Beyond School

First, a mini-photo essay on my own point of view about privileging writing over speaking when grading in the collaborative, networking, multimedia century:

Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of putting Diigo annotations on posts instead of leaving comments in the thread was a negative thing. Only Diigo users would see the conversation, and the post’s comment thread would be left poorer for that.

But after a wild four-hour storm of 74-and-counting comments on my Muhammed Ali post about privileging writing over other communication strands when we grade, it occurs to me that Diigo might come in handy here. There are so many incredibly insightful comments there, and the issue is so relevant to the futures of our students, that I fear the sheer bulk of comments might dissuade new readers from discovering the gold shining here and there.

Diigo highlights and annotations of the thread might help. If you want to take part in this experiment, go at it. It could be a great way to demonstrate the value of Diigo highlights and annotations as a complement to, instead of a substitute for, blog comments. Because the debate – particularly the one between Benjamin Baxter, who maintains that writing should constitute the bulk of a student’s grade in English/Language Arts and history classes, and opposing viewpoints that grades should more equally credit speaking, graphic language, and more, as articulated by Arthus Erea, Adrienne Michetti, Kirstin “Keamac,” Dean Shareski, Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez, Carolyn Foote, and many others – that debate never seemed to reach any resolution.

It sounds like I’m piling on Benjamin here, but I don’t mean to. Fifty million people saying something is true doesn’t make it so. Moreover, Benjamin works in an inner city school, and his arguments are rooted in his perception of what best helps his students’ futures. It differs with mine, but I’m in a different context. And we’re all running on varying assumptions about things like the future of work, the purpose of schooling, and more.

But that thread drifts into so many tangents – the high school freshman Arthus v. high school teacher Benjamin debates are priceless, but sometimes distracting (or am I wrong?) – that I see Diigo, again, as possibly helpful here. Highlight and annotate the strong assertions, the weak rebuttals, the evasions of direct questions and the red herrings, and let others add comments to those annotations.

(This connects, by the way, to a conversation with “Uninspired Teacher” Tom and Charlie A. Roy on the “Schooly Speeches versus Real Talks” post, about using juries instead of judges in mock trials – or better, real ones – to improve that old practice.)

Peter Rock said it took him an hour to read that post and thread (but he also said he read it slowly). That scares me. So many comments in that thread don’t deserve burial in the noise.

So head on over to that thread, if you’re a Diigo convert – especially if there’s a Diigo group on assessment - and have at it.

At the same time, far be it from me to dictate rules. If you want to just comment instead, of course that’s okay.

—

Photos:Toksik by The Sizemore McCabe Project, Continental Paper Grading Company by quinn.anya, Spring Branding Near Crane Oregon 1982 by mharrsch

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything.

Two that struck a chord:

1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea

Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their literacy skills in ways that classrooms typically cannot match.

One reason I love Sylvia’s posts is that she references reports and data that I don’t have the will or temperament to seek out, but which speak almost always to my own priorities as an educator. A case in point: the goal of creating a “LearnerTalk” (but that sounds schooly) of student edubloggers to give us teachers lessons on how our Classroom 2.0 attempts measure up. Sylvia writes that this is already happening spontaneously, which encourages me to seek ways to harness and shepherd that trend into this arena. Here’s Sylvia:

Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Nearly 60 percent of online students report discussing education-related topics such as college or college planning, learning outside of school, and careers. And 50 percent of online students say they talk specifically about schoolwork. (Read her “Web 2.0 – share the adventure with students” post as well)

Does anybody else read into this that the students are stuck, like we adults are, in their own separate echo-chamber? And that combining the student and teacher discourses in one truly universal “edublogosphere” has the potential to steer our shared enterprise into fertile territory sooner than the current “parallel echo-chambers” situation we seem to have right now?

Scott McCleod’s offer to host a “LearnerTalk” type thing a month or so ago has not been forgotten.* Life and work have been too fast to focus on generating interest in that. Last week, before we began our week-long Chusok holiday, I pitched blogging to my Web 2.0 activity club, and many of my students seemed to get a glimmer from that sermon of the power of real-world blogging. I think a few will bite.

2. The War on Teaching Bad Writing

Anybody who’s taught high school English should know why most students hate to write in schools. It’s because they’re taught to write badly.

