Beyond School

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott McLeod from Dangerously Irrelevant tagged me with this interesting meme, so here are the rules, followed by the last five educational podcasts I listened to and/or watched:

Meme guidelines

1. Choose five of your favorite education podcasts. Any kind of education podcast is okay - students, teachers, administrators, professors, etc. - feel free to pick ones that you’ve made yourself! Try and pick specific podcasts, not podcast feeds.
2. Tag others for the meme. Feel free to participate even if you haven’t been ‘tagged.’
3. Please use a Technorati tag of educationpodcast or podcasteducation.
4. Please add your selections to the Moving Forward podcasts wiki page (and create categories as needed) so that others can benefit too!

My Last Five Podcasts or Videopodcasts:
1. David Warlick’s K12 Online Preconference Keynote, 2007: More on that in a later post, as a follow-up to this immediate take-aways post (just a k12 chatroom copy-paste) from a few days ago. You can also read the conversation about the keynote in the comments to the K12 page linked above.

2. David Warlick’s K12 Online Keynote, 2006: I loved watching last year’s keynote right before watching this year’s. I’m so new to the edublogosphere (only 10 months old), I didn’t know about last year’s event. Doesn’t matter: I went back in time 12 months and caught myself up on the K12 website.

3. Jessica Yun’s “audiobook” of “Roots,” her published 1001 Flat World Tales story: (from last year’s first edition - more to come from new schools and writers at the end of this school year, and every school year following). Jessica was 15 when she wrote this story, and podcasted it. She tells her stories as well as she writes them. Watch out for this one - she’s got a future as a writer, if she wants it. (And check out her blog, and tell her to get back to writing. Actually, she won’t have a choice: we’re launching our re-tooled schoolwide student blogging program in two weeks.)

4. Wesley Fryer interviewing Scott McLeod: Podcast 151: Dr. Scott McLeod on Administrator Idea-Sharing on Blogs, [etc], and Educating Others for the Transition to 21st Century Schools: on school 2.0 and school administrators 1.0: I sent this one to my admin. Wonder if they listened to it. Interesting on many levels, from Scott’s perspective on ivory tower educator-leaders’ oblivion and/or resistance to the edublogosphere’s vibrant and up-to-date discourse, to Scott’s own thoughts about the growing - but by no means new - irrelevance and inconsequentiality of much peer-reviewed academic publishing. (Lucky you, Scott: I’m not making this up. A free plug )

5. Robert Green Ingersoll: “Improved Man”: (Ingersoll podcasts channel on iTunes): Ingersoll was a late 19th century secular humanist - a better word than that strange “atheist” word (am I also an “a-horoscopist”?) who wrote powerfully and elegantly about all the ways in which religion is most often a tragically misguided attempt to “be and do good.” It’s frustrating to think that America and much of the rest of the world have only gone backwards in their heroic “March into the Middle Ages” since Ingersoll wrote his passionate, erudite, and “radically sane” critiques and visions a century and a quarter ago. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Friedrich Nietzsche readers really should subscribe to these podcasts. My favorite educational quote from Ingersoll:

“Schools should be today’s churches, and teachers, today’s preachers.”

He wrote this around 1890, and today I’m watching America’s Intelligent Design proponents attempting to expand their virulent attacks on science and reason around the globe - including here in Korean international schools. So I can’t say I’m hopeful about the future of reason in education. It seems America - the majority of its people and its disastrous political leadership - is intent on praying for an end to Global Warming (or indifferent to it, since heaven is the real world anyway), while at the same time continuing to ignore or attack science - and good, hardworking, life-saving, true miracle-working scientists.

It’s not easy, and certainly not fun, risking alienating my religious readers out there. But a commitment to science, enlightenment, education, and the fate of our planet make me feel it’s a duty. As a former Baptist and lifelong student of religious texts and religious history (see my LibraryThing widget in sidebar), I feel more qualified than most to confidently take on that duty. I’m just trying to do good by my own lights, not tradition’s.

