Beyond School

A Different Kind of Marriage

Work and life are still too busy to stop to blog, but this announcement excites me, because I’m not aware of anything like it happening in globally collaborative / flat classroom projects. And the more I think about it, the more interesting, pedagogically and geekily, it gets.

It’s this: Because the 1001 Flat World Tales (see and hear the first published high school stories from Seoul, Honolulu, and Denver, 2007) is a literally endless, ongoing k-12 wiki-writing project, it requires more “stewardship” than one teacher can provide.

So, while Chris Watson in Honolulu and I will continue co-driving the high school version of the 1001FWT, I’ve asked Kim Cofino of International School of Bangkok – Kim’s Always Learning blog makes her one of my Top 10 edubloggers and educators – and Jeff Dungan (his Groundswell here) of the Dominican Republic to take over the 1001 Flat World Tales on the elementary/primary school level.

They’ve said yes.

Why This is Interesting: Pedagogical Mashups

That’s it in a nutshell. I’ve asked Kim and Jeff to take 100% creative and pedagogical liberties with the Tales as they take the project into its second year. Anybody who knows Kim’s blog knows her creative and pedagogical cup runneth over, and while I don’t know Jeff as well, his enthusiasm for the project (he was in the first elementary workshop last year) and, it turns out, his direct acquaintance with Kim – they’d talked about collaborating on other things before I pitched the idea to them – makes their collaboration on new directions for the Tales a promising idea.

I look forward to seeing how they mash the project up, according to the developmental levels of the primary grades and, better still, according to their own creative applications of all Tools 2.0 to the project. Pedagogically, it seems a great way to learn new tricks by watching other teachers play “variations” to the original project’s “theme.”

It’s kind of like the excellent HBO Band of Brothers mini-series a few years back: One story over ten episodes, but each episode directed by a different director – thus each having its own unique style, and offering a playground of comparisons.

Another benefit of this arrangement should be obvious. Kim and Jeff are in separate hemispheres, so they can exploit the time-zone flexibility in any number of ways as they facilitate global writing workshops with new participating schools.

Chris and I are similarly set up to cover Western and Eastern hemispheres, respectively, on the high school level. And we’ll be free to mash things up relative to last year’s first outing as well.

I’m still hoping to find a team to take over for the middle school workshops (ages 11-14 or so). Drop me an email if you’re interested.

And, if you or anyone you know want to add a language arts or creative writing classroom to the project, contact Kim and/or Jeff for elementary, and Chris and/or me for middle school / high school.

Who is the audience for this post? AudienceS is more accurate. They are people who are interested in:

1. Expanding the Global Cooling Project – I’ve never been so excited about anything, and an update is overdue;
2. Notes from the trenches of a teachergeek in his first weeks as tech coordinator at a new Apple 1:1 school (it’s been a hellish but fertile path so far);
3. Joining the second year of the 1001 Flat World Tales project (another overdue update);
4. How edublogger posts are stealthily replacing textbook readings in my AP Literature classroom.

In short, it’s a report from underneath the many different hats I’ve added to my wardrobe. I’m astonished by what my life has become after 7 short months of edublogging and edtech experimentation. I would never have predicted wearing any of these hats this time last year. So here goes:

1. Project Global Cooling / Citizenship 2.0: Real-world Learning without Grades or Homework – We’re Public

I think I learned a lesson about timing this summer: don’t try to generate collaborative ideas during vacation, because most people are very sensibly signing out for some downtime. And by the time they sign back in, all the blog posts will be buried in the archives.

In June and July, I wrote my way into a project idea that has taken root here in Seoul, and that wants to take root around the world as well. It’s more ambitious than the 1001 Flat World Tales – and far more relevant – but it’s also far less labor-intensive for teachers. Best of both worlds.

If you’re aware of the Live Earth Concerts that took place this summer in eight cities around the world, all web-hosted as the “festive” slice of the far more serious challenge of raising consciousness and creating sane lifestyle changes in response to the looming challenge of climate change and global warming, then the Project Global Cooling idea will make sense to you. Change the high-profile celebrities and professional web designers, computer graphics artists, journalists, filmmakers, etc to the young adults in our schools, and you have Project Global Cooling.

In a nutshell: around the world on Earth Day ‘08 (April 19, Saturday), student-organized “downtown music festivals” will take place. The performers will be local musicians – student bands, college bands, local bands. The concerts will be filmed, uploaded to YouTube or whatever, and embedded on the Project Global Cooling website, to form a gallery of world music featuring the next generation of world musicians.

Again, this is precisely what Live Earth did. Bands in the US, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia (?) performed on the same day. They filmed the concerts and streamed them on a central website – one that included MUCH MORE THAN MUSIC.

Our website will also feature much more: a collaborative blog authored by students involved in organizing this project in their locales around the world, documenting their successes and failures as they attempt to be taken seriously as citizens, not students; young adults, not children; community members, not disenfranchised “kids.”

It will also feature short, student-made promotional videos aimed at going “viral,” addressing Global Warming and the small things we can do to forestall it, with a style modeled after real-world videographers a la MTV, not “schooly” homework videos. Like the world music gallery, the PSA video gallery will accentuate the local culture while addressing the global problem. They’ll be as varied as the imaginations of our young contributors: comic, hip, sexy, ironic, brooding, whatever they decide. The goal, again, is to make videos so attractive that they become viral – with a purpose. My Seoul students have some great scripts already, aimed at projecting the Korean look and attitude onto the world stage.

