Beyond School

Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription – well worth it – required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that

[t]eens who communicate frequently with their friends, and those who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones, do not write more often for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens

seems hardly news at all, doesn’t it? Is it me, or does it imply that some people think that The Vast Percentage of Teens Who, Like the Vast Percentage of Adults, Do Not Enjoy Writing will suddenly, because somebody plops a laptop, tablet, or cellphone in their hands, have some Road to Damascus experience that magically converts them to the Cult of Writing?

That implication seems embedded in the “finding” above, and it’s about as silly as expecting people to all become economists when they’re given their first checkbook.

If you go into a 1:1 program with fantasies that all students are going to become writers because of it, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Nothing makes a writer but the self-compelled need to write. And that’s a limited commodity now as always.

The eSchool news article continues with this further bit of non-”news,” which this time, though still making me chuckle, also quickens my pulse and gets my dander up a bit:

Teen bloggers, however, write more frequently both online and offline, the study says.

–check that language out, that loopy logic: “Teen bloggers,” we’re told, are teens who write frequently “both online and offline.” I’m no expert, now, but why are we calling teens who write a lot, with and without blogs, “bloggers”?

Any of you adult bloggers out there, are you with me in wanting to correct people who call you a “blogger” – some person who “makes blogs,” apparently, like a designer makes designs and a reporter makes reports – by telling them: “Actually, I’m a freaking writer. I just publish my own writing online on a blog. I don’t buy those daily word-counts on my blog at Wal-Mart. I write them.” Such sloppy language!

(Note that I didn’t say “good writer.” Mediocre and bad writers fill the ranks of bloggers as much as they do of newpapers, magazines, and books.)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for a long time, this word “blogging.” The label cheapens the practice. Writing bloggers are writers, photo-bloggers are photographers, podcast-bloggers are audio producers, vloggers are video artists, etc, in teenhood as it is in adulthood.

So let’s revise that last excerpt for clarity:

Teen writers, however, write more frequently both online and offline.

Talk about a report from Captain Obvious. Give any writer a journal and pen, s/he’ll scribble away. Give him or her a blog, s/he’ll type away. There’s no mystery here.

Things get weirder here:

Forty-seven percent of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more, compared with 33 percent of teens without blogs.

What, exactly, does that unidentified fifty-three percent of “teen bloggers” who do not “write outside of school for personal reasons” actually write on their blogs, then? Wait — hold it – I think I’m getting a whiff of something. Do you smell it?

Bad air! Bad air! It’s a homework blog! Another moronic oxymoron brought to you by Schooliness, Inc. Let’s cross this 53% off the Book of Writing, and focus on that lovely, remaining 47% who blog write on blogs, not because schools make them, but because they’re writers. Breathe in the perfume, folks – we’re in the rose-garden now of flowering young writers.

They’re the ones I want to teach - because they’re the ones who probably want to be taught about ways to improve their writing.

There. I said it: I’m an elitist as an English teacher.

I’m not a democrat when it comes to teaching writing. Just as Thomas Jefferson believed that all people are born equal, but natural differences create a “natural aristocracy” – one having nothing to do with money and everything to do with spirit (and I mean that naturally) – I believe the same is true in the classroom. A rich kid can’t pay me to want to help him become a better writer if he doesn’t show me, through the evidence of steady, self-impelled production, he has a writer in him. A working-class kid who does have a writer in her – who can point to hundreds of blog posts or journal pages having nothing to do with homework – will find not only my door open during lunch and after school, but also my Skype and Twitter at home. As I said in a comment on Carolyn’s blog, it’s

the bloggers mentioned in the survey above . . . who interest me, . . those who have the will to write, the seed of a writer, in them.

Those “kids” aren’t mere students. They’re writers.

Let’s keep looking at that Pew Garden, and try to find the prize roses. I think I see them hidden in this statistic:

Sixty-five percent of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life.

Pop Quiz: Who are the “teen bloggers” who are the true writers?

a. the 65% of “teen bloggers” who “believe writing is essential to later success in life”

b. the 35% of “teen bloggers” who do not believe this.

If you answered “a,” I give you a zero.

To me, the answer is “b.” Because it implies that these young writers are writing not, as most of the consumerism-drugged “school is for money” customers in our classrooms do (and as the students in answer “a” seem to do), “to get a better GPA, go to a better college, get a better job, so I can buy a better house, car, and handbag.” This 35% in “b” wins my vote. They’re the prize roses. They write for the pleasure in the present, not the payoff in the future. [Update: Freshman Arthus trumps me in his comment. He gets an A+, I get a B.]

They’re writers.