More on Ingersoll from James Carr’s Ingersoll Podcasts page on Podcast Directory - a magnificent resource, with dozens of Ingersoll’s works, which Carr delivers with sterling quality:

Robert Green Ingersoll was an eloquent spokesman for free thinking, reason, and science in 19th century America. His intelligence, logic, humor, and clear thinking still speaks to us today. This podcast will include readings from his speeches and writings. Robert Ingersoll has an important place in American history, although, due to the weakness and politicization of our educational system, most of us have never heard of him. [emphasis added]

I tag (and apologize to, if inopportune):

Darren Kuropatwa (nice to talk to Darren for the first time in Warlick’s Fireside Chat)
Stephen Downes
Wesley Fryer
Will Richardson
Kim Cofino
Vicki Davis
Clarence Fisher
Doug Noon
Graham Wegner

Scott, this meme is a good idea. I’ll be checking out that wiki for human-filtered podcasts by the minds I admire the most. Thanks for the opportunity.

Technorati Tags: educationpodcast, podcasteducation, k12online, k12online07

I can’t keep a secret. I promised Chris in Honolulu and Michele in Arapahoe that I wouldn’t announce the launch of the 1001 Flat World Tales website until we did some clean-up. But - wait, wait - oh, heck, I’ll keep my promise. I’ll hold off on announcing the website for a day or two. We need to put the bios of the authors and editors, link to their blogs, upload their podcasts, and otherwise prepare for the launch party.

I’ll just say that the site includes the first 15 or 16 stories from the 130 written in the first high school workshop.

Since our goal really is 1001 student writings, and several new and returning schools are on board for the coming school year (and you’re always invited too), I’m still going to embed this screencast-o-matic tutorial about the wiki workshop itself, and the publication of the winning stories on the soon-to-be-unveiled website. It’s 9 minutes walking and talking you through the idea, the process, the set-up. (If you click on the embed, it will take you to the much larger screencast at my Screencast-o-matic channel):

A caveat: I chose to host the website on Wordpress instead of Edublogs because the image editor was giving me trouble there. I may regret that later, but didn’t have time to wrestle with it. I had to get this monkey off my back before going back to school on Monday!

Update: Wordpress.com is even more restrictive with Java and Flash embeds than Edublogs is. That’s what drives me crazy about Wordpress, and keeps me with Blogger. Anyway, I went back to Edublogs and solved the problem of image editing - a very un-intuitive place to enable the Rich Text Editor hiding in the “My Profile” page.

More later.

“See, Hear, Speak No Evil” by AndyRamdin on Flickr

[Update: This post is extends a critique of my own teaching, and typical schooling in general, that I wrote last week in "I'm Nobody. Goodbye to All of That." Makes sense to start there, if you haven't read it already.]

I have a headache and a neck-and-shoulder ache, but we all know how thoughts wing away if we don’t snare them on take-off. This might be clumsy, but here goes.

I think I’m figuring out a way to make school more relevant - at least in my classroom. And how to liberate the young adults in my high school classroom from the diapers the classroom makes these infantilized physics-, calculus-, and Shakespeare-capable young adults wear and, worse yet, find natural, in the first place. I think I’m figuring out a way to give them the initiation into the world of adult citizenship, adult community, adult participation, adult empowerment, which they wish I’d invite them to enter.

You remember how angry you were, when you were in high school, to be treated like a kid by the adults, don’t you? How you knew you were capable of more than the adults allowed you to show? I think I’m figuring out how to stop being one of those adults myself, now. And how to stop being one of those teachers.

It occurs to me that this should be easy for a high school language arts teacher who has managed one Big Project - albeit it an ultimately trivial one - on web 2.0. I’ve already written about that, and have students in Seoul actually acting on it, with the year-long Global Cooling Project. That’s step one: re-design my fay little web 2.0 student showcase from the merry-go-round blue-print of last year - gee, kiddies, isn’t this fun? - to something modeled after the real-world campaigns in the adult world. Need examples? Check out the presidential campaigns in the US using YouTube, check out Live Earth’s website and its actions, praise goodness, beyond the “producing informational products” fetish of the current stage of our “school 2.0″ visionaries (that’s not aimed at you, Will). As if going from text only verbiage to multimedia verbiage is going to change anything.