If I assigned any of you to write about ideas that aren’t self-selected, in forms that aren’t self-expressive, for an over-worked audience of one that puts two or three words, random red hieroglyphs, and a permanently-branded number into a ledger that threatens to determine your fate, face it: you would learn to hate writing (and school) too.

Like Sylvia, Jeff Wasserman of When the Hurly-Burly’s Done shares some hard data and classroom anecdotes to help us teachers of real writing wage the war against teachers of the poisonously schooly 5-Paragraph Essay [*jeers and hisses*]. I replied to Jeff’s post,

Jeff, this makes me want to make my AP Lit class Ning public. We’re having forum discussions about Organic Form v. Mechanical (5PE and all that garbage).

I’ve been making them write timed essays without outlining, trusting that an organic form will come from simply responding to the prompt and writing from there.

I modeled it for them by writing an old AP Lit exam essay about a poem, under timed conditions, in a screencast here, for what it’s worth. Interesting to be able to let them into my interior writer’s monologue as I read, annotate, and write a response, recording voiceover all the while, to the same exercise they did.

My best student responded to watching it by saying, among other things, “I didn’t think you could make a one-sentence paragraph in the body of an essay.”

One last tidbit: I took an AP Lit workshop from UCLA this summer – a waste of time, mostly – but got this from the College Board/APL celebrity who taught it: AP Lit exam graders appreciate organic form, “as long as it has a beginning, middle, and end.”

I like that: beginning, middle, end. None of this “introductory paragraph, body, conclusion paragraph” drivel.

Then, instead of sleeping as I’d intended, my mind shifted into overdrive. Sylvia’s and Jeff’s post led to these fantasies of how we can teach real writing (based on real reading in this “infinite book” we call the internet) with web 2.0:

First, students would write self-directed blogs. No homework assignments allowed in terms of subject matter, though standards of style and conventions would be set;

Second, assessment would be based on readership, comments, subscriptions, visitor stats, Technorati authority ranking (with safeguards against fraudulent links, which are easy enough to spot), self-assessment, and other non-authoritarian, teacher-gives-grades assessment styles. (And yes, as usual, it’s the institutional but otherwise counter-educational imperative to grade everything that presents the biggest obstacle to this approach to learning.)

–Wait, you say. That’s not fair. Some students who are not blessed with verbal intelligence will not attract subscribers, visitors, comments, and so forth. But not so fast: the art of compensation with other intelligences is so much more possible on blogs. Not a great writer? Then compensate by communicating through images (see Diane Cordell’s blog), podcasts (see Wes Fryer), films (see Marco Torres and Mabry Middle School), graphic novels and comic strips (see ToonDo). Carve out a niche doing Google Earth productions (see Google Lit Trips) as your blog’s specialty. Find some skill you have, or some passion you want to extend, and adapt your blog to exploit that.

Really: What form of multiple intelligences does blogging exclude?

Third, grades would be weighted toward the end of the year or term, to allow for experiment, dead ends, learning – through – failure, and other writerly discoveries afforded by real-world blogging. (I’m more and more fascinated by the fact that my own blogging has been a real-world case of what we call “project-based learning” in school, and more and more convinced it’s the way to engage young writers to naturally want to hone their skills and excel.)

I shouldn’t have tried to write this right now. Too tired. But these holidays are short, and I love them for allowing this type of reflection.

–

*I’ll probably just buy the domain and host it alongside the Project Global Cooling site anyway, since I’m already adminstering WordPress MU for my school – and soon will train students to administer these sites themselves. It’s so hard to let go of the reins and give them to the young, and so easy to forget that they’re more than capable. But I will ask Scott to boost, support, read, seed, reply

Photo credits:
Writing by oskay
Borg Drones by Dunechaser
Bible 2.0 by jeff w brooktree
Looking by eskimoblood
Fusion Festival 2005 by Udo Herzog

I’m catching up on grading and assessing on my AP Literature Ning – that’s where most assignments are posted, so student-people can see each others’ work, and my replies to everybody, not just to them – and was wowed by JungHee.

How? I assigned Keats‘ stunning last sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were Stedfast as Thou Art,” as a four-stage response exercise. Those stages were in four forums:

1. Read the poem and journal your first impressions.
2. Draw the poem’s imagery, then journal how your first impression changed.
3. Record and upload an mp3 of yourself reciting the poem – and read it as well as you can.
4. Journal how reciting and listening to your recital further changed your impressions of the poem.