Other categories on the website include (but are not limited to):

• “Student-powered”: gallery featuring the most remarkable accomplishments by students around the world in making this thing happen by April
• “Earth News”: student summaries and reflections on the latest updates from the scientific community about issues related to climate change
• “Green Entrepreneurship”: reports from the business-oriented about commercial opportunities to reap profit while at the same time benefiting society
• “Skeptic’s Corner”: a page devoted to any controversies about the science its challengers
• Podcasts and radio shows are obviously easy to include on any and all of these pages.

Finally, all banners, graphics, flash animations, slideshows, graphs, charts, etc, will be contributed by the students wanting to do more with the skills they learn in their computer classes than turn a product in to teacher for a grade.

The beauty: 28 students in my high school have signed up for this project as an activity block – a club – at school. There are no grades, no homework, no lesson plans involved. But there is much learning to come. Students at my school will be involved in real-world learning as they:

• propose to school administrators that the school adopt and adhere to a “Carbon-neutral Pledge,” with short- and long-term steps to reduce our school’s carbon footprint permanently. (Buying different lightbulbs, for example, is a simple, concrete, and consequential step the school can take. And it’s win-win: lower energy bills for the school, less emissions for the future from our school forevermore. Many more such steps are easy enough to take.)
• plan and execute proposals for corporate and community sponsorship, donation of a live music club’s performance space, etc.
• make films.
• coordinate and network with other students worldwide working toward the same goal.
• manage the funds using real-world accounting skills.
• promote the concert using real-world marketing and promotion skills.
• discover that you can “have fun doing good,” and that citizenship doesn’t have to be boring.
• learn real-world web 2.o power.
• make a documentary film of the whole year’s project.
• on and on.

Best of all: like the 1001 Tales, this is an endless project, to be grown, improved, repeated annually. Picture the archives of the PGC website as more and more content is added to each of its galleries over the years. Picture the learning of each new year of students as they learn from the prior year’s successes, and improve upon its weaknesses. And picture, finally, the fact that world-changing habits of mind and action will be instituted in the culture of each school and community that joins this project. (And don’t forget to picture the proud fun when the music is playing on a fine April day, thanks to the power and energy of students who decided to branch out and become people too.)

If this isn’t enough, click the “world citizenship” label on this blog to see all the posts related to this project since its inception.

Many adults expressed interest when I announced this, so I’m hoping that they’ll remember, get in touch, and pass the project idea on to their student network locally. Any interested adults and students can join the PGC’s planning Ning at The Global Cooling Collective (http://globallycool.ning.com). I recently switched the Ning from private, members-only, to public. I hope that makes it easier to get involved.

And I’d like to link to the PGC blog itself – it’s already got some nice banners and graphics from my Seoul students, and credited to them. But I can’t make that link because….

2. My Techno Life is Cursed: On “Breaking” Skype, Ning, WordPressMU, Moodle, and Other Joys of a Noob Tech Coordinator

Westley Fields in Australia cracked me up in an email last week, the day after my 1:1 Parent Presentation with Google Earth and Skype crashed and burned with Skype’s global outage, 10 minutes before I presented.

“YOU BROKE SKYPE!” he wrote.

As it turns out, that was just a warm-up. Since then, I have broken:

Ning. Twice:

First, I was locked out of my AP Literature class Ning for two days. More bad timing (more of Somebody Up There’s wrath): on the same day I sent a support request to the folks at Ning, who are always stellar with prompt responses and fixes, they disabled their “support@ning.com” address to switch to a web-based help-ticket form on their site. So they didn’t see my help requests. And I didn’t read their auto-generated response to my email requests, because I figured they’d say the same old “Thanks we’ll be in contact soon.” Instead, they said (I discovered two hours ago), “WE WON’T READ THIS. GO TO THE NEW SUPPORT PAGE AND MAKE YOUR REQUEST THERE.”

So for three or four days, I sat on my hands, locked out of my own virtual classroom, waiting. My students, meanwhile, had full access to the site. They must have laughed at the idea of a teacher unable to enter his own class.

Anyway, Ning fixed it when I emailed Gina, and we discovered the breakdown. I love Ning.

Second, Ning recently upgraded their service so that network creators can switch private sites to public, and vice versa. I’d made the Global Cooling Collective private, but wanted to switch that for easier growth, so I pushed all the right buttons. A Ning bug, though, made it shut down the site altogether. So PGC visitors from this blog reached a “closed” message.

Ning fixed it today. We’re open now. (Check out the Seoul group. It’s active and interesting.)

Moodle and WordPressMU:

Short version: I tried to upgrade Moodle on our remote server. I still don’t speak PHP or MySQL database, am not a whiz at cPanel and WebHost Manager, and all this website admin biz. But I tried anyway. Failure. I dinked, deleting this file and that on the Moodle server, trusting instinct and vague hypotheses.

By the end, I’d screwed things up so royally, I just admitted defeat and sent a request to the server support to wipe the Moodle site clean. I had a back-up, so I would just reinstall the whole thing.

Pop quiz: Mr. Burell requested WHAT to be wiped clean?

If you answered “the Moodle site,” you’re a better reader than the server support guy (may he burn in hell).

He didn’t only nuke Moodle. He nuked my school’s entire WordPressMU site.

So I’m back where I started last year: a blank server.

Luckily, I backed up the school blogs a day or two earlier, so they’re not lost. I just don’t know how to put them back. The support staff for my server offered to reinstall for me, but dammit, I want to learn this stuff, so I said no. I’ll learn and succeed, or die trying. Once I have this down, the future is golden. How hard can it be to figure out how to change code in a PHP file, to create a MySQL database? Trained monkey stuff.

Then, serendipity: I posted about Lyceum yesterday as a possible alternative to the slow WPMU (their support forums can be frustrating and unkind as well, depending on the day). Lyceum’s creator replied to that post, and I invited him to collaborate on a screencast demonstrating how to install Lyceum using WebHost Manager and cPanel. He’s going to talk me through the process on Skype tonight, using Vyew to see my Seoul desktop on his in New York, and we’ll have a screencast for all sorry bastards like me who can’t decipher the tech-head gobbledygook as they try to simply put a blogging software on a server.

So stay tuned on more about Lyceum for student blogging. Think “WordPress MU, but faster and nicer.”

Other errata as tech coordinator: Lessons learned:

1. Teachers don’t like being learners: I made screencasts for MacBook and Firefox setup before the teachers received their laptops. I anticipated every difficulty and need. I made a support blog for the teachers to see these screencasts. Two weeks later, almost none of them have taken the 20 minutes to save themselves a year of headaches. Instead, they’re emailing me requests for personal visits to “teach” them 1 on 1. “Did you watch the tutorial?” “No….”
2. IT Managers kill me: It’s really hard to get the IT Manager to allow the school server to be useful to teachers. Or to ask this teacher for input before making decisions that will affect all us teachers. For example, the student email setup: Here is an exhaustive list of all the family names in Korean society: Kim, Park, Choi, Hong, Lee, Kang. I may have left two or three out. When you’ve got ten Lees, Parks, and Chois at each grade level, and dozens 9-12, creating school email accounts using a familyname+first initial doesn’t cut it. I had to fight ten objections to simply adding a two-digit graduation year suffix to each name (lpark09) to at least tell teachers if this LPark was the freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior LPark. When that didn’t work, I told the principal. He pulled rank, so it’s happening. Lesson: be pushy and proactive. Probe the IT staff for any news on what they’re doing that will affect the classroom before they finish it. Don’t expect them to ask for your input; don’t expect to be happy if you don’t give that input while there’s time.

That’s enough for now.

3. 1001 Flat World Tales, Year 2:

I’m behind on contacting Dana, Cindy, Jo, somebody in Kazakhstan, Chris, Michele, and others about this year’s 1001 Flat World Tales – 2.0. I’ll be in touch soon. Lots of room for new ideas and synergy. I’m excited to incorporate others’ ideas into this iteration.

Chris and Michele are working on the final touches for the website, eBook, “blook,” and paperback version of the first edition of published tales. Stay tuned.

4. Edublogs as Textbooks?

As for using edublogs to replace lessons in textbooks, I’ll only say this: I’ve assigned students to read Christian Long’s post about “what an A paper is,” and to watch Wes Fryer’s “Engage, Don’t Enthrall” video podcast, and will soon add Carolyn Foote’s post on how to search online smartly, all in the first three classes of the year. This is interesting to me. My Bloglines edublogs folders are morphing into textbook replacements.

Sorry for the length. I just wanted to get a few monkeys off my back.

I know I’ve been a handful lately. Posts too long, thoughts too convoluted. “Think-alouds are messy.” Sorry.

Worst of all, I’ve been shrill at times. That comes from what I see as an education system blindered beyond the school boundaries, and educators largely unwilling to reflect on that.

But I’m more and more hopeful now, because I’m finding other writers mentioning similar things in their own parallel universes.

Here, for example, Will Richardson writes about what I want to call “So What? 2.0″:

Yes, we can have kids create movies and podcasts and wikis and all sorts of artifacts that have meaningful purposes and messages. And yes that’s all good, but at the end of the day, all that’s about is being able to use the tool to do the same stuff we’ve done in the past only put it into a new form and offer it to a wider audience. The pedagogies haven’t changed.

Yep. Web 2.0 as “just another way to turn in homework.” Will continues:

But here is the bigger question, I think. Through teaching them to use these tools to publish, are we also teaching them how to use these tools to continue the learning once that project is over? Can they continue to explore and reflect on the ideas that those artifacts represent regardless of who is teaching the next class? Can they connect with that audience not simply in the ways that books connect to readers (read but no write) but in the ways that allow them to engage and explore more deeply with an ongoing, growing community of learners? Isn’t that the real literacy here?

I can’t help but want to ask if there’s not an even bigger question or two.

First, why not rethink the necessity of creating projects that have a final end, that are ever “over”? [Update: I see now that that's Will's point.]

While I’ve been slamming my own 1001 Flat World Tales project for its ultimate irrelevance, the one design aspect I do think has merit worth considering is this: it’s what one Spanish edublogger called “a never-ending” one. That “1001″ is not hyperbole, but a conscious choice to create a project that is as open as YouTube and Facebook to continued contribution and engagement by old and new participants alike. Was your 1001 story not accepted for publication by the student-teacher publishing team? Revise it and re-submit it next year. Always open. And don’t forget to check back for the annual addition of more tales from more students around the world. The book will grow like the Arabian Nights. And you, dear student, were, and still are, part of this new, never-ending project.

If I were a student who worked on this project last year, I’d be interested to watch it unfold next year, and do more than watch. Add images, comments, whatever. And I’d be curious about it every year after that.

The designing of projects with finite end-dates – which makes them “artifacts,” historical relics – is arbitrary. It’s a product of the limitations our profession puts on our thinking. Learning through a project finishes with a grade. On to the next one. Lock this one up as a showcase of “what I did in my [your discipline here] class.” It doesn’t have to be that way.

And that’s another reason I can’t let go of the potential of “Project: Global Cooling.” (That’s right, the Seoul students gave it a name yesterday in a meeting at my apartment. No more tortured labeling. ) That project is designed to be real, not an artifact. It’s designed to invite content and connections from students worldwide in precisely the same way the real-world “Live Earth” project is going about it. Fun with music, critical thinking with issues, digital skills and literacy development with content. And local action to tie it to engaged citizenship – pro or con. “Teaching the controversy,” as Doug puts it, and not “indoctrinating.”