A Revised Position Statement on Classroom Blogging, Two Years into the Fray:

And this brings me to the latest position-statement in my evolving views, after two years of experimenting with it in the classroom, of the value and place of blogging to teach writing in schools:

It should only be required in an elective “advanced blogging” class. But we need a better word than that tuneless aural trainwreck of a word, “blah – geeng.”

“Advanced writing,” though I’ve restricted this article to writers because the Pew study does the same, is no better a title, because “blogging” invites the natural talkers and interviewers, singers and raconteurs through podcasting; the natural symbolic and visual communicators through photo and computer graphic, fine arts and video blogging. So “advanced digital communication,” then?

You tell me. But I think you see what I mean, don’t you? Simply a workshop of the thirsty, the hungry to improve – the natural aristocracy of self-expression and communication.

Over the door I would post a big sign:

ROSES ONLY. NO STUDENTS ALLOWED.

Then we’d set to working – making perfume.

Images:

• De Petale, by Christiane Michaud
• untitled, by rosemary*
• rose for you…, by Lyubov

Relevant posts:

• 21st Century Education: Thinking Creatively by Anthony Chivetta, Students 2.0
• Dialogue with a New Student Blogger on the Question of Classroom Blogging

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

If I’ve learned anything in this year of blogging, it’s that good ideas need ritual repetition before they gain traction, find support, and become realities. So here goes (and the second point is far more important than the first):

Scott McLeod just wrote a very nice post about the launch, and the future, of Students 2.0 at Dangerously Irrelevant. I replied there, but want to paste a snippet here, since I’d planned to put these ideas out here anyway.

They concern two things: finding more writers for Students 2.0, and applying the same Twitter-social bookmark PR tactics used in the s20h launch to generate political pressure concerning educational issues.

1. Seeking More Students 2.0 Writers

From the comment to Scott, slightly edited:

Getting more staff writers for s2oh is a high priority. (Sylvia Martinez, by the way, already helped me find the first batch of writers, along with Diane Cordell (http://dmcordell.blogspot.com) Carolyn Foote (http://futura.edublogs.org), and Chris Watson (http://watsoncommon.blogspot.com).)

Any readers of any age who know a student already blogging with regularity – and quality – are invited to contact us on the “Contribute” page of Students 2.0. They don’t have to be “edubloggers” per se, just good writers (or multimedia)/ bloggers with the ability to reflect about their experiences in education. They can also contact me [here].

2. One-Click Political Activism via Social Networking: Twitter, Ning, and the e-Blogosphere as a Potential Political Force

On a side note, the launch itself was a learning experience about network marketing, and how it can be used to generate a message. I’m hoping to find a few others who see that this can be duplicated for political/educational purposes aimed at influencing politicians, voters, and the “education industrial complex” (to quote Jim Walker’s brilliant comment on Will Richardson’s recent “End of Year Dreaming” post).

So far, my post about it has been met with silence. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, to me; it just means either the right people haven’t read it or, if they have, they read it at the wrong time

I’m convinced we can hold a few feet to the fire re: NCLB, the textbook industry, the ETS and College Board, and more, in a series of regular campaigns requiring little more than bookmarking a post to del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon, etc, in a short time-frame.

You saw the potential of s2oh, Scott. Do you see what I’m saying about the potential political power of the educational networks of Twitterers, Ning-ers (Steve Hargadon, I’ll be in touch again soon, because the numbers in Classroom 2.0 can generate quite a message!), and similar networks to create pressure for change?

Come back soon for more ritual repetition. This can be so easy if we all work together, and at the same time, so powerful. We’ve shown with Students 2.0 that Twitter can be about more than the latest cool tool you found. It can be about creating the changes we all want to see – or at least raising a fun bit of low-effort hell in the attempt.

Photo credit: “see him?” by laihiu

If you haven’t read Ryan Bretag’s and Steve Hargadon’s posts on TechLearning about Students 2.0, they’re worth a read. And Steve’s podcast interview with Kevin, Sean, and Lindsey shows them at their wonderful best, in terms of both intelligence and personality.

I haven’t really written any reflections here since launching Students 2.0 back on December 8 – those of you in my Twitterverse may have noticed I’m feeling a bit burned out right now – so I want to do that now.

I’ll start with saying thank you to the educators out there who helped it happen: Scott Schwister and Scott McLeod for simple moral and conceptual support back when I was blogging about the idea in June; Diane Cordell, Chris Watson, Carolyn Foote, Sylvia Martinez, and Elizabeth Helfant for answering my twitter request for good student bloggers out there; Christian Long and Steve Hargadon for blogging about Sean “The Bassplayer” and Arthus Erea (that’s how I learned about these two s2oh contributors); and Mr. