Beyond School

Real quick: I know about Archive.org, but what other online film, television, video, photo, and audio archives are there that give permission to students to use and edit for their own “digital essays,” a la Humanity Lobotomy?

Any specific sites, or lists of such sites on a wiki, that you can recommend?

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Bud Hunt at Bud the Teacher recently posted a link to the text version of the now-viral “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video and suggests classroom (and teacher) reflection on the differences between the pure-text medium and the web 2.0 version.

I’ve had the same idea for a while–ever since presenting Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?” video to my school admin in early January. I kept pausing Karl’s video to invite the administrators to reflect on how much more effective the video was as a communication medium over the traditional way–printing out Karl’s text and handing copies to everyone to read and discuss.

My superintendent–a wonderful literacy enthusiast–chimed in with some great comments. She noted the critical thinking involved in Karl’s isolation of only the most powerful information for inclusion in the video, and articulated how much skill it takes to separate the wheat from the chaff in this way. “That’s critical thinking,” she said.

She also noted the power of the timing of Karl’s text, and how radical this ability to control the readers’/audience’s pace of reading was–thanks to web2.0. It was a great thing, having these conversations about web2.0 as new literacies, and not as technology.

Yes, we all know that, but ritual repetition creates new realities. So it bears repeating.

SO…Bud posted the link to the text for “The Machine is Us/ing Us.” I’m just going to copy and paste it below, followed by the video itself–so now the “lesson” is all in one place. (And Karl, I can’t find an embeddable version of “Did You Know?”, nor a text version, to add to this exercise. Can you help out by showing me where they might be? It’s so worth doing!)

Here’s the text (with some formatting glitches I tried but failed to fix, sorry):

Now here’s the video:

(By the way, I posted it on my class blog–not as an “assignment,” just sharing–and here are two unsolicited, and pregnant, student comments from ninth graders:

2 Comments

1. wow, this is a cool video
   it really does show that text on screen can do so much more than lead on paper.

   — February 4, 2007

2. awesome!
   it clearly shows that networking is far more efficient then writing!
   The these stuff confuses me
   hope i can learn them and be an expert in computer networking

   — February 4, 2007

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

[Update: I just watched the screencast, and found that a lot of the conversation between Jeff in Canada and me in Korea overlapped on it. That's a result of the capture and rendering of the screencast (please, anybody, show me a better tool than SnapzPro for Mac screencasts). When we talked on Vyew, it was a normal phone-like conversation.]

Jeff Whipple and Pat Aroune have been giving their attention to Vyew these days on their blogs, and Jeff and I are “sociallaborating” (to paraphrase Stephen Colbert, “Wired News, I own the copyright on that word.”) a lot lately. So Jeff was kind enough to spend his Canadian (New Brunswick) Saturday night talking to me on Korea’s Sunday morning showing me the ropes. He also showed me his wiki (did I just write that?) so I could get ideas on how to improve my own.

Jeff’s “Whip Blog” explains Vyew better than I could, so go there to read it. Pat Aroune’s blog shares very valuable anecdotes about its social bonding effects on students who use it for homework study sessions. and that’s worth a read too. Pat’s really out front on this.

Since I did a screencast of my session with Jeff last week, I thought I’d just share a few minutes of it here so you could see and hear how it works. A couple more clips from it will be on my Google Video page. They show how users can annotate and work on Powerpoints and other desktop files in Vyew.

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This is a revised email I just sent to Jeff Whipple in New Brunswick, Canada, and Karl Fisch in Colorado, about the Flat Classroom collaborative writing project I’ve been cooking up for the last few weeks. (Jeff has become a co-chef with a few fantastic suggestions, the most exciting of which is to invite students of more visual than verbal intelligence to submit their original illustrations for inclusion in the final project. Brilliant. And to take it further, there’s no reason to exclude podcasts of gifted oral interpretations of the published stories–and any other digital product showing any other of the “multiple intelligences.”)

My students decided to call the “blog-book” something fittingly new: a “blook.” (Rhymes with “book.”)

Here’s the update on the project (and see this post for more, including links to other posts and to the wiki itself)–which I’m trying to stall a bit so others can jump in (though it can still work if they jump in late, and actually has different benefits–namely, watching the story spread after we’ve finished in Korea):

Since each individual student’s story will serve as a “tale,” a la the Arabian Nights, told by a frame narrative, I had my students brainstorm for a frame narrative to tie all the individual tales together–the “Scheherazade and King Shahryar” element.

They’re doing that this weekend. There are some excellent ideas brewing.

Next week, they’ll seek personal stories (their own, or ones their parents or friends tell them) to write. As the Arabian Nights stories don’t only please the audience, but also inform it of Arab culture, our own stories will have to reveal insights into Korean culture while they delight. (Partner schools in other countries will, of course, reveal their own local culture in their stories, while delighting us all the while.)

We’ll use our class Wikispace for the writing / revising process for these stories. That writing workshop phase will probably last for a good week or two.

The next phase will be evaluation: students will evaluate each others’ stories, playing the role of King Shahryar to each storyteller-”Scheherazade”, and only nominate the high-quality stories to be published on their individual blogs. Each published story will link to the next one on the next student’s blog, ad infinitum.

But what about the students whose stories were denied publication in the blook? They can always seek student criticism on their stories’ “discussion” tabs on their wikipage, and revise and revise and revise. The wiki is like a Farm League–keep honing your skills there, and one day you may be called up to storytell with the Pro’s. On the blook.

This is where other students and classrooms around the world can still be included in the never-ending Flat World Nights. And if/when other students are promoted from the Flat World Wiki (where all students write) to the “blook,” the last student to be published will just add a hyperlink to the newly published storyteller’s blog. On and on. New classes can always join whenever they like–next week, month, year, or decade.

We’re hoping to top the original 1001 Nights.

That way, readership of each student blog is provided–more dots for each student’s ClustrMap, more sense of audience, more motivation to keep writing, and writing well.

I’m about to hit e-Pals with an announcement. It’s just so annoying to fill out forms when your address is Korean!

Photo credits: Arabian Nights illustration: Scheherazade Telling the Tales, by Kay Nielsen (1922) here; Friedman book cover here.

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