This doesn’t mean grades can’t figure in the equation. Assign arbitrary deadlines and give the credit then. But since climate change isn’t going to be an artifact any time soon, and worldly students, anyway, are aware of that, the project will hold continued relevance.

The fun factor will help there too.

Which brings me to my second “bigger question,” after some background: Will Richardson is writing about citizenship (he’s even writing about Live Earth). Christopher Sessums is. David Warlick is. But it always seems to be compartmentalized in a separate space from “literacy and learning.” Will, possibly -strike that – definitely ironically, points to this compartmentalization of “knowing” and “community doing” in the title of the post: “Before We Get Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Blogging, Let’s Save the World.” David Warlick’s “Do You Have What it Takes to Become a Citizen?” is an occasional piece for America’s July 4 Independence Day (and the “citizenship quiz” it links to is depressingly knowledge-based, which isn’t David’s fault. As if engaged citizenship ends with knowing a lot, and is something we think about on fireworks day. I beat you by 5 points on the quiz, David ).

So my second question: Why is citizenship a side-issue divorced from learning in our classrooms? Or if I’m wrong, where is it central to that?

Am I wrong to want to push the envelope and say that learning in all the disciplines can be applied to real-world issues while a) still satisfying standards and outcomes, and b) developing the literacies and new affordances of web 2.0, and c) reversing the infantilization and trivializing of our students? But I’ve already written about that in “The Year of Global Cooling and Understanding by Design.”

I’ll close with an idea so finely crafted by Christopher Sessums that it’s stirred me from my oblivion to his relevance to our conversations. It addresses my own rhetoric of late, and the rationale for it:

I recognize I am framing this issue in dualities that necessarily point to the poles as opposed to plowing a more fertile middle ground. My point is to suggest that if “we the people” are not careful and do not actively participate in this debate, then we could easily be left with fewer choices.

Sessums continues the thought with this must-read observation which, though framed in a different context, applies to this one as well:

The question of What kind of society do we want? is indeed a critical question, one not to be taken lightly. Getting members of society to really focus on this question, to engage in the debate, to participate in the conversation, is the $6400 question. When billions are spent annually on entertainment and escapism (pdf), getting people to focus on the critical questions will remain marginal at best. Yet change often starts at the periphery, at the fringes, before it becomes part of the larger conversation.

The nice thing is, some of these questions are starting to gain focus. See the cocomments for starters. Now if I can just soften the sharp edges of my rhetoric to invite more people in instead of, as I fear, driving them away with diatribe.

I’ll try. In the meantime, thanks for reading.

[This post is a watershed for me, stuffy as that may sound. Many loose threads needed weaving. I apologize for the tone, which I fear is typically more self-important and more harsh than I would like. I also apologize for the length. I hope you'll read it through, and thank you if you do. Update 13 July 07: Be sure to read the conversation with Doug and others in the comments following the post. And the thinking extends in this "Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: on Fear and Irrelevance in Education" post.]

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1. I’m Nobody

Suzie Boss, writer of the upcoming Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age, to be published by ISTE this fall, interviewed me via Skype* (thanks to a referral by the ever-helpful Jeff Whipple of Whip Blog) for an article recently published on the Worldchanging.com website entitled “Education: Connecting the Lonely Profession.” It goes without saying that it was an honor to be mentioned in the same paragraph with Wes Fryer, Julie Lindsay, and Vicki Davis. It was Julie and Vicki’s Flat Classroom Project, after all, that inspired my idea to take the traditional language arts writing workshop onto a flat classroom collaborative wiki, and make it a never-ending global project: the 1001 Flat World Tales**. It was also an honor to appear at all on Worldchanging.com, which I’d subscribed to in Bloglines many months earlier. There are few more important blogs out there for real-world problem-solving in the Age of Mindless Waste and Warming.

That being said, though, that interview with Ms. Boss came at a pregnant moment in my own journey not just as a teacher, but as an earthling. I had just taught a unit of satire in which Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – and the multimedia Yahoo Project we finished that unit with – probably changed my thinking more than it did my students’. Swift’s novel nailed human folly with the timelessness that makes it the classic it is. The Yahoos he pillories in the novel are alive and well today, inside us all. And I couldn’t shake the feeling that they were most painfully present in our schools, in my classroom – in my teaching.

Here I was, assigning four dozen 15-year-olds to take action addressing whatever “Yahoo-caused” problem in the world disturbed them via a digital storytelling product and a plan involving the use of web 2.o to create positive change about their chosen issue, and thinking I’d done my job at inculcating a sense of citizenship and agency in them. “Think big,” I told them. “Look at the Flat World Tales: it was an idea in January, and by May more than a dozen countries were participating in the project. Use that as a lesson to see how possible it is to use web 2.0 to create real change.” I was pretty proud of that. Until.

I started listening to my students talk about how bothered they were about The Big Issue affecting their futures: global warming (and I’d love any deniers out there to comment so we can debate this). They were bothered about it because “Nobody’s doing anything about it, and we know it’s a problem.”

That set off my 5-alarm Hypocrisy Detector. Sure, the attempt to be “Classroom 2.0″ with the 1001 Flat World Tales was not your run-of-the-mill way to deliver a lesson – it was inventive, it was fresh, and it had pedagogical potential to improve both engagement and literacy. But. In terms of its content, its basic objectives, it was nothing new at all. Just a traditionally irrelevant and arbitrary, teacher-dictated little exercise in writing a nice little story for school with other nice little students stuck in their classrooms around the world.

It wasn’t “Beyond School” at all. It was Classroom 1.0 with web 2.o bells and whistles. In terms of vision, it was still “school-y.”

