to peacefully pursue future superiority over the Facebook scribblers sitting next to them. It’s a lesson in real-world responsibility. Sometimes we have to do things we’d rather not do, or suffer the consequences.

And while I’m not sure I believe that, this I do believe: It’s going to be messy for all of us.

And you, student, whoever you are, can help make it less messy. You took a good first step by articulating the problems you say students are talking about. Now take the next step: get those students to join you in generating solutions. (Read my “Recession Skills 101″ posts here, here, and here to get my take on how you should see yourself as a stakeholder in your education — as basically an employee who’s expected to contribute to the betterment of the company.)

Do it openly, do it professionally, do it maturely, and do it constructively. Don’t name names and if you’re going to stab something, stab a solution.

How can you do that? The simplest way would be to start a blog — or turn the newspaper into one.

And one last thing: as you’re helping the school try to launch this thing, as you’re suggesting your changes and communicating your point of view, don’t forget to be open to changing your mind and learning something new. Because there’s more to the web — to “blogs, wikis, and forums,” to quote your example (did you know the CIA and United Nations use wikis now?) — than you seem to understand.

And that’s true for all of us.

1. Him? them? I’m going to assume it’s a her.
2. Scroll left on the graphic and you’ll see the individual newspapers that have closed their doors over the past couple years.
3. Kaplan Test Prep subsidiary excluded — there’s always money to be squeezed from parents obsessed with Junior going to Harvard
4. Unless the school itself is prohibiting the use of blogs for the newspaper. I’ve seen that policy before at other schools, so it’s entirely possible.
5. I couldn’t fly to the States in time for the recording, so it didn’t work out, but that’s beside the point, which is that it was all because I write on a blog.

37 Comments

• At December 25, 2009, Nathan Lowell wrote:

  Thanks for this, Clay.

  The writer totally nailed the process problem to the floor. Rolling out technology for the sake of rolling out technology is exactly what educational technology is not supposed to be doing.

  On the other hand, the reality is that, until you can find out for yourself where the technology can take you, then it's hard to know where you might want to go. Putting out without training is actually a good thing, IMHO, because when you train somebody to use a tool a particular way, you predispose them to use the tool *only* that way.

  How much more valuable it might be to put great tools in the hands of teachers and students and ask them to figure out ways they could be used to foster learning. Oh, sure, there'd be a period of "what the heck do we do with THIS?" but ... as your writer points out, there's a certain modicum of expertise in the wild that can help shape the exploration. Moreover, there are a lot of resources already available to help bootstrap the inquiry process. You don't need to leave them floundering in the dark, but the excuse of "we didn't get trained" is paper thin.

  There's another point that makes me a little twitchy and that's the tendency to lump it all into "technology." We use technology all the time, every day. The school building itself is technology. The lights, heat, paper, furniture -- even the design and layout of the space -- it's all technology. I'm exaggerating to make a point but not by much.

  What technology are we talking about that needs to be used more effectively? Display technology? Communications? Network? Information architecture? Collaboration? Feedback? Print? Spoken language?

  Even just limiting it to Digital Technology encompasses such diverse items as mp3 player, digital camera, and wireless routers. We don't make the "technology" any less homogeneous by saying "laptop computers."

  Furthur, we are doing nobody any favors by blaming the "technology" or even the process for failing in the implementation of "technology" if we're not more precise about what we mean when we talk about it.

  The term "technology" -- and even "digital technology" -- lacks sufficient granularity for meaningful conversation. I think we need to be talking less in generalities if we intend to actually make a difference.

  .-= Nathan Lowell´s last blog ..The hidden curriculum… =-.

• At December 25, 2009, Patrick Murray-john wrote:

  Interesting. It seems like this student has fallen into the "digital native/digital immigrant" binary that sounded good a few years ago, but now from what I see is largely discredited. But the twist is that it's coming from a putative digital native and they're using it as a claim to authority.

  .-= Patrick Murray-john´s last blog ..VoCamp To The Rescue! =-.

• At December 25, 2009, Concretekax wrote:

  This reminds me of a student panel I listened to at an ed-tech conference. The students had very little technology in their schools and strict filters. Their opinions echoed those of adults who do not know how to use technology to support learning. If they would have had at least one student from a 1:1 school with a successful implementation then the panel would have been more interesting.

  Unless students have experienced an effective integration of technology then they often parrot the fears of teachers and administrators who see no reason to change teaching and learning from the past 100 years. We can't blame the students anymore than we blame a toddler for imitating poor behavior of his parents.

  .-= Concretekax´s last blog ..The Purpose of Grades =-.

• At December 25, 2009, Jason Kern wrote:

  I think the student nailed the problem. If teachers use blogs, wikis, etc. just to use them then they are going to simply be more busy work.

  However, if the student would have had Mr. Burell as a teacher then they would have realized all the benefits of taking their paper/lesson online. They would have realized how they could be creating, controlling and leveraging their digital footprint.

  This is why we will always need teachers. Students may understand the technology but they do not always realize that it is only a tool to accomplishing their goals.

  Technology just amplifies the teacher and the lesson. It's not about the technology, it's about the pedagogy!

  .-= Jason Kern´s last blog ..Google Teacher Academy for Admins - Why I'll apply =-.

• At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  The students had very little technology in their schools and strict filters. Their opinions echoed those of adults who do not know how to use technology to support learning. If they would have had at least one student from a 1:1 school with a successful implementation then the panel would have been more interesting.

  Unless students have experienced an effective integration of technology then they often parrot the fears of teachers and administrators who see no reason to change teaching and learning from the past 100 years. We can’t blame the students anymore than we blame a toddler for imitating poor behavior of his parents.

  --word, word, word. Outstanding points. I think I'll suggest to my admin (and the student newspaper) a call-out for input from students at a good 1:1 school.

• At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Good to hear from you, Nathan, and interesting thoughts.

  Your point about the dangers of teacher-training "pre-disposing" them to use these multi-purpose tools for fewer purposes than possible is well-taken -- to a degree. I put "experience" and "readiness" in that phrase about "training" for roughly that reason.

  I have reservations, though, about the negative consequences of students having to suffer through their teachers' floundering first steps, and the opportunity costs to learning of letting teachers muddle through that stage.

  (That being said, in all honesty my students are surely still suffering those very costs every time I try something new. We're all still in the pioneer stage, after all, aren't we?)

  Something along the lines of a "digital driving school" requiring teachers to spend a certain amount of time/energy behind the wheels of various tools before they can try them in class appeals to me, warts and all.

• At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Interesting point. I think I've read that the fastest-growing demographic on FB is middle-aged and older women.

• At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  I agree with everything you said, Jason, except the "if the students had had Mr. Burell as a teacher" part.

  In the past, this may have been true. But at the end of my first semester at my new school, in which the plate was just too full to do anything well, it wasn't.

  But that won't stop me from trying to change that next semester :)

• At December 25, 2009, Nathan Lowell wrote:

  An excellent point and I agree to a point.

  The opportunity cost of the initial floundering is a challenge, certainly, but I think it might go back to two ideas.

  1. As a teacher you have to "cover" the material.

  2. A teacher teaches the way they're taught.

  Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

  The second is more difficult. Getting teachers to understand that the *first* thing they need to learn about these tools - the ones we lump loosely into a box and label "technology" - is how to *learn* with them. Instead, my experience is that teachers only want to know how to *teach* with them.

  It comes down to realizing that teaching is a communicative art and each teacher is an artist. How they use the tools will be - must be - unique to their particular practice. How many ways are there to use a paint brush? Are there fewer ways to use a digital camera? How many different media might an artist use to create a feeling, a mood? Does it make sense teachers would use a fixed subset?

  How do we get this level of skill and awareness inculcated in teachers? An artist struggles with media and tools and tries and fails, again and again. While this might seem like a waste of time when held up agains the production model of factory-school, if we value learning and not just curriculum? Does that change our paradigm?

  .-= Nathan Lowell´s last blog ..The hidden curriculum… =-.

• At December 26, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nathan,

  When you write,

  Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

  --you take me back to my roots, in a sense. Or maybe one of my finest flowerings/flounderings. It's when I was letting students "fail" at being independent writers for weeks throughout a writing workshop course, so they could experience the hoped-for "finding their feet" in their first experience of classroom freedom to find themselves as writers (instead of, you know, writing whatever I told them to write).

  You nail the challenge that the "coverage" imperative presents to this approach. In my last post before this one, the "think-aloud" about the Chinese history course I just ended, I think I found a way to cut a lot of the coverage for the next iteration, which will maybe make room for the type of learning you remind me is important.

  As for

  Getting teachers to understand that the *first* thing they need to learn about these tools – the ones we lump loosely into a box and label “technology” – is how to *learn* with them. Instead, my experience is that teachers only want to know how to *teach* with them.

  --it's often true for students too. They only want to know how to do "traditional homework" with the tools, as the student editorial hints when it valorizes traditional learning at a certain point or two.

  I used the "tools as paintbrushes" metaphor in my keynote in Australia (and threw in a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" motif for good measure). You're totally right: at its best, a teacher approaches his craft like an artist.

  So I want to ask, anyway, how we get students to "value learning, and not just curriculum"?

  I think Christian Long's Alice Project (a recent and belated obsession of mine for the last few days) is very relevant to this.

• At December 26, 2009, diane wrote:

  Clay,

  As a start, I'm going to share this posting via my Google Reader and on Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk . It deserves a wide readership and many thoughtful responses.

  Your title is beautifully ironic: it applies equally to the "adept" generation and us older folk.

  .-= diane´s last blog ..Old Friends =-.

• At December 26, 2009, Nathan Lowell wrote:

  You asked:

  So ... how we get students to “value learning, and not just curriculum”?

  We have to stop rewarding them for chasing grades.