In short: read it with the switched-off laziness that is par for the course with homework; SEE the imagery (and if you’re really sharp, discover that you can touch those images, hear them, smell them, taste them, too); sing the poem’s sounds (albeit atonally); and connect those sounds to the sense of the poem by hearing them.*

I’m really enjoying reading and replying to these forums. The reflections are so revealing of each student’s level of accomplishment in savoring poetry.

But JungHee threw me for a loop. He recorded his mp3 on a music editor, noticed the patterns of the “p” phonemes in his reading, and seemed to be able to notice sound more by seeing it in the digital soundwaves – doing a spectrographic analysis, basically – than by hearing it unaided by technology. So he shared by uploading his discovery, which I do here as well:

Here’s what JungHee said in his forum about this:

What I noticed in my sound wave was that there were frequent “high peaks”.
I posted the picture of this as attachment below for clarification..
All the “mountain looking” ones are the places where the “P” sound made the air go into the mic with too much force. So we can tell that there were some… “edged” words throughout the poem (?)

I don’t know what to make of this, but thought it was interesting to share.

Back to branding my student-people with tattoos for their permanent records….(*grrrr…*)

–

*This is all based on the conviction that one drawback of our multimedia age is that it has led to the atrophying of that mental muscle we call the imagination. That is not a good thing for our experience of the sublime and beautiful. And I love my student-people too much to deprive them of the opportunity to make the ascent to that plane.

Stephen Downes (top) trounced me (bottom) with a 98.98. He is King. (Nice new ‘do, Stephen!):

Diane Cordell (below: top) gave the testers a 180-degree ankle-wrench for misspelling “population” in their results:

And Doug Noon (bottom) “flipped the goat- sucker” with his question: “What is ’smart,’ anway?”:

I thought about Doug’s question myself after taking the quiz*. And I have this much to say for it: 1) it required some knowledge of the wider world; 2) it required the ability to pay attention to wording; 3) it required some lateral thinking; 4) since it didn’t go down on my permanent record, it was harmless fun; and 5) there was something motivational and instructive about learning where I stood relative to others who took the quiz.

One of the weird things about school – at least with teachers who conceal other students’ work by not making it public on a wiki or blog or whatever – is that we rarely get the chance to compare our own performance and skills-level with that of our peers. I didn’t know my writing was any different from others my age until, as a college junior, a professor in a graduate course I was taking told me that most of the graduate student writing in our class was less polished than mine.

(And if you think this is mere bragging, you miss the point, which is this: I may have taken myself more seriously as a writer far earlier in life, if only I had been allowed to learn, by having the opportunity to compare my own writing with that of my peers, that it was one of my relative strengths. How many of our students today don’t realize their strengths, in a similar way, and for similar reasons?)

*Sour Grapes Shout-Out from “The Cerebral Assassin”: I Demand a Rematch!

[Burell grabs microphone, shouts into camera]

This is to you, Downes! And anybody else out there with the yarbles to accept! I didn’t know the speed of the test was counted in the score. So I challenge you all to a rematch! Take the Genius Test and report back on Sunday, your time!

–

Apologies for the wonky formatting. It’s a Blogger column-width thing. I’m going to migrate to WordPress soon.

Photo credits:

top by Stuart R Brown
middle by Prof-B
bottom (“flipping the goat-sucker”) by upeslases
“Cerebral Assassin” by PetroleumJelliffe

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works on permalinks, not on main blog pages) with the kisAP07 group. They use that as “test reviw.”

Here it is:

Just sharing this tutorial I made for my staff (95% of whom will not watch it, and therefore spend the rest of their lives making and grading quizzes and tests the hard way). It shows one way to use class Scribe Blogs to create test and quiz items on Moodle. Moodle then auto-grades, reports correct and incorrect answer percentages for each item, and more.

This is not a vote for objective quizzes and tests, by the way. We all should know how limited they are as a way to assess learning. But, since grades are a curse we’ve not been freed of, I see this test as a good way to generate an easy good grade for my students. And it does assure that they learn the basic literary terms and concepts covered in class discussions.