“Nobody’s doing anything about it.” It kept on echoing. My pride in the 1001 Flat World Tales collapsed as a result. I wasn’t “teacher 2.0.” I was one of the “Nobodies” that frustrated students by my complicity in schoolhouse irrelevance.

The rest is history, unless you were at NECC or Disneyland while I was writing a dozen posts in Korea that you didn’t read upon your return. Here’s the short version:

1. I read that over 200 universities in the US had signed a “carbon neutral” pledge in recognition that they, as educational institutions, had a responsibility to set an example in responding to the overwhelming scientific evidence that human activity was the key factor in global warming.

2. I blogged about that pledge, asking why K-12 schools aren’t following suit, and Jeff Wasserman blogged about that post in a Very Strange Coincidence that set the Global Cooling / Community Service 2.0 project in motion. (Were I superstitious, I would have thought that coincidence a sign. I suppose I did see it that way, somewhat.)

3. In the intervening 3 weeks, I’ve written a dozen or more posts developing the idea. In the midst of that, Suzie Boss interviewed me about her WorldChanging.com article (ironically, her interest was in the 1001 Flat World Tales, which I’d come to view as too “school-as-usual”). But the title, or, more precisely, the tagline of Suzie’s forthcoming book – “Your Field Guide to Real-World Projects in the Digital Age” – worked a spell on me. Real World. My world, the students’ world, the students’ future. Projects that were relevant to that. That was key.

And the title of the website Suzie’s article appeared on: WorldChanging. That too was key. As a teacher, I’d been “World-Ignoring,” creating nice little exercises to connect students with other classrooms around the world, but not to connect with the world itself. Harnessing the power of Web 2.0 to reinforce the disempowerment and infantilization of adolescents around the world. School-y. “Beyond School”? Again, a joke.

Yeah, the students thought it was more interesting than most of the stuff they have to put up with in schoolhouses. But it was still just homework. Nothing WorldChanging, nothing that taught them that they have the potential to affect this world for the better. Nothing that encouraged their empowerment. Nothing that gave them the opportunity to apply their learning to something that mattered to them, or to discover that, if only schools would let them, they could learn about the limits of their own power to make change in the world.

I was keeping these young adults in diapers, checking their homework, teaching them that changing the world was something to leave to others. Our purpose was to teach them what a metaphor is, and a synecdoche. Leave the fate of the planet to politicians and prayers, and other such time-tested solutions. Depend on anything but your own skills and agency to avert catastrophe.

4. I invited my AP Literature students, strangers I’m getting to know on our AP Lit Summer Reading Ning, to begin organizing the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” here in Seoul, so it can all come off by Earth Day next April. Over 20 of these young adults are active on it now, and a dozen met me yesterday for a Sunday afternoon planning session at a downtown cafe. I left early, because they were so all over it, they didn’t need me – which was what I’d hoped would happen.

On the Global Cooling Collective Ning I started, another member I’d invited sent out over 100 invitations to other “Classroom 2.0″ adult types. About 20 of them joined. 20 of my students also joined. So far, the students are active, while the adults are, with a couple of exceptions, pictures on the “Members” box. But maybe they’ll contribute at some point.

That’s about it, on that front.

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2. Goodbye to All of That

On New Year’s Day, 2007, I started this blog. I named it “Beyond School” and, in the months that followed, thought I was being true to the aspiration so vaguely adumbrated in that title. A lot has happened in the seven months since that time that has energized my professional life beyond my wildest expectations, and none if it would have occurred if I hadn’t started participating in the edublogosphere.

But I see now that my personal journey to get Beyond School is only now starting to crystallize. It’s not about web 2.0 for me anymore (though that is a tool I’ll continue using). And it’s definitely not about “Classroom 2.0,” since I dislike the realities of schools and classrooms as much now, as a teacher, as I did when I was a very miserable high school student.

Putting “what it is about” in positive terms is more difficult, but here are a few stabs. It’s about not being “a Nobody doing anything” when my students are looking for “Somebody doing something” about what they care about. It’s about inviting them to discover that they have the power to do something too. It’s about being a community leader more, and a teacher less. It’s about extending my relationship with these young adults beyond the nine-month term (if church youth group leaders can do it, so can teachers). It’s about re-conceptualizing schools as community action centers instead of walled gardens (or day-care centers, or juvenile detention centers). It’s about designing relevant experiences and projects in which any metaphors or synecdoches that, god help us, they learn, will have a purpose and meaning beyond an alphanumeric grade.

It’s about trying to be World-Changing instead of World-Ignoring and World-Ignorant.

That’s the best I can do right now. Does anybody out there want to talk about ways to collaborate on “real-world project-based learning” along these lines?

—

*I podcasted part of that conversation, in which Ms. Boss was kind enough to indulge a 15-minute “think-aloud” about the Year of Global Cooling project, which was then a four-day-old (obsessive) idea, in an earlier post.

**I’m incredibly excited, by the way, to report that Dana Huff of huffenglish, one of my favorite English teacher blogs, dropped me a message on Wikispaces saying she wants to participate in the ‘07-’08 iteration of the 1001 Flat World Tales – talk about “connecting the loneliest profession” with a vengeance! Dana’s the kind of English teacher I dream of having in the classroom next door. And now I will, virtually. Too cool for words. More on that later, I’m sure. With Dana on board, and the logistical lessons learned about flat classroom projects under our belt from the first run last year, this year will surely see a focus on improving the project’s pedagogy. Dana’s been studying Wiggins’ and McTighe’s Understanding by Design for her summer vacation, and has inspired me to do the same. So this looks like fun. You’re invited too, by the way. See the 1001 Teachers wiki to sign on.