  In my grad school courses I exhort my students (who are, for the most part, US K-12 teachers) to think like learners instead of students. If they're worrying about the points of their grading, then they're missing the points of the learning. I give them one task all semester. "Prove to me that you're thinking." I change the focus weekly, but their task each week remains the same. Of course, I have a lot more flexibility in grad school than most teachers who have to certify that they've covered X chapters of material ... which brings us back around.

  BTW, I don't give "tests" in the traditional sense, but remind them that there *will* be a final exam. It'll come long after the class is over and it'll be graded by the learners they're trying to reach.

  .-= Nathan Lowell´s last blog ..The hidden curriculum… =-.

• At December 26, 2009, sylvia martinez wrote:

  Clay,

  With a terribly broad brush, this is partially "our" fault (ed tech enthusiasts). I'll step up and take this rap too. Enthusiasts promote anything with the barest whiff of technology, talking about "low hanging fruit", "gateway drugs", and "baby steps". We should not be accepting bad educational practice as some sort of entry to good practice. That's just nonsense.

  We have to be braver and point out areas where technology does not make things better. We have to be braver and not buy inferior products from large companies who simply co-opt the language of education for their marketing campaigns. And we have to be louder and more critical when we see these things happening.

  The students certainly aren't fooled. We often hear how "engaged" students are when using technology, but if it's just busywork, the initial thrill will soon disappear. We hear about how teachers are reluctant to adopt technology, but what if they are actually making good judgements about bad implementations?

  There has to be student ownership of the technology, in a way that allows them to make choices both good and bad. That's what teachers do - help students make the better choice. By allowing corporations and publishers to control the technology, rather than the teacher and the student, we remove that agency and create powerless students and worse, powerless teachers.

  All technology is not created equal.

• At December 26, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Diane, one reason I love librarians (at least ones like you) (and you) is that they know how to read. Thanks for noticing the irony.

  And know, in return, that I see the subtlety of the first part of your comment. I hope the intended audience does too (unless I'm projecting, which I doubt).

  Happy Holidays, D.

• At December 27, 2009, monika hardy wrote:

  Great conversation. Thank you....

  This is huge:

  If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

  The second is more difficult. Getting teachers to understand that the *first* thing they need to learn about these tools – the ones we lump loosely into a box and label “technology” – is how to *learn* with them. Instead, my experience is that teachers only want to know how to *teach* with them.

  The focus needs to be on the connections web access allows - to knowledge via people. People aren't buying in because we're missing the point. Learning how to learn.

• At December 27, 2009, » On Using Technology Without Understanding It at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] On Using Technology Without Understanding It at Beyond School. [...]

• At December 27, 2009, Ian Gay wrote:

  An interesting post. The whole article really made me think and I was enjoying the by-play of the comments until I got to all the Twitter links which added nothing (in fact detracted) from the whole conversation. Sometimes I feel Twitter could be renamed Chatter.

• At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Ian,

  I'm playing with a Twitter plugin that has various settings for displaying tweets as comments (it was much worse when they were mixed in with real comments, rather than put after them as now).

  In the context of this post, though, I wonder if you miss the significance of those tweets to the entire topic of the post. I see it there in spades, and hope students do too.

  Finally, besides telling us in your comment that you enjoyed the post -- which is pretty much what the tweets suggest via a simple retweet -- and that you don't like twitter, do you care to add anything about the ideas you say you enjoyed?

• At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hm. Ian, Your complaint about Twitter did make me think about how that plugin affects reading my blog in an RSS reader (I have another plugin that includes comments to posts with the post itself in the feed).

  Thanks for making me see that using the "display tweets as comments" setting, while being a negligible inconvenience if read on the blog itself, is surely a pain in the rear when scrolling through a feed reader. I'm thinking of changing the settings.

  What I like about keeping them is simply their display of Twitter as the new Google Search, in terms of bringing readers to a text. Since installing the Tweetmeme plugin, the proportion of my readers coming from Twitter instead of from Google has risen dramatically. That seems significant for students to understand -- or at least any who want their writing to be read in the real world.

• At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Sylvia,

  We hear about how teachers are reluctant to adopt technology, but what if they are actually making good judgements about bad implementations?

  is the money question, for me.

  But if you read my response to the student editorial, it makes clear to me that many students think adults can't teach them anything about tech, when they clearly have much to learn (from some, at least).

  And for the sake of argument, since "bad choices" by teachers and students result in the same waste of learning time -- though your point that students learn from those bad choices is well-taken, probably moreso if they made those choices themselves -- I still wonder if it's worth the opportunity cost in terms of more valuable learning of, yes, content, that could have taken place otherwise.

• At December 27, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:

  I'm late to the show, so most of the pertinent points have already been covered, but I just wanted to address this: the editorial author really doesn't have much control over the format of the newspaper. She might very well have a blog elsewhere, but most newspapers require exclusivity, so you wouldn't be able to find it. Furthermore, since this is likely a one-off editorial, she wouldn't have the influence to get the newspaper moved online. Don't fault the message, fault the messenger.

• At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Points well-taken, Morgante (and a concession to that hinted at in one of the footnotes), but there's an irony to note too, maybe.

  The editorial suggests it's a collective one by "The Eye Editorial Staff," first of all (not exact wording, but I'm too lazy to scroll up right now).

  If that's the case, a) they're presumably the power-clique of the paper this year; b) they're the ones implying they know more about tech than their teachers, while also c) claiming their teachers and traditional educational methods should be respected.

  So since the post-pdf digital revolution has passed them by, who better to make the real Reformation happen in the newspaper now, if not them?

  I wonder how many of the staff do have quasi-professional blogs, by the way. And how far they've gone in learning the ropes.

• At December 27, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:

  I noticed your footnote, but completely missed the "Eye Staff" headline. Clearly, my reading skills need some improvement.

  In that case, if it really is a staff editorial (which it likely is), you're absolutely right: they shouldn't have such a high opinion of technical skills if their paper is still published on dead trees and their technological equivalent.

  I'd be pushing for my school's newspaper to go online, but at this point the internet is better off without it.

• At December 27, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:

  I just wanted to note I find the separation of tweets out from comments at the bottom extremely confusing.

  From the comment form, I was trying to scroll up to find my comment yet was seeing dates from before it was published. Since there's an expectation that everything is ordered chronologically, I was mystified as to where my comment had gone.

  I'd say either abandon the tweets or integrate them into the chronology, maybe with a filter to remove simple "retweets."

• At December 28, 2009, sylvia martinez wrote:

  Well, all of these generalizations are being built on a pretty flimsy base -- all we have is one editorial with no real knowledge of the situation at the school, who wrote the article, or anything about the technology at the school.

  School curriculum around the world is permanently stuck in the pre-Internet world. To expect students to rebel against a newspaper assignment would be the same as expecting them to revolt against logarithms. Instead we give them a song and dance about how learning these things that they'll never use is good for them. Some passively revolt by not showing up in mind and/or body. Some chant along with the party line (usually the ones who are winning the game.)

  .-= sylvia martinez´s last blog ..Free guide – How to keep your teen safe on the Internet =-.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Ian, this post by a new blogger who just discovered the depths of Twitter made me think of your comment.

  Don't get me wrong, sometimes I agree with you about the chatter. But if you haven't experienced it beyond that, the above-linked is a good read.

• At December 29, 2009, Lindsay Jordan wrote:

  The point that resonated with me the most in your post was the frustration of processing static content - whether it's 'electronic', printed, scribbled with a biro or painted in illuminated letters on parchment.

  I downloaded Curtis Bonk's new book - The World is Open - last week. In true Digital Age style, I purchased it through Amazon on my iPhone and it was sent directly into the Kindle app. It was the first e-book I'd bought in this way and the feeling of 'connectedness' I felt as the words appeared on the touchscreen was very satisfying.

  Such a strange feeling, then, to be turning the pages, annotating and adding notes, and for none of this activity to be accessible to anyone else. I had no idea who else was reading this material, whether they were responding in the same way or had a different perspective to offer. I couldn't even grab and tweet a link.

  Many people have proposed that we are losing the capacity to focus on one thing for sustained periods. Maybe they have a point, but this is not the most accurate or helpful way of describing how the way we engage with ideas is changing. We are social animals who benefit intellectually and emotionally from talking over these ideas together. In a beautifully choreographed collaborative movement, we have created the tools we need to bring people together from all over the world to talk about the ideas that interest them. Now we have this, what is the value of static, non-interactive content? Does it have a place?

  Given its title, it's ironic that Bonk's book isn't at all, in any sense of the word, open. There *is* an interactive accompanying website though - which is a positive step, and perhaps an appropriate compromise in a world that is still largely working with a traditional publishing infrastructure. The next time I pay $20 for an e-book though - Amazon take note - I would want to be able to communicate with the other readers.

• At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Lindsay, you're further along the digital curve than I am. I still read paper books, and like them. Do you prefer the Kindle?

  I'm also behind the learning curve in Evernote. I've heard of people taking photos of pages from books they're reading and adding annotations there, which seems horribly clunky for manic annotators like me. I'm also unclear on whether Evernote allows open access to files.

  Although most days I'm so satisfied with the fullness of my life to this point that I could easily die tomorrow, the evolution of literacy -- and we know we're in the clunkiest of early stages of this revolution -- does make me hope for a few more decades. It's all so fascinating.

  Thanks for the very thoughtful post, and see you on Twitter! (By the way, what do you teach, and where? I see you're in the UK, yes?)

• At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  I've tried to respond to your comment a couple times, Monika, but couldn't nail what I wanted to say. Still can't, so I guess I'm still not ready.

  But I'll start with saying I'm still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher -- which to me means "preparation for informed citizenship" teacher -- I'm not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.

  I see the value of both, though. I'm thinking a separate course -- a sort of "Intro to Web 2.0" -- might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.

  And I'm still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I've recently been calling, in my internal monologues, "barbarians with laptops."

  Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).

  And the new tools also enable "connections to knowledge via people" that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.