Going back to Suzie Boss and the WorldChanging.com article, and back to the talismanic power the tagline of her forthcoming book holds on me now - “Real World Project-Based Learning in the Digital Age” - it’s clear that the notion of school should evaporate as much as possible when designing projects for my young adults. John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary, Giuliani, even Bush (if he ever learns to email and use “The Google”), Gore, Micheal Moore: all these adults use the media and the read-write web to “produce informational constructions of meaning” (as we so clumsily put it) for real world, relevant, important purposes. And here’s the rub: these world-changing adults are all still “learners” engaged in their own, adult, versions of “real world project-based learning.” It’s not like web 2.0 is old hat to them, either. You can bet your last dollar they’re learning up a storm on a minute-by-minute basis in all these campaigns.

Again, the difference: they’re applying that learning with a real-world purpose that can produce real-world change, for problems that matter. In school, our projects are usually lacking that vital element. Again, they’re just nice little diversions that for some tragically unfathomable reason we, as teachers, generally cannot think beyond. (Maybe it’s very fathomable, this shackling force. Maybe it’s simply fear of parents, administrators, community leaders, or the fear of being uncommon generally - though why trying to make engaged citizens out of young adults is a controversial issue among educators, of all people, is indeed tragic.)

So: the problem with me, as a teacher, is that I design units that don’t address anything important. I’ve been trained to think that my job is to stuff the headpieces of the next generation with such irrelevant things as the definition of litotes and onomatopoeia, to write cute little stories about nothing, to know Stratford-upon-Avon. To be able, paradoxically, to think critically about safe subjects. And above all, not to think about anything that might, god forbid, rankle the status quo. And let’s not even start to think about taking any sort of action.

Again, so: As soon as I stop thinking like a teacher, designing units derived from an institutional culture that defines me as a teacher, and subconsciously makes me far more traditional in my teaching than my progressively-posing ego likes to acknowledge….as soon as I re-define myself as a community leader - as that once-upon-a-time American thing called a citizen - instead, maybe the young adults of my community might have an opportunity to learn how to function in the world they’ll inherit from and manage for us all-too-soon.

I know. Wordy. I have a headache. I’ll move on.

The task of last year’s 1001 Flat World Tales “project”? (For those of you who don’t know it, it actually managed to get over a dozen schools from four or five continents writing together on a wiki in self-contained k-12 collaborative workshops, though some of those workshops crashed and burned. The one my students participated in with Arapahoe¹ and Honolulu made it to the end of the two-month unit.) That task was something like, “Write a story that reveals your local culture for readers from other cultures.”

Cindy Barnsley, who worked on the project in Australia (with Shanghai and Serbia - it crashed, but not without lessons learned, so it wasn’t a failure), has taken me to task for damning my own baby, and she’s partly justified. The conceptual objective of the project was a more conscious, more critical, understanding of the students’ own, and their global peers’ “Other,” cultures. The skills? To use process writing coupled with the 6 Traits of Effective Writing to refine those writing skills, giving and receiving peer feedback from across the globe.

I’m not saying it’s garbage, Cindy. I’m saying that, when all is said and done, and all that energy in bringing together, in my workshop alone, 130 students from the Korean peninsula, the mid-Pacific Ocean, and the Rocky Mountains - when all that energy has been expended, what’s the result? Students have written a story for their English class. And it’s been published in a little e-Book (sorry, but I still think it’s true in the grand scheme of things, though I loved some of the writing that happened there).

Couldn’t that immense amount of energy have been expended on something more consequential?

Yes. And how it could, by the way, is the idea that spurred me to sit down and write this post now. Here’s how:

Real-world literature - the great works we tame in our classrooms - invariably consists of precisely the critical thinking and literacy skills we aimed to develop in the 1001 Tales. But that project was fatally flawed by it’s lack of real-world literature’s concomitant element: a social problem worth criticizing.

“Reveal your culture” is so pathetically fay and schooly by that standard.

These young adults are screaming their critical attitude toward the roles we’ve limited them to in our culture in everything they do, from their attitudes to their music, fashions, and past-times. They live in passive revolt against what schools, parents, communities at large are doing to them. And having no constructive outlet, they either self-destruct or seek solace in the trivial.

So why not let them write about that?

A bit more: They’re also woefully oblivious to the burning issues of their futures (and that pun, though pregnant, was not intended). Doug has commented about the fear in (American) schools of teaching anything controversial, god help us (and this does not mean Doug’s complicit in that). That’s a screaming admission that schools fear relevance.

The logical corollary? Fear makes schools irrelevant.