But it should be clear that I’m ambivalent now about the value of the 1001 Flat World Tales. I wonder how it can be modified to make it more relevant, and less school-y.

NECC 2007: Preparing Teachers to Lead in a Global Society (Lucy Gray, U Chicago)

• Scott Schwister of Higher Edison was nice enough to inform me that the 1001 Flat World Tales (book release late July) was mentioned in this NECC workshop as an “example of global collaboration.” Way out here in Korea, that’s nice to learn. They don’t call Korea “the Hermit Kingdom” for nothing.
  – post by cburell

[This post has taken me a few days to write. I apologize for its length, and hope you'll read it to the end.

When I started reading edublogs last December, Karl Fisch was my first. His Fischbowl frankly blew me away. I read it obsessively during my Winter Holiday vacation, started blogging my reactions to Karl's "best of 2006" selections on my first fumbling posts as an edublogger.

This was on the original Beyond School (which I now lovingly abbreviate), on LiveJournal.

Reflectively blogging on Karl's best, I felt ideas for classroom implementation bubble. They came to a boil before the holiday was over, and I returned for second semester ready to launch my first large-scale wiki project--the French Revolution Ant-Farm Diaries, a writing-to-learn history mini-wikipedia combined with historical fiction-writing in the form of diaries.

While this was a collaborative project, with another teacher and his learners, and while it did explode the classroom walls, it did so in a very limited way: the only wall that went down was the one between my own classroom, and Mr. Spivey's room next door.

My point so far? I didn't need the edublogging network to help this collaborative classroom project happen. I found Jason myself, which was easy. He was in the lunchroom. I pitched the project idea and he said "Okay, sure" with a mouthful of kimbab.

Still, even though this "flat classroom" project was literally as global (and flat) as the 100-odd square meters of our two adjacent rooms, the lesson was a hit for the students. They loved collaborating with all the ninth graders in the school, and not just the random group in their period. And their summative assessment--traditional analytical essays on the course of the French Revolution--demonstrated a very solid grasp of the content.

(Strangely enough, I think the writing was overall stronger for this than it was for the much more intensive 1001 Flat World Tales, but that's a topic for another day. I think it has to do with something Alan Watts points to with the Zen maxim, "When you try to float, you sink; when you try to sink, you float.")

While Jason and I were managing that project, I started blogging "teacher think-alouds" about how I could do a collaborative wiki project based on The Arabian Nights that extended beyond my hallway, beyond my school, and out into the "flat world." I'd discovered Julie Lindsay's and Vicki Davis' Flat Classroom Project (and it's relevant to my point, which I only manage to arrive at several paragraphs down, that both Vicki and Julie are also edtech specialists, not core-content teachers), and after seeing how the students took to the French Revolution collaborative writing, thought it would be incredible to do a global creative writing workshop on a wiki, using the 6 Traits of Effective Writing. A few "think-aloud" posts later, the idea for the 1001 Flat World Tales was firm enough to start hawking here on "B.S."

But this time--and this is my main point here--I did need help from the edublogosphere. I needed teachers in other countries to sign on. So I kept hawking, inviting, pleading, and hawking some more. And within a couple of weeks, edubloggers started helping out.

Jeff Whipple, an edtech specialist in Canada, and Jeff Utecht, an edtech specialist in China, plugged the project on their blogs. I believe Karl did too. NextGenTeachers were even nice enough to host a podcast about these projects. And while the attention was nice, I still had no classroom teachers to connect with.

Jeff Whipple then went beyond the moral support by persuading Chad, a middle school English teacher in his district, to throw his hat in the ring. Chad's students were a grade below mine, and he only had a handful, but it was a start.

Then Karl, responding to a few emails I'd sent, came through maybe a week later with a teacher in his school who was willing to play. And Michele, like me, taught ninth graders. Things were looking up.

Around the same time, Chris Watson in Hawaii signed on (I don't even remember how we hooked up--maybe I left an invitation on his blog, or he on mine?).

So within three weeks of floating the idea, Chris, Michele, and I started our students writing together. (We just finished, and we learned loads by doing--but that's a subject for a later post, since we're giving the "almost publishable" writers one last week to revise to meet our standards.)

Meanwhile, another edtech specialist in Malaysia, Kim Cofino, hooked up one of her teachers with Chad in Canada to start a middle school workshop; soon, a Serbian English teacher signed on too. I met her through ePals. (Since all workshops are self-contained, I don't know how this one fared. Stay tuned for a "lessons learned" on that one as soon as final exams are over.)

Also meanwhile, an elementary workshop got off the ground (but how high it flew, again, I don't yet know) between Terry Smith in the US and a teacher pulled in by edtech specialist Jeff Dungan in the Dominican Republic. Stayed tuned for reflections on that one too.

And finally, a second high school workshop between Shanghai, Serbia, and Australia began a month after our first Hawaii-Denver-Seoul one. A glimpse at that wiki a month or so ago tells me that the collaboration hit some considerable bumps. I can't wait to compare notes from all of these first attempts to find out what those bumps were, identify patterns, and isolate principles for smoother flat classroom collaboration in content-area classrooms next year. The mistakes, mis-steps, and brick walls all these English teachers experienced should provide a motherlode of lessons learned for all content-area teachers in the future. But again, that's summer homework.

Why I'm writing this now, though, is to point out how difficult it was to actually find content-area teachers to collaborate with. Many edtech specialists, as you've just read, took an interest and tried to help by plugging the concept on their blogs (and once the workshops got off the ground with the participating teachers on board, many more edubloggers started writing about their "discovery" of the project -- leading me to feel a bit like the Native Americans must have felt to learn that Columbus had "discovered" them), but very few were able to actually expand the project by bringing in participating classrooms.