  But I'm still hazy. :)

  Thanks for the comment.

• At December 29, 2009, Lindsay Jordan wrote:

  I definitely prefer digital to paper books... I like to lie on my side while reading and it gets too fiddly holding the book open. And with Kindle you can annotate with the same hand you're holding the iPhone with - very good if you're reading while standing on the train and you need to other hand to hold on with!

  I'd agree that everything is still at the clunky stage - converting a pdf into a format that you can read on the iPhone in Kindle or Stanza is a rather complex operation (it gets easier after the first time and if you're doing lots of files in bulk).

  I teach Arts educators on the PG Cert in Learning & Teaching at the University of the Arts London. I also support teachers across our colleges in using technology for teaching & learning - this involves some community development work as well as supporting individual projects.

  .-= Lindsay Jordan´s last blog ..lindsayjordan: @Psythor Me too! I assumed Flash Gordon, or Colin Firth or someone, was going to fly in at the last minute and save the day... :-/ =-.

• At December 29, 2009, monika hardy wrote:

  Lindsay - thank you for your comment. The whole idea that the masses just keep changing up ... "processing static content" seems so invisible to others, maybe because it's so ingrained, esp in ed. And dang - what is the value of it now that we have created the means to do better....?

  Clay - this bit:

  Now I believe the best we can do is simply attract. The sun isn’t getting muscle fatigue keeping the planets in orbit. It’s simply attracting them, effortlessly, because of its impressive mass. Teachers should be suns in this way, and students the planets worth keeping in orbit.

  ...reminds me of Seth Godin. He's taught me what remarkable means. Something has to have enough value that it's worth talking about...by others. We're not pushing or pulling - we are your impressive, attractive sun.

  I think devalue, unattractiveness, the need to remark on our own activity, doing things only for a grade... comes when we think we have to have the masses buy in. As much as I want everyone to get it.. to have all ears hear it (those who have ears let them hear)...I am continually saddened by the cheapening of this beautifully choreographed collaborative movement.

  I love the ideas of podcasting as homework.. experts connecting with the few that do get it.

  Maybe this is where I need more patience. It makes so much sense... to be attractive and remarkable, because I want the learning to be geniune... but when I get in "school," waiting is hard. I want them (teachers and students) to get it now. I don't want them missing out on the beauty of it all. How long does/will it take to debunk? You'd think in it's true form, networking would/could debunk overnight.

  I just want to make sure that those moments when ears do open up to the possibility that this really is different... they aren't barraged with talk of new tech tools.... that just glorify the processing of static content.

  .-= monika hardy´s last blog ..the science of motivation via dpink =-.

• At December 29, 2009, Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear? at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] Nathan Lowell and Monika Hardy — it’s too long to post in its entirety, but it starts here — on the “Using Technology Without Understanding It” [...]

• At December 29, 2009, monika hardy wrote:

  I totally agree - this: sacrificing time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation - has been to our demise.

  I'm thinking more along the lines of Erica McWilliams term, being "usefully ignorant." Knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.

  Not - gosh I blundered the tech again - what can we learn from that?...

  But, dang, the questions you're asking are beyond my knowledge,... let's google it, or tweet about it, ..etc... to find out. And then obviously research the people, things, etc, we find for accuracy.

  I think we have to break away..and do the Clay Christensen disrupting class thing. Kids teaching themselves in a sense, because their journey is their journey. They have created (or their teachers have created) their own network of experts to guide them to knowledge/information.

  Currently, in my brain, learning how to use new tools isn't what ed needs. If the need for a tool is there, anyone can learn how to use it. So a separate class for it... hmmm.. I don't know. What we're missing is why we need the tools.

  Some reasons I think are good:

  I don't want to process static content anymore... I want to follow my passion... I don't want my end project to end up in the recycle bin... I want an authentic audience... I want what I do to matter.....

  Voicethread is an example of a great tool.... because it lives on.. It can be tweaked anytime. But I've also seen it used in static mode... it lost it's use.

  Gosh I was I was smarter...

  .-= monika hardy´s last blog ..let's not keep processing static content =-.

• At January 4, 2010, “You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] the unwilling to attempt genius, and not even “pull” them, but only to “attract” the three percent of “roses” in any student population who might blossom in the [...]

• At January 12, 2010, Students with Eyes, Let Them See: 27-Year-Old Chinese Blogs His Way to Fame at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now [...]

• At February 2, 2010, Part 4: What is important to know? wrote:

  [...] beyond school.org [...]

• At February 6, 2010, Some teacher resources… « RTOA wrote:

  [...] 100 videos showing new classroom techniques http://beyond-school.org/2009/12/25/on-using-technology-without-understanding-it/ -here’s an article on using tech without understanding it Tags: classroom techniques, [...]

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I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept through. I put my pleas along those lines in red.

Feel free to skip to section three for what’s really the meat of this post. I’d love feedback there especially.

I told my students in the just-concluded semester-long Chinese History course that I gave myself a B/B- for the way I taught it this first time out (call it the Beta version). This post will return to my early “teacher think-aloud” habit on this blog to reflect on ways to raise that grade for the second semester

Since a B supposedly signifies “above average” without signifying “excellent,” I’ll justify that grade first by listing what I thought were the course’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I hope I’ll have enough steam left to dump the brainstorm of how to re-figure the course — using Diigo to heighten the academic rigor, and an “in medias res” narrative structure to heighten the engagement and provide the essential purpose for studying Chinese (or any) history at all¹ — that’s been brewing in my mind over the last (typically post-midnight) hour.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

Strengths: A week before the course began, the returning teachers arrived to work and I was finally able to see the resources and scope of the course. The textbook, to put it generously, was great for 12-year-olds, but not my 16-year-olds in this supposedly “rigor”-driven school — so I tossed it and replaced it with the China chapters from an introductory Asian History college textbook (Rhoades Murphey’s excellent A History of Asia).

Weaknesses: Murphey’s text led to an embarrassment of riches: there was simply too much information in it for a brief survey course. I was also concerned that its readability level was too challenging for some students, but I did a Poll-Daddy poll and found 33 of 36 responded from “It’s a bit challenging, but I can handle it” (my definition of the Zone of Proximal Development for reading) to “It’s just right for my reading level” to “It’s easy.” Still, for the three who couldn’t handle it, alternate texts or resources were necessary, and I didn’t have them.

Another weakness was in the photocopied packet I made of the Murphey readings. I didn’t include the Index in the copies, so it was surely difficult for students to be able to locate information from the text for review purposes.

A final weakness: It had been four years since I’d used the text, which means I’d forgotten most of it, and spent the semester “two days ahead of the students” in terms of content mastery. (Students seem to think teachers remember everything they’ve ever known, which is interesting, since a brief reflection on their own forgetting of content from courses from prior years should demolish that idea. They seem to think the adult brain is of an entirely different model, some new design inserted in the skull upon college graduation or something. So here’s a dirty teacher secret, kids: Our brains are at least as limited as yours.)

Future Improvements: I’ve ordered The Cambridge Illustrated History of China to be the textbook next year. An Amazon “Reader Reviews” and “Look Inside” perusal satisfied me that this is a reasonably solid high school China history text. (We’re looking at ABC-CLIO database as a possible digital replacement for paper textbooks altogether for next year, when we go 1:1. Anybody know how feasible this is?)

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

Strengths: I haven’t written about it yet because I’m waiting for the video to be released, but I gave a keynote speech at the Learning Technologies Conference in Australia last month, and during it I declared a “pox on Blackboard.” I meant it. It made my first month trying to get to know my students’ backgrounds, preferences, and literacy skills utter hell. First I assigned an “About Me” forum that most students put a lot of effort into, apparently….. “Apparently” because I never saw it. Some glitch in Blackboard didn’t save the things, so I never got to read them. That damned me to fogginess about the general skills of my class for the first couple of weeks. Later attempts to use the forums, once the glitches were ironed out, were still clunky due to Blackboard’s horrible user interface (in all fairness, my school is using an old version, and I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive). Example: answering a forum in Blackboard confused most of my students because of the language of the User Interface. Instead of hitting “reply” after my prompt — no “reply” link existed — they had to somehow just know that to simply reply they had to click on “Start New Thread.” Talk about unintuitive.

Then there was Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning. (I wasn’t about to install and manage my own Moodle. Been there, suffered that. Anybody have solutions along these lines I don’t know about?)

The strengths of Ning: It’s way more straightforward. The Main Page is a one-stop overview and link-list for all necessary tasks and documents for the week. Videos, photo slideshows, forums, blogs, RSS feeds of China News from Google News and from my Diigo China bookmarks in widgets on the sidebars for any advanced student wanting to read more. Hell, even student birthdays announced on the sidebar (it never hurts so sing Happy Birthday in class). So good riddance, Blackboard.

I kept things pretty minimal, as far as assignments went. Rotating groups of four or five students had to blog each week on the prior week’s content — open, whatever idea struck their fancy — and the others had to reply to two that appealed to them (authentic audience response awards students with the best ideas, hopefully stirs those whose posts elicited cricket chirps to reflect on how to do better next time). It was hard for me to participate in the blogs and forums as much as I’d have liked because of the afore-mentioned “two days ahead of the students” reading the textbook.

Weaknesses: Organization. I’m not going to beat myself up for this one, because I had to design the airplane while I was mid-flight in the semester. But I need to set all forums so that replies are threaded under the comments replied to, which isn’t the default, for one thing. Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. I also need to figure out how to instruct students to subscribe to email notifications when somebody replies to their comment or post. I’m not sure this finely-tuned of an option is even available. If not, that means students are getting 40-odd notifications every time somebody replies to the forum they replied to — which means they understandably delete them all, as I do, without looking at them. Clunky. (Help?)