Note: If you click, “Click here to see full size,” you’ll go to the Screencast-0-matic.com site for a much larger video, much easier on the eyes. And you can leave comments and questions. SOM is very cool.

Let me know if you find these useful, and if you’d like more of the same?

In one of the great ironies of my life, I’m probably the only HS teacher at KIS not to have a 1:1 classroom, since I teach only AP Lit for seniors – the only grade level not required to buy MacBooks for school this year. But yesterday, I jumped in anyway with a project that incorporates the constructivist and 21st century literacy / web 2.0 ideas of having students create a “legacy product” for their assessment, instead of turning in stale homework to teacher.

Here’s the scoop: We’re reading Shakespeare’s greatest and most difficult tragedy, King Lear. The syntax and diction of the play are over the students’ heads, with a couple exceptions, but they have to become proficient at reading 16th century English for the AP Exam. So that’s the learning objective: give them practice at accurate comprehension of 16th c. English.

So here’s the “Constructivism 2.0″ project to work toward that goal:

1. I created a wiki on Wikispaces (free for teachers), entitled “King Lear Street Talk.” We’ll use this wiki to create a student-written modernized prose translation of Shakespeare’s play. (Setting up the wiki took only ten minutes, max. An eight-year-old can do it.)

2. In teams of two, students have to write a translation of one page of the play into today’s English. Accuracy counts, and so does the quality of the script they’re re-writing. If any team has a disagreement about how to translate any section of their page, they have to cover their butts by explaining, in the wiki page “Discussions” page, what they disagree about. Pedagogically, we all know that to translate archaic language into modern language, we have to comprehend that archaic language. So this is practice and close reading and comprehension on a line-by-line, focused level.

3. We’ll keep translating the play until we have the full 5-act play translated. We’ll publish that as a free e-Book using Lulu.com, which anybody can download to read.

4. We’re also going to record “radio performances” of our modern translation of the play on GarageBand podcasts, and upload them to Librivox.com, a literature podcast site that is a library of readings of copyright-free, public domain world literature. Senior citizens, blind people, and people who just like audio-books use this site to listen to 1,000’s of different titles. This can also be used by future classes as an intro to the tragedy – ESL students, younger students, and others can benefit by listening to these podcasts before reading the original version. So the students are becoming teachers of future students with this product.

So this will give students practice in all the AP Lit and Language Arts skills on our Standards and Benchmarks – reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking (which comes when they debate opposing interpretations with their teammate, as well as when they decide how to act out different lines when they record their radio play podcast).

But instead of doing that in the old, stale way – handing in their translations to teacher, and performing a giggly mess in front of the class – they’re making a real product that they can share with the world, and – for the excellent performers – mention on their college applications as an example of their best work as part of their “digital portfolio.”

[Cross-posted from my AP Lit UCLA workshop.]

Out of curiosity, how many of you solicit course evaluations from your classes at the end of the year?

Do any of you solicit course evaluation feedback throughout the year?

Last year I experimented with this on my classes’ Moodle websites. I invited criticism and student feedback – using a single “dummy” username name and password I created for the purpose, and gave to all students – and created a forum called “How Can This Class be Better?” The forum was open 24/7, all year. It was fairly active all year too.

I was amazed at what I learned. No student was ever disrespectful or immature (and we’re talking 9th graders!), though they often used that anonymity to criticize this or that about the learning in the class (pace, focus, clarity, relevance, load, what have you). And the great majority of student contributions taught this teacher. (Actually, my first day of class speech formally forbids the words “teacher” and “student,” and changes our language to the much healthier, all-inclusive, “learners.”)

I can’t recommend this highly enough. Class morale and engagement – and respect for me as “teacher” – skyrocketed, because the “students” were unaccustomed to having conversations about their own education with their teachers in the past. (They are our “customers”, after all, not our employees or “subjects.”)

My instruction improved too, by adjusting when their feedback communicated new ideas and points of view to me. I didn’t honor every suggestion, but many of them I did. And their suggestions produced many highly reflective class conversations about what education means.

Like the hidden curriculum in the labels “teacher” and “student” (I always think “doctor” and “patient”), there’s a hidden curriculum being taught, whether we realize it or not, in the single “end of course evaluation” habit.