And this, I suggest, is a huge challenge for getting "flat classroom" projects out of the salons and into the schools. All of the blogging about new edtech finds and possibilities is genuinely helpful and interesting, but until more teachers are connecting in the content area classrooms, it seems less vital than facilitating those connections.

It's fairly certain that the reason for this dearth of participating teachers is largely due to this unfortunate truth: most classroom teachers would sooner brave the gates of Hell than those of flat world collaboration. Try as they may, the evangelical edtech specialists surely find content-area teachers a hard lot to convert.

But there has to be a way we can improve this situation. And since (drumroll) I'll be joining the ranks of edtech specialists next year at my school (except for two sections of an AP Lit class I'll be teaching), I want to suggest this one: Let's make it a goal to find and connect teachers in our various schools between now and the beginning of the '07-'08 school year, and to help them set up and sustain collaborative projects. Patrick, Scott, Jeff, Jeff, Karl, Chris, Pat, Kim, and anybody else: what do you think? Do you have any content-area teachers right now who might be open to connecting with other teachers over the summer to explore starting the fall semester with some global collaboration? Here in Seoul, I've had one history teacher, four English teachers, and one drama teacher express interest. Our school will launch a 1:1 program next year (with Macs) to make such collaborations more easily manageable.

If we start talking now, we've got a good part of the summer to lay the groundwork for classroom 2.0 (or at least 1.5) in practice. I hope to hear from some of you. (And I guess I'll put this out on the Classroom 2.0 Ning as well.)

[Two afterthoughts:

1. Maybe there is such a network for such a purpose already. If I'm reinventing the wheel, please let me know so I can join that one instead, and promote it in a follow-up "never mind" post.

2. If you're a content-area teacher reading this, and you want to nominate yourself for inclusion in this network--Bing, Nate, I think you already have, yes?--then by all means, leave a comment or shoot me an email.]

My last post failed to mention in its title that student reflections (only in response to the first of six questions) on the 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom project were posted at the bottom. So now you know: they’re there. (Barbara, I’d promised this to you, and will post the rest–Hawaii’s and Seoul’s–within the next few days.)

More soon, including the website with the selected stories for publication on the “blook,” as well as the literal book publication through Lulu.com.

Chris in Honolulu and I just finished a Skype conversation about improving the 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom project for next year. We’re not finished with our talks, but one thing that came up, and warrants immediate public mention, is this:

Our student reflections were overwhelmingly positive (and helpfully constructive when not), so we do want to continue the project next year. And here’s the “big but”: we want to do it first semester. And we want to plan with all partnering teachers–including newcomers–for a couple of sessions before launching the project in ‘07-’08.

So consider this an invitation to any grade 9-12 (15-18 year-old) classrooms: my students in Seoul, Chris’ students in Honolulu, and Christina’s students in Kuwait are so far on the “in” list for next year. If you’d like to add your students to the list, joining Koreans, Kuwaitis, and Americans, leave a comment.

While not required, ideal candidates for next year’s workshop will be teachers who:

• are active edubloggers
• intend to assign individual student blogging in their classrooms
• able to commit to a weekly communication schedule with the project teaching team for approximately six weeks (two weeks pre-launch, four weeks during)

We’ve sketched out a rough “team planning” checklist to make next year’s road is smoother, so any newcomers will benefit from this.

If you need evidence that students will find this project engaging, here are excerpts* from the anonymous feedback my Korean students gave to this question: “What did you like best about this project?” I include every reply, so there’s no cherry-picking here. In their own words:

• I was able to learn their cultures just through their stories. I liked how I could.
• I especially liked about how we were able to define ourselves, using stories.
• We were able to have fun writing stories which we wanted to write.
• The project was kind of free in a way of writing a story of your own choice.
• What I liked best about this project is that many people around the world participated in the project.
• We got to interact with other people from different parts of the world.
• The thing that I like the best about this project was the opportunity to share ideas abroad.
• I realized that we have so many differences but we have as many similarities. I was honored and glad to view the world from a different perspective.
• We were actually able to connect with students our age in different countries. These types of projects that we’ve only been thinking about came possible in reality through this project–learning that just because we’re in different countries, that doesn’t mean we can’t do work together.
• We came to read and understand about the different writing style and culture of each other (Hawaii, Denver, and Seoul), and that we were able to interact and give feedback to their story. By doing so, we socialized and changed different opinions, which I thought was unique. It’s clearly different from projects that we do in school, because international projects allow students to interact with each other to learn things that they won’t from their fellow students at their own schools.
• Through this project I was able to learn about different cultures. Also I think I was able to provide information about my own culture to other students.
• I liked about peer works and editing processes online. Students from different regions of world got together online on internet and did project internationally. It was new and interesting to get to know each other.
• I honestly didn’t like writing this piece, but the best thing about the project I liked was that we got to know people from other countries. I could know how other people in the states wrote compared to me.
• I got to grow as a “writer” and push myself to use my creativity to write and revise my story.
• By helping each other—by having different cultures—helped me learn more. Sometimes, I didn’t know what I did bad in my writing and wanted to know how I should improve, but the only way that actually helped me improve my writing is the people from other countries that helped me learn more about my writing.
• I thought it was inventive and original. And it was good to see how other people wrote about their own cultures.
• Of course, I liked writing my own story and getting it read by people from all the world the best. It was my first time publishing my story on the internet, and I liked it.
• It made me think about writing more carefully and accurately. Also taught me the importance of editing my work and other people’s work.
• I could read various stories and it was interesting to read other students’ stories.
• I got peer help from them. Without this help my flat world story could’ve been much worse.
• The most impressive thing was to talk and reply to the foreign students. In the first semester, we had to exchange our stories or essays to one of our classmates. But then during this project, we were able to reply to the other school students, and whom we don’t know anything about.
• It was also a good idea to read the stories of students who were in different countries.
• I like how students all over the world are interacting with each other and how we can discuss things. It’s very interesting and cool at the same time. We can see how good everybody is at writing and what good writing looks like. American style writing and Korean style writing.
• My favorite part about this project was the fact that we, as writers can make up stories from our own head instead of reading a story someone else invented.
• What I like the best is that we were able to actually make up a story of our own because I thought we wouldn’t do such things like creating stories when we would come up to high school. I think it was a good experience to have. Also, by this “Peer Editing” things we did I think I was able to somehow improve my reading skills and how I should respond to another person’s story.
• The best thing I liked about this project was that we could contact other school students and read their stories. They were some great stories that I enjoyed reading. It was interesting to read students’ stories who lived in other part of the world.
• It feels good when you write good stories and others read yours and they know that you wrote the story. So it’s like if I tell you one story, then I’ll listen one story from other students. It is also like exchanging stories.
• Because we’re from different schools, and different countries, it’s exciting to hear what others have to say about your story.
• I was able to think back about the Korean culture and make story out of it. It was also interesting to see other people from the US, how they write and what they like. Most of all I enjoyed what people wrote and tasting their creativity.
• I liked the whole idea of this project because it was a certain way for us to connect to students in other countries, and realize how either far off we are behind or front we are then them
• I liked the fact that we were working with people living outside our country, the fact that we were working on a same project, with a same goal, communicating and supporting each other through internet.
• I just liked the fact that we are working on such a massive project with so many other students with diverse backgrounds.
• This project was the best at the point we can express our ideas in terms our cultures and share it with other students from around the world. It was also a good experience to see how others wrote their stories.
• I really liked how we were able to work with students our age all around the world for this writing assignment. Even though we didn’t get to meet the participating classes face to face, I feel we really got to know each other. We learned the other people’s hobbies, culture, and even their level of writing.

*a link to all Hawaii and Korea reflections to the same six questions is coming soon.

Just a quick note to say that this blog has been preempted by end-of-year duties such as:

• assessing (and overseeing publication of) the 1001 Flat World Tales (more soon: student reflections from Hawaii and Seoul already done, and Denver hopefully soon to follow; after that, teacher reflections)
• assessing and polishing the Broken World wiki-textbook with my history class
• assessing and responding to the mountain of blog-posts in English and history
• prepping final exams and lessons

I imagine most teacher-bloggers have similarly pulled back from blogging in these final weeks.

And I imagine any of them who have been experimenting for the first time with integrating the read-write web in the classroom have, like me, a lot of sorting out going on in the silences.

After finals, I’ll be back with attempts to share my lessons learned. It’s been an interesting ride.

Phuket sunset
Originally uploaded by rosswebsdale.

Nothing like an illness to clear your head. Mine taught me a lesson in balance. I’ve been so fascinated by the possibilities of our sci-fi educational reality that I’ve forgotten to take care of myself well.

It’s also a good time for silence in other ways. Things are slowing down, getting calmer. Thank Goodness.

Chris in Honolulu, Michele in Denver, and I are wrapping up our first 1001 Flat World Tales workshop (more on that when the student publishers choose the first stories for the “blook” in a few weeks).

The World War I to World War II online wiki textbook my history students are making is coming along nicely, and since they are lecturing for at least 75% of each class session, I’m more of a coach than a teacher (you can see their lectures on the wiki, since we filmed and embedded them–come back next month to see them try again with a second lecture, and we’ll see how this improves their presentation and speaking skills).

The endless 1:1 planning meetings with my admin are also winding down, and I’m waiting, with everyone else, to hear what the business department and owner finally decide. (Which gives me time to catch up on my grading.) Bless them for having the sense to include a teacher in these discussions.

The student blogging Grail still evades but still beckons. Let it. I can’t push the river.

And I’ve taken a break from my RSS subscriptions, from reading edublogs (at least reading so many), and from constantly holding my laptop to hold other things instead. Things like books, and EunJeong’s hand.

It’s nice to be reading again: Harvard historian of religion Elaine Pagel’s Adam, Eve, and the Serpent is a fascinating look at the culture wars between pre-Church Christians concerning sexuality, the body, and gender politics. It’s my second Pagels this year. During Chusok (the Korean Thanksgiving, Buddhist/Taoist style) I read her Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, along with ex-minister and New Testament Greek professor Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, and learned how much closer to Buddhism and other advanced viewpoints early Christianity was, before Roman Imperial politics put an end to all of that. So Adam, Eve, and the Serpent continues this jag for me. I’ve got Pagel’s The Origin of Satan, another historical study of early Christian thought and politics, waiting after that. It all fascinates me. I wish I knew more Christians–any, actually–who it fascinates as well. All the amazing discoveries we’ve made about Christian history due to the Nag Hammadi Texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other pre-Catholic writings burned by the victorious Roman Church, yet nobody reads them. (Or even bothers to consciously read their Bible, for that matter.) It’s a shame. “The Christianity that was, but is no more” is a Christianity far superior to the current brand, in my book. (DaVinci Code fans, there’s more history there than pop churches are comfortable to admit. Again: fascinating.)

But enough of unsolicited book recommendations.

I’m really just writing to say that I’m off to Thailand for a nine-day Spring Break. No computers, no students, no “Mr. B.” Just a guy with a backpack full of books and a snorkel, looking forward to reconnecting to more elemental things.

See you on the flip-side.