Future Improvements: Frankly, I’m still puzzling over this one. I‘d love to have students use Diigo to comment on other students Ning blogs and forum readings, but since the site is locked and the content is dynamic, I’m not sure Diigo highlights would be visible to other students visiting the pages. Anybody know? [Update: Well that was easy. Diigo told me on Twitter, while I was writing this, that the highlights will indeed show. They also set me up with an Education Account within 20 minutes of my applying for it, which will make class registration much easier. So cool.)

3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")

Strengths: Covering the 4,000 years of Chinese history from the semi-legendary Xia Dynasty of 2,000 BCE to the present in a semester course was no easy task -- especially since China, unlike Europe, doesn't have any gaping 1,000-year Dark Age through which to conveniently fast-forward, but instead boasts an unbroken string of literate centuries across four millennia. Survey though it was, the students did receive an education in the broad (and with Murphey's text, often impressively deep) flow of Chinese history from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and on into the 20th century's Nationalist and Communist regimes -- right up to the present day. (And though I know they couldn't know how skinny their "education" in Chinese history would have been had I just used the old textbook, and thus didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how superior their introduction to that history was in terms of depth and scope, I'm still pouting over the lack of a single expression of appreciation for the bang they got for their semester's buck. I know, I know: Cry me a river. Then send me to a shrink for expecting gratitude from teenagers.)

Weaknesses: The pacing was too fast. Again, I'm not beating myself up on this one because the textbook was new and I'd never used it as the primary text for teaching Chinese history before.

But more importantly, despite the oomph of knowing the highlights of all of China's major dynasties, at a certain point it starts feeling like a stuck record. Most of China's classical dynasties follow very similar "Dynastic Cycle" patterns in which a new dynasty begins, implements some impressive reforms in its first century or so, and over the next century or two becomes complacent and corrupt, and finally loses "the Mandate of Heaven" in the eyes of its subjects, and falls to whichever rebel or neighbor state emerges triumphant in Ye Olde and Verye Predictable Ende-of-Cycle Civille Warre or Forynne Invasionne. It brings to mind the title of an old Bowie song: "Always Crashing in the Same Car."

Most importantly, that almost-never-ending 3,000 years of dynastic cycles becomes, without a purpose for knowing it, an exercise in what Jared Diamond calls "history as one damn fact after another." Diamond insists on what most history buffs would assent to: that there are patterns in history that point towards essential understandings of who and what we are -- and those understandings, of course, separate the naive and ignorant from the educated. More importantly, they separate the citizen who you pray, for the sake of democracy, will not vote, from the one you pray will always vote.

Future Improvements: The course fell into the One Damn Fact Trap because I covered it chronologically: "In the beginning....." Tonight I think I arrived at a better approach.

I'm going to start the next course with the end of the dynastic era in 1911, when the Nationalists threw out the Qing -- more accurately, when the Qing just collapsed due to its own decrepitude -- and went through a painful and practically literal "crash course" in modern governance: nationalism, socialism, dictatorship, fascism, and democracy all in a stew from 1911 until 1949, and then totalitarianism and various shades of communism from 1949 to the present.

But before doing any of that, I'm going to assign the final exam essay questions in the first week of class, and have the students Diigo the hell out of our readings and forums on Ning for the rest of the course in order to arrive at their "answers." Here are the questions:

Essay Questions:

1.  Western Liberal Democracies in Europe and (especially) the USA typically criticize the PRC for its lack of human rights – freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as well as for its one-party dictatorship. Based on your knowledge of Chinese history in the “long view,” how valid do you think these criticisms are? Give as many specific examples from Chinese history as you can to support your arguments.

2.  Mao Zedong waged the Cultural Revolution as a last-ditch attempt to prevent party Moderates (Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) from implementing capitalist reforms to China’s economic system; Mao believed instead that a planned economy relying on the social spirit of the people was the path to prosperity and justice for all.  Based on your understanding of the effects of the Moderates’ reforms from the rise of Deng Xiaoping around 1980 to the present day, to what degree do you think Mao’s resistance was justified? Use as many specific details from the successes and failures of the planned economy during the ‘50s and early ‘60s (the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward), and from the successes and failures of the Four Modernizations to the present, to support your argument.

Why Diigo highlights and sticky-notes (online, on-site, on specific segments of text annotations) instead of simple forum and blog responses? A discussion on a Diigo forum last year that Cliff Mims started -- see my highlights on it here -- sold me. Diigo's Maggie Tsai said it most succintly:

Fundamentally there is a difference between Diigo's annotation and traditional blog commenting. Diigo in-situ highlight and sticky note allows fine-grained discussion to specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges...

So in a nutshell, as students read, they'll be highlighting and bookmarking the evidence to answer our semester-long "essential questions" that traditionally I would have sprung on them as "surprise" cram-questions at the end of the course. This will very much raise the "rigor" bar, and provide a similar routine for individual research projects. But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)]

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

Wordy, I know, but that says it. China might not have made the finals for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” award, but I’ve no doubt it made the short-list. Add to that the endless refrain, from at least the days of Ronald Reagan, of the evils of “godless Communism” and the blessings, historical and contemporary evidence aside (Iraq anyone? Or Afghanistan? or or or?) of one-size-fits-all “Democracy” and “Capitalism,” and you’ve got all sorts of articles of Western ideological faith to complicate with those lovely things called facts.

And please notice I said “complicate.” That’s the beauty of the idea: easy answers to the above essay questions, if pursued across a semester, with all evidence nicely aggregated on a simply-tagged Diigo page, will surely give way very quickly to the type of answers our future adults should have when considering modern China: and I mean nuanced answers.

Now my last two questions:

1. Assuming students will be able to offer valuable evidence and insight into the questions above — questions I’m convinced are relevant enough to the real world to deserve an audience — what’s the best way to present their findings to the world via the web?

2. How can I keep the project alive after its first iteration? Different questions for each successive class?

A million thanks for any who took the time to read and respond. If you see any beautiful ways to extend or enhance the idea further — Skypecast interviews from my students in Singapore with American students about their stereotypes of China and its government, for example? More? — please pitch those in the mix too.

1. it reminds me of David Warlick’s occasional pitch to “teach history backwards,” though my approach is a little more complicated

26 Comments

• At December 31, 1969, lindseybp (Barbara Lindsey) wrote:

  Terrific @cburell reflective post on Beyond School http://bit.ly/7VEyC7 fav part: fnl exam ?s guide student-led learning from beg

• At December 23, 2009, Damian wrote:

  Clay, if I'm understanding your PDF sharing/annotating needs correctly, I'd offer two suggestions:

  1) http://bookgoo.com supposedly offers these services (I say supposedly because the reviews say so, but I haven't been able to get the site to load)

  2) This takes a little more virtual elbow grease, but if you only want students to share w/each other and you, as opposed to the whole web, get them free Evernote accounts, let them annotate in Adobe or some similar offline program, then save their PDFs to Shared Notebooks (Mashable has an overview of the service here: http://mashable.com/2009/06/25/evernote-shared-notebooks/ ). Depending on the settings you use, students can share just with small groups or with the entire class (set up different Shared Notebooks for each purpose).

  .-= Damian´s last blog ..The Fine Print =-.

• At December 23, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for those, Damian. Book-goo (horrible name!) isn't loading for me either, so what we're to make of that is up to us.

  Evernote is a great idea, though. I'm looking at the link you gave and will let that brew for a while. Group eds are available only with a premium account, so maybe I need to finally rethink my cheapskate approach, since I've heard such great things aboout EN. (I have an account, but force of habit has prevented me from using it much at all. Diigo seems so easy by comparison.)

  Another option I thought of post-post is to convert the pdf's to text, and copy those to Ning. That way they can be annotated and highlighted.

  But definitely good to consider EverNote in the mix.

  God I'm rusty. Thanks for the help!

• At December 23, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf's what Diigo does for websites.

  A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)

• At December 23, 2009, Clif Mims wrote:

  I remain a big, big fan of Diigo. Thanks for the other tips, Clay. I especially appreciate the encouragement to consider consider substituting the use of Ning for Blackboard (Desire2Learn, WebCT, Angel, etc.). I'm going to give that some serious thought.

• At December 23, 2009, beth wrote:

  Clay--I love it when I hear teachers discussing databases. The ABC-CLIO is a great option! I can put you in contact with our humanities head who is also a great fan of this database. As you probably know you have the additional option to create tailor-made reading lists for your students. We are successfully using this with our 8th graders. We have had an excellent response from our students with this database—so good in fact, we have added Daily Life Premium: Daily Life through History, World Folklore and Folklife, Daily Life America.

  We are not a 1-1 school, but since you are there are additional options. Have you looked at Proquest's History Study Center? Berkshire Publishing has just published this year a a digital Encyclopedia of China, which looks quite good and they are open to a consortium pricing. And since you are discussing China history--have a look at my blog posting on Education about Asia; it is a worthwhile subscription. And any China syllabus must have Spence on it.

  And BTW thanks for the suggestion A.nnotate. Diigo has wonderful possibilities, but it is currently blocked in China right now (OUCH!)

  .-= beth´s last blog ..Looking East =-.

• At December 23, 2009, Mrs. Fuller wrote:

  Hey Clay,

  Regarding the .pdf dilemma . . . I clicked on the a.nnotate.com link that you posted & noticed that it could be quite pricey. Have you tried foxit reader? I have had great success with it--it is free for the reader & mark-up version, with upgrades available for a small(er) cost http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/reader3.php (I am not affiliated with them in any way, just a teacher on the lookout for cheap/free stuff!)

• At December 24, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Will try indeed, Mrs. Fuller, thank you :)

  I will say that what I'm liking at a.nnotate is the ability to socially bookmark the highlights. For collaborative research in the classroom, that has benes. I haven't looked at pricing too much there yet, but from what I recall, it didn't seem spendy at its lower tiers.

• At December 24, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  D'oh! It's just for Windows, and I'm married to a Mac. Still a nice tool to know about, so thanks again.