I’m curious to hear other views or stories about this. Is the practice of ongoing evaluation something you’ve done? Something common in your educational history?

The first half of this post is written in the (very real) voice of an angry student wanting to “quit school.” The second half is a preview of an upcoming podcast interview with the director-producer of the “unschooling” documentary, “Voices from the New American Schoolhouse,” that I wrote about recently in the “Four Convergences” post. It’s also an invitation for anybody out there to submit questions for that interview, or arrange to call in during it, in this post’s comments.

The two halves of this post belong together. Bear with me.

What Fresh Hell is This?:
When the Desks are Turned….

As regular readers know, I’m a “student” again in this (US) $500 online AP workshop.

I almost “hate” it. And that’s good.

It’s good to sit in the student’s desk and experience the exasperation, the time-wasting folly, the powerlessness, the absurdly arbitrary nature of it all.

Harsh? You decide. Another quick example (after the B+ for assigning a videochat / filmmaking poetry lesson instead of an analytical essay): Course started three weeks ago. Course book was mailed before that, but only included the AP Lit workshop book. No syllabus. On Day One of the course, Blackboard lets students in to see teacher bulletins. I must have missed the mention of reading Their Eyes were Watching God on one of those links. Even if I hadn’t, it takes three weeks for book orders to arrive in Korea. This was a Week Two assignment.

I went to two bookstores with foreign (English) book sections, but no luck. I emailed the teacher, asking for either an extension or a workaround by performing a similar analysis in a different novel. Seemed reasonable to me.

I emailed teacher the day the assignment was due – Sunday in LA, Monday in Korea. (I’d searched in bookstores the day before, so I sent this email within 24 hours of discovering the problem.)

Here’s where it gets interesting. Teacher told me “It’s too late at this point to deal with the geography issue.” Note the language: absolute as the Ten Commandments. And so arbitrary. It could easily be otherwise.

Think about that: am I supposed to learn “a valuable lesson” about punctuality here? Is that the teacher’s role? Is that what I’m paying $500 for? To be told, “No learning activity for you because you were tardy”? And “this is going to hurt your grade, young man?”

At 45, it’s absurd. Given the circumstances, it might be at 15 as well.

Compounding the mood is another maddening fact: teacher and I went round and round for probably two or three hours this week in private emails in which she told me I was participating too much in the forums. Forums participation is weighted 400 total points, while weekly work is weighted 100 points each week, so I spent silly energy trying to tactfully ask teacher to resolve the cognitive dissonance of the simultaneous “Talk / Don’t talk” commands she was giving. In a parallel universe with a teacher comfortable with student autonomy, I could have used that time to discover the problem with the upcoming assignment.

(That tact was hard because a forum, especially online and asynchronous, is open space when I teach classes, and I only interfere when there’s abuse. I still don’t get the pedagogy behind this control, and feel more and more like asking for a refund. I participate a lot, yes, and that’s no different from a fantastic AP Language workshop I took last year, in which much good conversation and good will happened. Why the difference now, with this class and this teacher? Where’s the pedagogy?)

Add to that: teacher publishes assignments for each week at a pace she controls. I’d finished the prior week’s assignment within two days, and had she set up the course for self-paced acceleration, would have seen the unavailable novel issue five days sooner. Why not publish all assignments up front, and assign only the feedback on a tighter schedule?

One last doozie: She requires class members to read every post in Blackboard’s primitive forums (proprietary software like that is so painful – you can’t expand a thread to see it all at once, so you click countless posts that say, “Thanks!” Worse, teacher has disabled all multimedia embedding, so we’re stuck with text only). It’s required for the grade.

But what’s in the forums? “Schooly” assignments in which we play high school and write literary analyses of teacher-selected works. We write our analysis, then we give feedback to others. Fine, okay. It can be fun, within limits. But this isn’t an AP Literature class. This is “Teaching AP Literature.” Why so much “playing the student,” instead of focusing on the pedagogy? Yeah, I get the idea of shaking off rust. But it shouldn’t be the major focus.

The more important assignment, though, is our lesson planning for AP Lit – you know, the “teaching” aspect that we teachers enrolled in the course for? Hold your hats, because here’s a bigger doozie: Teacher does not require us to read each others’ lesson plans, and give feedback.