Etymology time: “Educate” - “to lead out.” If we’re afraid, as educators, to lead our students “out” to anything important in the real world, what exactly are we doing? I mean, besides paying the bills and perpetuating worldly ignorance?

So back to those “burning issues”: Diane got me thinking about the need for educators to serve as “futurist guides” to remedy the “soft news diet” of mainstream media and community ignorance of what scientists of all stripes, social as well as natural, are unable to get us to notice. (Another etymology check: “science” - “knowledge”; one hopes schools would defend science, especially in the anti-scientific US, against its detractors, but I’m not seeing it. I’m seeing more cowed, fearful, silent educators.)

Again: “Our past is not their future.” If the international community of scientists is dismissed as crank Cassandras by the Bush administration, by fundamentalist churches, and by all the followers in our communities of the information campaigns so powerfully managed by both of those camps, how do our children stand a chance of meeting future challenges if we’re afraid to talk about them? We’re like the current Democratic congress: we have the power, but we fail our constituents by fearing to wield it for the best interests, scientifically-grounded, of that community and of the globe.

So instead of a writing project that limits students to expressing what they already know too well - that they’re subtly ticked off and passively rebellious over their infantilization and the irrelevance of schools - why can’t we, as “futurist guides,” “lead them out” to questions posed by science about their futures?

That’s another “problem worth criticizing via literature.” Students around the globe comparing artfully-crafted, critically-observed notes in story form of the “consensus trance” of their local community as it trashes their futures with nary a thought. Students being encouraged to authentically express whatever satirical, lyrical, tragic, comic, or utopian variation on this theme suits them. Or to challenge the premise. This is not indoctrination, but “teaching the controversy,” as Doug so sharply frames it.

Or are we so afraid to educate (instead of merely teach) that we can’t even ask open questions like: “Is global warming a problem?”

If so, isn’t school kind of like studying for the SAT on the deck of the Titanic - post-iceburg?

Parting shot. On July 9, I mentioned in my little “personal commencement” post, which announced my graduation from the web 2.0 church and conversion to the church of relevance, that one of my new goals is to become “less of a teacher and more of a community leader, and to expand my relationship with the young adults in my community beyond the 9-month term.” Something like that, anyway.

One of the things that has disturbed me in that respect is this: I’ve had expressions of interest from surely more than 30 adults about the “Year of Global Cooling” and “Concerts for Global Chilling” project targeted to culminate, “flat world community service” style, on Earth Day of next year. I’m literate enough in the science to think it’s worth continuing to “flog” this idea on this blog, as Jeff Wasserman so pricelessly (and accurately) put it. I’m trying to be the change I want to see, and I insist that the time to get young adults involved in starting the “real-world project-based learning” so historically relevant to their futures is now, in the summer - before school swallows them back into homework and SAT-world for nine fallow months beginning soon. These young adults are free right now to be relevant. And if I’m right, some of them would like the opportunity to be invited into that relevance and treated like they could have some fun doing something good.

So here’s what’s bothering me: If 30 educators have expressed interest and even joined the project Ning, but only one has managed to produce a single young adult - while over 20 students here in Seoul are working on it, during summer, with no grades involved - does that indicate something troublesome about our relationships, as youth leaders (we are youth leaders, like it or not), with our youth? And is that troubling thing possibly rooted in some strange perversion of adult-youth community relations caused by the fact that schools make teachers “want vacations from the kids” because . . . beyond assigning them work, disciplining them, and branding them with grades, we don’t have human relationships to them?

I fear the answer is too often yes. If not, why are no world youths being told about this by their educators during the summer? Is it that hard to pass an email invitation to a few young adults in our communities, when we spend nine months a year with them? What’s going on there?

Finally: Cindy Barnsley’s blog has a great conversation going right now about “dissenting voices” and the need for them. (See cocomments in the sidebar too.) I hope it goes without saying that I shouldn’t have to apologize for any statements critical of the status quo. I’m here to field comments and learn from those that teach me. (And Dana, did this help you understand what I’m getting at?)

–
Photo 2: “The Ghosts of No Evil” by lindes on Flickr.
Photo 3: “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” by Auntie P on Flickr.
Photo 4: “Fear Squared” by seetwist on Flickr.
Photo 5: “Fear Limited Edition Tee” by spcoon on Flickr.

1. Denver [↩]

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