• At December 24, 2009, Jodi wrote:

  Dude, haven't read the whole post (or all comments) yet, but will slowly make my way through. In the meantime, this is what has resonated so far:

  "I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. " -- OMG, my biggest stress about going back after my sabbatical, especially since this year, my school has switched from PC to Mac, and I haven't had the time to play around on the Mac and feel as native with it as I did with my PC.

  "Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning." -- AGREED. Though this year our school will have installed the new Bb, over the past year I often considered "going rogue" and shifting just my classes -- or even just my AP Lang classes -- to Ning. But our school is very lock-step, not to mention obsessed with the "security" of its students (read: We.Must.Use.School.Protocol) that I'd probably get a big wrist-slap for doing so.

  "Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. " -- My solution to this in the past on Bb has been to create a single course page out of my two AP sections and then create cross-sectioned groups (with about 3 kids per section in each group). They'd then interact with a slightly smaller group that included kids from the other section, and at the end of the exercise I could open the groups up for them to see one another's forums. Not 100% satisfactory (partly b/c of the Bb unwieldiness), but it had some benefits, including cross-pollination of ideas from one section to another in a relatively manageable way.

  Gonna keep reading to see if anything else twigs, but didn't want any one comment to get too long.

  .-= Jodi´s last blog ..Romancin’ the languages =-.

• At December 24, 2009, Jodi wrote:

  Continuing:

  "But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find." -- Thanks for this. V cool. Also, I have this vague inkling that the latest versions of Adobe allow PDF sticky-note annotation. But it may be something attached to pay-only versions...? Will have to play around with a.nnontate, as it's also two-tiered.

  That's it for now. Funny, cause I had a dream last night that I was working at a new school that wasn't 1-1 and it was so awkward, b/c I was trying to get students to share their responses to the work online with one another.

  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Padova, Italia! :D

  .-= Jodi´s last blog ..Romancin’ the languages =-.

• At December 25, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:

  It's good to see you back, Clay. Now if I could only summon the will to break from applications and schooly writing to post...

  I think your questions are excellent will drive students to see that history, rather than being a set of facts, is nuanced and, at its best, controversial. To present their answers, it seems like a WordPress blog might be the way to go. In particular, I'd hope that you support a variety of media responses: written essays (which do still have their value), but also YouTube recordings of speeches.

  Another idea, which might just stem from my enjoyment of argument, is to have Skype debates between your class and American students. Push for thinking based on facts, but keep students from simply posting facts without thought.

  Also, about Blackboard/Ning: "I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive" — I don't think Moodle is, by any means, a standard against which usability should be judged. Its usability is questionable enough that I've considered making my own dozens of times. Depending on application results, I might end up making it this summer, giving you a potential alternative next year.

• At December 25, 2009, Stian Haklev wrote:

  Great post, very inspiring to read teachers reflect that honestly and openly about their teaching. I would love to see the teachers at my school of education do the same. I was just yesterday discussing with some of my friends how there seems to be a singular lack of concern for pedagogy (or andragogy) at schools of education... Do as I say, not as I do...

  I have played a bit with Diigo, but never in a large group setting. I'd love to experience that. It's something we've thought about experimenting with more at Peer2Peer University. I guess a lot has been written about it already, but I wonder how to best structure it. Do they only comment on the "curriculum", or do they go out and find any resources that are interesting, and comment on them?

  It's also annoying with PDFs. I really wish all these online publishers could serve us with HTML, rather than PDFs... I am doing research for a paper right now, and I keep ending up with a download diretory full of PDFs with enlightening names like 3094032492034.pdf.

  .-= Stian Haklev´s last blog ..Harper Valley PTA/Fru Johnsen/Fröken Fredriksson =-.

• At December 25, 2009, Ning und Diigo im Unterricht einsetzen | Tim Schlotfeldt » E-Learning wrote:

  [...] 3 Aufrufe Clay Burell beschreibt in seinem Blogpost A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West sehr anschaulich wie er seinen Kurs über chinesische Geschichte weg vom Learning Management System [...]

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Beth, I know I followed your link and commented there, but I just want to urge others to follow it too. It's so very rich.

  Thanks for the input and enjoy Tianjin! How long have you been there, anyway?

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Good suggestions, Morgante.

  The problem I'd need help with on debating students in the US is the time-zone problem. We're GST+8 here, the US is around GST-8. Do you think asynchronous debate would be worth the effort? If so, how would you do it? (Why am I thinking VoiceThread?)

  What do you mean by "recordings of speeches"? Original student speeches, or historical ones? I don't get it.

  Moodle 2.0 is coming soon and sounds promising. Anything is better than Bb, and I do like Moodle well enough. But I'm not going to host it myself, so it's moot anyway. I just looked at Edmodo or whatever it's called, and it seems so minimal I'm not sure how it would do the job. What would you use? (If/until you make your own, which of course you will tell me about. That's an order.)

  Get back to your schoolywork now.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Stian,

  You did see a.nnotate.com as a pdf version of Diigo linked above, didn't you?

  I've never mandated Diigo before, so it's going to be a first for me. I think the open surfing option is a good idea -- but only if (and mostly in order to) website evaluation is required.

  As for the honesty, I figure it was pre-emptive (bad word for an American like me to use in the post-Bush era) strike before my students might launch their own critiques ;-)

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Jody,

  Adobe and other pdf readers allow annotation, but I want the social annotation a la Diigo for collaborative research and annotation discussions.

  You should see a shrink if you're dreaming about 1:1 schools while in Italy. I order you to instead dream of Petrarch and Botticelli.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for input on "cross-pollination." I'll see if Ning allows this kind of approach.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Clif, a belated hi and thanks for starting that Diigo discussion. It was very helpful, and you moderated it well.

• At December 28, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:

  Good point on the debates; I forgot about the time zone issue. Asynchronous debates might work though, especially if spread over multiple days—record 1 speech, then 1 response, etc. VoiceThread could work for this, so could simple video uploads to YouTube.

  By recordings of speeches I meant student recordings—presenting thoughts through oratory rather than solely writing.

  Edmodo does seem too minimal, but I've also lost faith in the Moodle model: individual schools/teachers all hosting their own instance doesn't seem the best way, especially if we want to see true global collaboration. It just seems to bring the restrictions of the school walls onto the web—and not in a particularly elegant fashion. I'll certainly let you know if I get anything going.

  Now back to studying for the SAT, since I'm on break.

• At December 29, 2009, Adrienne wrote:

  I know I'm late replying, but on a Mac, I think the simplest way to annotate PDFs is using Preview. You can highlight or at the very least circle / box text and add your own notes. When you save it, it saves all annotations. A.nnotate looks good, but a bit complicated if all you want to do is mark up a PDF and show it to others.

  .-= Adrienne´s last blog ..Resuscitated: Assessment — For What it’s Worth =-.

• At December 29, 2009, Tim Drown wrote:

  Your reflections on your teaching experience about China was helpful. In January 2010 I will be (co-)teaching Asian History for the first time. One of the countries I will be teaching is China. I have been reading everything I can get my eyes on about China. I have a tougher job than you. I will only have about 2-3 sessions to help my students grasp something worthwhile about China's immense history. Do you have any suggestions for a very brief overview and analysis of China's history that would be helpful for university reading level (EFL students in Indonesia reading in English, their second language)that I could have online access to?

• At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  I know how to annotate on a Mac, Adrienne. What I'm looking for is the social annotation equivalent of Diigo for pdf's for the class. A.nnotate is the closest thing I've found.

  Thanks for pitching in, though.

• At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Gosh, Tim, I have no idea how a person could do China in three classes. I guess I'd go deep on the PRC or the 20th C. to the present. There's a good short textbook by Josh Brooman, China in the 20th Century (Longman) that might fit the bill, but even that would be tight.

  Also google Fareed Zakaria Newsweek the rise of China for an article about China today.

  PBS has a documentary online called Tank Man that's a good watch on Tiananmen to the present. Transcripts included on site.

  Zhang Yimou's movie "To Live" is a great historical drama about one family from the 1940s to the 1980s that nails the main political events.

  Of course, you'd need to do Confucianism too.

  Hope that helps.

• At December 31, 2009, Jodi wrote:

  Yes, well... maybe it's all the rich food and wine... :D

  .-= Jodi´s last blog ..New Posts in the New Year! =-.

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(This post is dedicated to the aspiring writers out there.)

Today, January 1, 2009, is the second birthday of Beyond School.

What a short, strange trip it’s been.

I’m not superstitious, but I love coincidences, synchronicities, and patterns as much as the next guy. So I’m going to trace those two years up to an announcement about some ch- ch- ch- ch- changes in my writing and non-writing life that will start this week. It’s not quite the death of Beyond School, so much as maybe growing beyond it. I’m not sure. Maybe I will be by the end of this post.

In my dreamer’s twenties, I often fantasized that….

….could I but scrawl across the sky, in letters stratosphere-high and coast to coast broad, an unknown writer’s plea to the world to discover my words – with contact info at the bottom – then some patron would do so. I had no connections, no money, no idea how to manifest my potential to the world. (College essays with a red “A” across the top and encouraging scribbles on the last page did not seem like manifesting to anything larger than the usually tired hired reader at the front of the classroom.)

That was in the ’80s. It lasted into the ’90s. And I’m fully aware of how lame that dreamer was, when others with more gumption did the work to figure out the publishing game, and got published. But that was me.

Then I collided with a White Rabbit in Shanghai,

- Jeff Utecht – around the autumn of 2005, and followed him down a certain rabbit-hole, and into the wonderland of blogging. (I still hate that word.)

During the winter break of that same year, Karl Fisch, who maybe knows this, and maybe doesn’t, offered me a Fischbowl full of red pills, blue pills, new-colored pills, and I fisted them up and gulped them down. For a couple of weeks, I read everything he wrote and started having trippy visions of an education that could be. I started a blog on Live Journal, of all things, and wrote a good twenty posts in a week. (I was single then, and it was an easy pleasure.) On New Year’s Day 2006, I waved a magic mouse and zapped those posts from Live Journal to Blogspot.