Instead, she alone gives feedback on those – in an email, with a numerical grade.

I’m sorry, but that’s simply bad teaching in my book. I don’t care much if somebody finds fault with my interpretation of a Shakespeare sonnet. I do care if somebody finds fault with my lesson plan design. I’d love to see my classmates criticize that. I’d have 20 peer-teachers. My teaching, and my students’ learning, would benefit.

But no. I have one teacher only here: The capital T teacher, the expert who gives grades to fellow adults. Note the hidden curriculum. Again, absurd.

There’s no less pleasant feeling than righteous indignation. Who likes feeling self-righteous? But I’m burdened with it.

So cure me of this. As usual, dear reader, I beg you: tell me what I’m missing.

For the record: there’s no space on the forums for suggestions to improve the class. I have emailed suggestions, with little response. In the classic “park the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff instead of installing guard-rails at the top” move, those suggestions come only at the end of the course, with the end-of-course evaluation. By then, it’s (fittingly) academic.

Why This Bad Luck is Good Luck

If nothing else, I’m re-living the experience of all intelligent students who have to swallow their insights into how their teacher could foster better learning – and better morale.

And the convergence of this experience with my recent explorations of unschooling, of Illich, of Downes, and of the Sudbury schools couldn’t be more serendipitous.

Danny Mydlack, the New American Schoolhouse documentary director, told me in an email that he’d posted the full documentary in segments on YouTube. So I started watching it tonight to prepare for the interview.

I’m not finished yet. But so far, here is what I consider the film’s most powerful moment. Listen to this young man explain why – after a life in public schools – he did nothing in the full first year of his attendance at this self-directed “unschool.” (His clip starts at 4 minutes, and he hits his brilliant stride at 5.30):

Such power in those insights. One day, I hope student voices this honest and insightful are common posts in our edublog readers.

So here’s the invitation, again. If you want to watch the full documentary, it’s posted in ascending order – bottom to top – at Danny’s page at YouTube. It’s very well-done, and worth the hour.

And if you want your questions or comments included when I interview Danny – or if you want to join us on Skype – just comment below and have your say.

Interesting journey these days. More and more, the problem doesn’t seem to be “dropping out,” as much as “dropping in” – or being dropped in, in a perfect use of the passive voice – in the first place.

Treat a student like an infant – even a 45-year-old one – and you get an infantile student. This post is proof.

I look forward to “de-toxing” when it’s all over, and getting back to what I want to learn, for free, grade-free, and above all – teacher-free.

–
*Sorry for the re-post. I want RSS readers to enjoy the epigraphs from the Greeks and Chinese – a stylistic touch I’m learning from Diane’s writing at Journeys. This is another thing I don’t like about aggregators – they don’t update revised posts.

Patrick Higgins Shows the Love (Nice poster skills!)

So I’m hanging out with Mac last night, late, in Korea, doing homework for my (sorry) pretty uninspiring UCLA online workshop, and then Mac said: Brrrrriiing.

It was Patrick Higgins (of the excellent Chalkdust) in New Jersey, on Skype. He was giving the second day of his workshop to interested teachers in his school, and had invited Konrad Glogowski (Canada grade 8 teacher and writer of his Blog of Proximal Develpment), Carolyn Foote (librarian in Texas and writer of her Not So Distant Future blog) and, apparently desperate for a third guest, this writer of the B.S. blog in Korea.

(I thought it was going to be a video, so I put on a shirt for the occasion. It wasn’t, though. All that energy – standing up, buttoning down – wasted….)

Because we all read each other regularly, we all knew each others’ minds somewhat, though we’d never heard each others’ voices. It was nice to connect this way, in real time.

Patrick set it up nicely. His faculty had questions, and we all gave our two cents.

The subjects? Classroom blogging and edublogs as professional development.

It was strange, fun, and stimulating. As Konrad said, we three guests were really learning alongside the teachers in Patrick’s space. And, oh yeah – it was free. I wish I could say the same for that USD $500 UCLA workshop, but can’t, honestly.

(Check out Patrick’s prof dev wikis – Connective Writing and New Teacher Geek Day – worth a look. Especially for the goofy photos!)

Here it is (and thanks for a good time, Patrick. It’s an excellent way to connect teachers in workshops instead of talking at them about connecting):

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