I wrote and wrote and wrote for months, mostly to nobody. The  occasional comment in those days was like a gold coin from the sky. I wrote visions of world-writing wikis that would turn into blog-book “blooks” and French Revolution wikis that made my head swim. I wrote about dystopian edu-futures in which teacher-vampires “sucked classroom blogging dry,” turned it into “a new way to turn in the same old homework.” I wrote and I wrote, for nobody and everybody.

By the end of the first year, I had written – and read, oh yes, so many of you – my way into ways of teaching that were candle-flames to my moth. I’m not saying they were anywhere close to great or perfect; they were just beautiful, bright forms of inventive play that frequently drew me too close and, because they were usually too ambitious and too big, burned me out.

I’ve always agreed with whoozits the great writer who said, “It’s better to burn than to rot,” so that was okay.

A healthy schizophrenia came….

….a Nietzschean “ball of snakes” of the mind, each contending for control of this here space. I was tired of writing of Things Two Point Oh. It felt like writing about the joys of a honeymoon, long after the newness had worn off. But I was an “edublogger,” a self-taglined “kicker of addictions to 20th Century teaching.” Stuck wriggling on my pin, how could I presume to write beyond Beyond School?

But the literary snake ascended triumphant. I started writing mad long posts about Gilgamesh, touching taboos untouchable in the schoolroom (possibly only because of my own ex-Southern Baptist unconscious).  I asked students to stay and teachers to leave. I wrote ten thousand words about an epic of about ten thousand words, and only got a quarter of the way through it.

The funny thing about succumbing to that snake: it worked. More people read those Gilgamesh posts than all the rest of my 600 posts combined. It made me want to stop writing about school(iness) altogether, and just write readings of the heights of human art.

Then Sarah Palin winked up the world,

and too many seemed seduced. Another snake ascended the ball, a political one, fangs thirsting to sink venom into that catastrophic hockey-mom’s neck – for the sake of America and the world. Grandiose, yes, but aren’t all our evangelisms? I wrote about nothing but politics for the next many weeks. (And if McCain dies, goodness forbid, in the next four years, don’t make me say “I told you it was important.” That Saks Fifth Avenue demagogue would be ruling the world – including that “country” she knows as Africa.)

Fully expecting my subscribers to unsubscribe in droves, I could only hope others would come to replace them. Water seeks its own level and all of that. (And I thank all of you who stayed.)

And then one day,

after weeks of nothing but manic and stentorian political blogging, I got an email from somebody about an editing / writing position opening up. It involved educational politics and activism. “I thought of you instantly,” he said. (And I thank him, and he knows who he is.)

I applied, interviewed, interviewed again. Glacial, painful waiting (and contemporaneous with the radio job I’d also been interviewing for).

And I got the job. Stay tuned for the URL when the site is ready to launch later this week. And expect me to pull many of your sleeves to help me push that vision of an education that could be – and that, because of so many of you, already is for a few lucky students.

Have I mentioned that long ago….

….I fantasized about writing in letters as large as the sky, “I write, I write – find me”?

That was B.W. (Before Weblogs).

Now, A.W., that fantasy has become possible. Instead of scribing on the sky, we write and write  on screens of light. And if we do it long enough, hard enough – instinctively enough – we can, with the right timing and wind conditions, be found.

This isn’t crowing, mind you. I’ll still need a day job. What this is, for any who need it spelled out, is a T-E-S-T-I-M-O-N-Y of the potential of writing yourself out there. Maybe those students who never believed it when I talked myself red in the face about all of this in theory will see it now. I started Beyond School with a freshman class two years ago; I wish I had them as juniors this year.

~   ~   ~

In the future,

I’ll be writing more on my new space than here. I want to continue making time to write the Unsucky English Lectures, but am not sure if I’ll post them here, or on a new blog, and just leave Beyond School as an artifact of teaching ideas.

(I wonder what Christian Long would advise. He bowed out of Think:Lab recently, if I’m not mistaken. And my god, I just searched for his blog and it seems he deleted it. Is that true? What a loss.)

Photo:
“Escribiendo el cielo” by anikaviro

35 Comments

• At January 1, 2009, Harold Jarche wrote:

  Congratulations, Clay. What a wonderful way to start the new year!

  Harold Jarches last blog post..New year, new challenges

• At January 1, 2009, Paula White wrote:

  Clay, Congratulations on the new job! This testimony is great, and I think some students will take to heart your message and find encouragement in it. Thanks for sharing your journey and thoughts!

• At January 1, 2009, spgreenlaw wrote:

  That is really good news. I can't wait to see the new site. I do hope you'll keep this site up, as I haven't managed to read through everything in the archives yet.

  This unknown, aspiring writer is extremely grateful to have been able to read this post. After reading it (thrice) when I first woke up, without even having had a cup of coffee yet, I felt encouraged and motivated and hopeful again. It certainly is a good affirmation.

  Oh, and it is eerie how similar the "dreamer's twenties" portion is to my current mindset.

  spgreenlaws last blog post..Shalom, Salaam

• At January 2, 2009, Lorraine Orenchuk wrote:

  Clay, I am so excited for you! What wonderful news and I agree with spgreenlaw - it is also personally inspiring. My blog, started years ago, also began with a wish to share my teaching stories. So many days now I find myself pondering entries but have no place to put them as they don't fit the teaching journey theme. I think we are all consummate learners, maybe it is the learning journey I should write about. Your prose is a gift to us, your energy a vitamin for tired visionaries. Congratulations and I look forward to reading your letters in the sky. Peace.

  Lorraine Orenchuks last blog post..Accountability

• At January 2, 2009, Jennifer wrote:

  Hi Clay, Congratulations and Happy New Year ~ I truly hope you will keep this blog up, if not active, so your newer readers, like me, have an opportunity to read more of it. I can imagine it would be difficult to keep two such blogs going at once, but perhaps this one can evolve into your personal/creative blog -- I accidentally wrote persona/creative blog there, and maybe that's a clue -- while the new one can be the place for your ongoing, focused critique of education. At any rate I'm glad "the world" discovered you, through Gilgamesh, politics, or by whatever means!

  Jennifers last blog post..Instructional Technologist, “In Quotes”

• At January 2, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks, Harold. I figured you'd relate. :)

• At January 2, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks, Paula :)

• At January 2, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  S.P.,

  Hearing it resonated with you comforts me. Terrorist fist-jab, time-delayed doppelgänger. (And the Dreamer 20s were a good stage for me. Since I didn't mind scraping pennies as long as I had books music film, it was all fine. A squirrel in autumn thing. You'll chew the nuggets you're storing now for the rest of your life. And be glad.)

  I won't delete Beyond School. I'm just not sure whether I can continue writing under a title so specialized.

• At January 2, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Lorraine, that's an interesting comment. You feel it too, the "no place to put them" syndrome.

  Long ago I read a post asking whether professional and personal blogs should be separate, and at the time thought "No." Now I disagree.

  It's an audience thing. Non-educators are probably not going to want to read posts about freaking classroom wikis, no matter how cool they are to us. But non-educators might subscribe to a space we devote to us as sojourners, to riff off your phrase. Or more naturally, us as simply ourselves.

  I love the style of your comment. You've got ear, girl. "A vitamin for tired visionaries" is a sound-sense keeper.

• At January 2, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Jennifer,

  "Persona/creative" - what a great typo.

  BS won't go anywhere, as I said to Lorraine above, I'm just not sure what to do with it.

  Happy New Year :)

• At January 2, 2009, Tom wrote:

  Clay,

  Congratulations on the new job! That's great news, and I'm very much looking forward to what you've got in store for the new year. All the best!

  Toms last blog post..Resolutions

• At January 2, 2009, Michael Doyle wrote:

  Um, Clay, have you peeked at the name of your blog recently?

  Beyond School. Beyond. Really. Go look. I'll wait while you do.

  Everything out and about and beyond--your blog is the anti-edublog, and it needs to continue, at least until you finish Gilgamesh.

  You only need one passionate reader to make writing worthwhile--you can only truly write to one other anyway, despite the industrial perception of art today.

  Unless there's some ridiculous copyright thing attached to your new endeavor (and congrats!, btw), then cross-post here.

  The only person who thinks you're an edublogger is you. No sane teacher would take on Gilgamesh as though it matters (and it does).

  And whoever hired you knows you're less than sane in the limited definition of "sound mind."

  I didn't drop the F-bomb, though I had to edit it a few times in the past coule of minutes.

  I am very happy for you, but you got to get this idea that you are limited here out of your head.

  You changed the conversation. We cannot allow you to walk away from it.

  So there.

  Michael Doyles last blog post..Industrialism and clams

• At January 2, 2009, Sharon Seslija wrote:

  Congratulations Clay! I hope you'll have time to finish Gilgamesh - I actually went out and bought the book and read it based on your posts. Good luck in your new endeavor. I can't wait to see where your "sky writing" takes you next.

  Sharon Seslijas last blog post..What Type is that Blog?

• At January 3, 2009, Daily wrote:

  [...] di idee con Ilaria sulla questione di pubblicare le proprie creazioni. Vi propongo di leggere questo post di Clay Burrel, uno dei quattro punti cardinali del mio Personal Learning Environment. Cos’è [...]

• At January 3, 2009, Kate Tabor wrote:

  Congratulations, Clay - glad to know that we will still be able to read your work, now in more than one place. (I've only just begun struggling with the "no place to put it" problem.) Lean into the discomfort that new things bring; it's there that beauty is created. And I agree with Michael - the only person that limits you is you. Thanks for writing and, a personal thanks from me, for reading.

  I hope that you can kick that flu.

  href="http://tabor330.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/provisioning-bermuda/" rel="nofollow">Provisioning in Bermuda

• At January 3, 2009, Sean Nash wrote:

  I have to say- since starting my little blog slowly back in September, your words here have often been a big inspiration for many things I think, talk about, or write.

  When I read your first sentence about a short, strange trip... I knew that you were going to drop something interesting. Thinking about your link in my blogroll heading out to an archive page somewhat saddens me at first thought. Not that it isn't a sweet little archive, but I (and I'm sure many others who read mine) always knew we could click that link and get something a little different than the standard fare.

  I think your new plan sounds pretty doggone exciting. I am anxious to see this when it drops. I'm confident you'll let us know when and where this is happening when it does. Your blog helping to lead you into this next phase of your life is quite cool. It is one more perfect example for my kids to see. Back when I started plugging away on the web in these venues I realized this could be a way to subvert the typical path through one's career. I think it is one of the most exciting and democratic things I have seen in my young(?) life.

  So thanks for having the chops to pull that off... and for being a public example (redundant to the topic) of what I try to forewarn folks about.

  And yeah- it seems I may be getting ready to add another site to the ol' blogroll perhaps.

  Keep it uP!

  Sean

  Sean Nashs last blog post..My Daughter’s Favorite “Gift”

• At January 3, 2009, Bill Farren wrote:

  Congratulations Clay and Happy New Year. Still find myself heading over to BS --often-- despite the billions of other net options out there. A true testament of the great thinking that exists here.

  Can't wait to see what's next. Cheers.

  Bill Farrens last blog post..Convinced

• At January 3, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:

  Great and inspirational post: it's hard to believe you've only been writing on Beyond School for 2 years.

  I certainly can sympathize with being constrained by a venue, and I hope I can continue to follow your work wherever it resides.

  Congratulations and may this be a good year for you.

• At January 3, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Oh, Michael, it's the "school" part that makes me want to....graduate.

  Titles are the first thing new readers see. I want new readers in and out of education, and wouldn't blame most new readers for passing on the title because, um, they're really not into reading about school.

  Maybe I'll change the title to just "Beyond." Or "Into Life."

  But I will keep posting here, I think. Although I'm thinking of starting an "Unsucky English" blog. (But damn, that "English" sounds schooly. Damn damn damn.)

  Hey, happy new year, by the way. You really enriched '08 for me. Thanks for that.

  We should meet before we die.

• At January 3, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks Sharon :)

  I will definitely (knocks wood against the runaway bus flattening tomorrow) finish Gilgamesh, and more. But I think the "more" will be the additional chapters of the book that the Gilg writings will be, in revised form, the chapter one....

  I really appreciate your encouragement, by the way, Sharon, and hope your new year is a good one.

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Sneak preview for commenters here (woo-hoo, I know), because I'm too tired to post about it yet.

  Education.Change.org.

  So far it's prescribed (and rightly so) background content, but I'm excited as all hell. Great community there already for the other Change.org blogs, and the focus on action in addition to words - with a huge member base seemingly born to act - is my kind of focus.

  I'd be honored and delighted to converse with all of you there and here. In Google Reader, if nothing's new, the extra feed won't show.

• At January 4, 2009, Nicholas Howell wrote:

  I must tell you that when I received an email informing me that there was going to be a new section on Change.org concerning public education, I felt an immediate rush of excitement followed by a huge sinking down to my gut.

  You see, as a first-year teacher, I'm still idealistic and passionate. However, as with most idealists, I'm used to being let down or disappointed. I assumed the new Change.org page would be run by one of two people: 1. an ancient professor who hasn't taught in a classroom in years; or 2. one who spent a year or two teaching and then moved on into administration.

  I should have known better! After discovering you on here and reading what you have to say, I'm so glad that you formed a partnership with them. I look forward to reading your words and taking them to heart.

• At January 4, 2009, Paul C wrote:

  I agree with you: I hate the word blogging. And I remember what you said it could be for adults and students: advanced digital communication. Keep it up with the bar raised high.

  Paul Cs last blog post..Heirloom Discoveries and Treasures

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nicholas, just a quick note to say your comment made my day.

  After I finish packing for my flight to Thailand in 18 hours, and writing my post for c.o., and interviewing for jobs all next week (I'm on a self-financed sabbatical this year to rejuvenate - and that k-12 teachers don't get that as readily as university professors is criminal beyond compare) - *inhale* - I really look forward to settling in to get to know you and so many other good people.

  What do you teach? Where? What levels?

  Clay

• At January 4, 2009, Scott Schwister wrote:

  Back in ancient times, during one of our potent conversations, you said something about a vision of web 3.0-to-come: read-write-ACT. Take all the words and thoughts and convictions and put them into action. And here it is, and here you are. I can't imagine a surer set of hands on the wheel at education.change.org. Really and truly...not just blowing smoke. Constructively framing issues that have built up layers of political calcification over the years (did you see Bud Hunt's research into Project Follow Through?), negotiating/mediating/translating a conversation with so very many voices, and then helping move all that blogspeak into real action? It'll take someone with deep background knowledge of public ed past and present, social media chops, in-the-trenches teaching experience, unshakable sense of self, passion for activism balanced by pragmatism. Have I missed anything? Throw in a superhero cape for good measure. You're it. It'll be fun to see you in action in a feisty new locale.

  Scott Schwisters last blog post..laboring for invention

• At January 4, 2009, Bud Hunt wrote:

  Clay,

  Happy belated blogday - and don't let it be a funeral. Just checked out your space at Change.org - and I'm excited both for you and for them. Go get 'em. But please stop by here, too. I suspect you'll have plenty to say in both places.

  Bud Hunts last blog post..Seeing Mindfully, Thanks to D’Arcy

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Scott, you know, you're right. Our talks back then were almost exactly about this.

  It's so nice to hear from you again. I hope you're well.

  I'd say more, but I'm packing for Bangkok flight at the last minute!

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks Paul. We both know that blogging is just a place to put writing :) Have a great new year. Nice to see your own blog taking off.

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Kate, I've still got the damn flu, but the antibiotics are kicking in. Gah.

  The "no place to put it problem" is a thorny one, but it'll all wash out.

  I'm so glad we "met."

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Sean, that "one more example for my kids to see" nails the purpose of the post. It's good to get that feedback.

  It's great interacting with you so much these days. Let's both try not to die any time soon so we can do more of it :)

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Bill, thank you for that. I've featured and linked to you in a couple of places in my resources post already. Sorry I've been so incommunicado the last couple of months (or more?). The reasons should be more transparent now :)

• At January 4, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Morgante, in a few words: You amaze me, and I'll hunt you down if you ever disappear. Thanks for the kind words, too.

• At January 10, 2009, diane wrote:

  Can't quite find a clever phrase that adequately conveys how I feel about what you've shared and how it's prodded me to step off the beaten path every now and again. Just a simple "thank you" will have to do.

• At January 12, 2009, Adrienne wrote:

  Clay,

  Belated congratulations on your new position over at change.org -- you truly are *THE BEST* person for such a role! I am happily entering it into my reader presently and I look forward to more nuggets from both that site, and this one. I am glad to hear you won't be taking BS offline; it has been a ray of inspirational light on more than one occasion since I discovered it about a year ago. I feel better knowing you're not "going anywhere" in some strange way - almost like a security blanket! Thank you for past encouragement, and for that which I am certain will come in the future just by my continued subscriptions to your writing.

• At January 27, 2009, Virkelighetsnært? « Mitt hJØRNe av web’en wrote:

  [...] seg i sin egen “boble”. Det er skolen - og så er det det virkelige livet der ute. Enkelte trekker konsekvensen og slutter i skolen. For oss som holder ut, er det en stadig utfordring å [...]

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14 Comments

• At December 12, 2008, spgreenlaw wrote:

  "And yes, that means books."

  Ah, but what if they are e-books? Gotcha.

  But seriously. Since taking the time to think about things that I post, I find myself reading more. It's delightful. Part of the reason is that because I am chasing down ideas, some of them old ones that have been stewing in the back of my mind for some time, I get to wonder where I heard that before or what so-and-so thinks on the subject. So, writing in a measured way has led me to think in a measured way, which has forced me to really read again. The fact that I'm already feeling better about the whole thing so soon is remarkable.

  Oh, and I took Boing Boing off my google reader account a few days ago. They were updating too much for me to deal with, and I had to fight the compulsion to click to every single new article Doctorow posts about DRM. Rehab is tough, man.

  spgreenlaws last blog post..A Frost poem would be cliché, wouldn’t it?

• At December 12, 2008, Will Richardson wrote:

  Hey Clay,

  In J school, my Principles of Reporting prof handed back my first article with four words at the top: "Cut it in half." When I did the revision, he handed it back with five words at the top: "Cut it in half, again." I got the point.

  What I love about my favorite essayists, Donald Murray, Anna Quindlen and others, is their ability to squeeze out the most meaning from every word. And I know that was the product not just of vision but re-vision, and then more re-vision. I loved the way Donald Murray used to write and reflect on his process, the way he positioned the reader in the task, the way he heard his reader hear his sentences. I learned much from the way he made his process transparent, and I wish he was alive today to be blogging about it.

  I think that is the good and bad of fast writing/blogging. We don't take the time to revise, to re-vision a post in the same way. Yet, I feel like my ability to revise as I write has found new heights simply by doing it over and over and over for seven years in these online spaces, and that that revise-as-you-go posture doesn't necessarily mean less quality or less depth. In fact, I think on balance, I might trade all that depth for the scope and scale of what I can connect to now. It's like for me, deep reading comes in the synthesis of ideas from many disparate parts. It's like I've trained my brain to make those connections, to compose it's own compilations and collections, to do the stuff that authors of books used to do for me. To make an attempt, at least, of creating its own "longer river of time." And I can go deep into the pools when I desire to do so. (Let me show you the marked up pages of my current book in hand.) But I can also find comfort in the rapids.

  This isn't (I don't think) a defense of fast reading or fast blogging as much as it is a defense of this reality of information and an acquiescence to the reality of "continuous partial attention" or "ambient awareness" or what ever the cool description of the month is. As I think you suggest, both slow/fast reading/blogging have value. The rub is how do we get the most from both at the same time, and, in turn, how do we help our kids do that as well.

  PS...How ironic to have a countdown clock for revision once a comment is published. So much for slow commenting. ;0)

  Will Richardsons last blog post..The Ultimate Disruption for Schools

• At December 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  S.P.,

  I know you were kidding (mostly) about e-books, but they do open the door to that ADD/Obsessive-compulsive urge to check the reader/blog/news/Twitter etc. That's why "off-line" seemed key.

  As Will says in the next comment, and as I didn't say well enough, it's no "either/or," but a question of balance. History has the accelerator to the floor, so I can't not do online reading. But it also has a back-story to serve as context and deeper well, so I can't - or shouldn't - neglect the more focused study of books. Yet I do exactly that.

  And I can't even bring myself to unsubscribe to Boing Boing.

• At December 12, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Will, I hear you on the "revise-as-you-go" piece. That's what I was trying to get at with the daily writing work-out that blogging gives us.

  An aspect of this I didn't mention, and that really comes out when you picture you and me, both well over 40, and S.P. (21) and Morgante (16?), is age. We immigrants grew up with books to give us our big picture of history and all the details on its canvas. That was a long, sustained process of construction. For me, at least, books were key in that. (Hm. Teaching was even more key.)

  Would I have such a coherent big picture if I were a native, reading websites in my youth more than I read books? I can't know. But I wonder what Morgante and S.P. and other youths would say.

  How do you piece together the "great conversation" of ideas over time, in grandest liberal arts fashion, classic-to-classic and idea-to-idea (what Nietzsche calls the "conversations from peak to peak through the centuries," to roughly paraphrase), without slowing down, reading those primary and secondary sources, and weaving them into coherence over years of youth - if you don't read books? Can you do that online?

  I mean, I know Project Gutenberg and such are there, but those old public domain translations generally fail to speak to us, especially the young, in voices and styles we're comfortable with. That's what struck me about S.P.'s post, particularly. You could hear his conscience telling him his time at 21 was better spent reading Kropotkin and Marx, without other readings open on other Firefox tabs doing the siren bit when he's trying to concentrate on keeping his course.

  "How to help our kids do that as well" indeed.

  But to end this, you're clearly right to say that it's not either/or. It's more how much of each - which I'm just wondering doesn't change depending, among other things, on age.

• At December 13, 2008, Morgante Pell wrote:

  In short, I completely agree: the ideal intellectual development involves a mix of slow and fast reading/blogging.

  At 15, I definitely don't have the same historical perspective as any of you. I haven't even made a dent in reading the classics, and everything has always seemed to be fast.

  Luckily, I have had great teachers over the years who encouraged me to explore the classics—offline. I make time for both – though most of the day is spent online, I do some slow reading everyday.

  However, I do think there are major benefits to fast reading. Primarily, it is far more accessible than slow reading. While Clay, Will, and I might voluntarily read the classics in our free time, most students won't. However, there are plenty of students willing to subscribe to a few blogs which interest them. In terms of development of literary enthusaism, fast reading can be far more effective than slow, dead-paper reading.

  As you said, there are places for both slow and fast bloggers. Fast bloggers are, in every sense of the word, journalists. Fast blog is perfect for covering anything like politics, which moves fast. The problem I see is when people attempt to approach topics more appropriate for slower thinking with a fast blogging attitude. A sad example of this I see is the educational discourse: education really doesn't move so fast that it is important that responses be immediate. Educational pedagogy and theory evolves slowly, not with the quick shifts of politics.

  There is no question that fast blogging can make you a better writer over time, but I believe a healthy dose of self-reflection is required to enjoy maximum improvement. Otherwise, it is easy to get stuck in the same tired and poor style.

  Clay, I absolutely agree that length isn't the critical factor. But length:ideas is. The greats actually all have very good length to idea ratios, but schools tend to just focus on forcing increased length rather than depth of ideas.

  So length, to repeat, is not the problem. The perennials teacher-answer to the perennial student-question - “How long does it have to be?” - “Not too short and not too long: just long enough to meet the demands of the assignment” - holds true for a writer’s self-assignments too.

  You must have had different teachers than me, since many of mine will tell me 3 pages, even when I could easily fit the critical ideas in 1.

  P.S. I once subscribed to Boing Boing, but quickly unsubscribed due to the deluge of pointlessness. On the other end of the spectrum, I long ago unsubscribed from bgblogging, finding the massive word counts too high for the few ideas.

• At December 13, 2008, Will Richardson wrote:

  First, really glad to see you back online and blogging Morgante. Missed your voice.

  I'd agree that most students wouldn't read the classics if they weren't exposed to them in school, but I have to say that most adults wouldn't read them either, myself included. Unlike Clay, I was not moved by the "greats" and I fully admit that says something about both my tastes and my intellect.

  I'm frustrated by the slow education reality. I wish I could fast blog it out of existence. And I agree that our attempts to trumpet each of the molecules as they move one at a time from the past into the future are by and large fruitless in terms of providing a deeper understanding of what's happening. We need the perspective that only time can give to understand it deeply.

  But having said that, those bursts provide some powerful, useful glimpses along the way. That's what I find so appealing...

  Will Richardsons last blog post..Networked Learning: Why Not?

• At December 13, 2008, Paul C wrote:

  'And that makes our thoughts more like mayflies flitting on that river than old growths towering beside it. Not much timelessness there.'

  I must admit that my blogging has resulted in less time for reading the classics and more time in flitting through my latest Google Reader posts. But it's posts like yours where I can relish the well turned phrase and the long sentence rich with imagery.

  Paul Cs last blog post..Blogger Discovery

• At December 14, 2008, Jonathan Chambers wrote:

  There are two basic types of blogging: the relayers and the synthesizers. The relayers manage to bounce information into our consciousness so that we can digest it, and the synthesizers manage to creatively process the information so that we can process the information at a new, deeper level so that we can act on information at a new creative level. Both are useful.

  The act of "slow blogging" is encouraging deeper synthesis, although without the surface level of relay of basic ideas, we may not reach some of the synthesis that may be possible if we don't continue to offer some of the "raw materials" as ideas in our blogging.

  It's up to each of us to judge how we manage information, and if we should manage to slowly distill concepts to the point of "slow blogging" then that's a catalytic convertor that may or may not be borne out in the process of transmission.

  It all boils down to choice - a choice to listen, to read, to convert, to process, to synthesize, to make an idea more relevant, or whether we choose to simply log ideas and accrue knowledge until we can connect a series in a beautiful, intricate pattern that will be recognized as eloquence.

• At December 14, 2008, Justin wrote:

  I'm going to paraphrase something I heard from a TED talk that succinctly exppresses my view, and that is that a blog should be like a dress, short enough to keep interest, but long enough to cover the subject.

• At December 14, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hm. If I said anything suggesting my push for "books" was a push for "classics," my mistake. While there's nothing like a grounding in the real Homer and Plato (both very readable and enjoyable in the right translations) and Bible and so forth for actual knowledge of what they're about (otherwise, you're at the mercy of professors or preachers, god save you), I'm thinking as much of simply long books period. Histories of the Renaissance, of the Scientific Revolution. Theories of statecraft or biographies of Darwin or Jefferson. Whatever. Just more big picture arguments and meditations than are afforded by even the best blog posts or online articles.

  Somehow related to all of this is my own recent attempt to "slow blog" my thoughts on what Gilgamesh tells us about our past and present. The task was not well-served by serial posts. It slammed me to the limits (my limits, I guess) of blogging - and it showed me that some ideas are so slow, so big, so long they belong in books.

  Hm. Can you imagine Howard Zinn writing a People's History of the United States online to the same effect? And can you imagine getting the coherent perspective of that epic history by reading all the ideas as short posts from different bloggers or wikipediers around the web?

  Is this frame even valid? You tell me. It's almost 4 a.m., so I'm suspect.

• At December 14, 2008, Morgante Pell wrote:

  Clearly, some ideas (particularly large ones) are best developed through cohesive books.

  However, I would actually disagree with your frame: I think any piece which is built around chronology (however distant) can work well on a "blog." Indeed, this format might even add to the air of discovery: the "story" must reveal itself over time, just as it originally was.

  I'm sure we agree that not all books worth reading are "classics."

• At December 14, 2008, Kate Tabor wrote:

  the dreaded page length question:

  "How long should it be Ms. Tabor?"

  "Long enough to explain your thinking."

  "Is that three pages?"

  "I won't know until I read it."

  Okay, that's simplistic, but I always tell students that I don't weigh their papers before I read them. Nor do I decide to read or not read a blog post based on length.

  As a blog writer, I have started to post about events in my teaching life when I am still in the middle of synthesizing my understanding of the event, but still the posts come out long. Long enough to "cover the subject" - at least for me.

  Kate Tabors last blog post..Putting all the pieces together

• At December 14, 2008, Tom wrote:

  I know I just posted on this over where I am, but to restate ...

  "Uh-huh." "Yep." "What he said." "You're right." "She makes a good point."

  To jump on Kate's comment, my reply is "as long as you think it needs to be." I'd rather murder the essay AFTER it's written :)

  Toms last blog post..Insert size matters joke here

• At December 16, 2008, Jabiz Raisdana wrote:

  Sorry couldn't stay long enough to comment, because I have 77 other blogs to skim today. I did catch some of what you and the other commenters said, as I read every other line of your work.

  Seriously, sometimes it is all too much and we have to decided how to adjust accordingly. I am still try to find a happy medium. Thanks for a great post.

  Seriously I want to get my reader down to zero so I can rest. This behavior can't not be productive.

  Jabiz Raisdanas last blog post..Parrots on the Sill

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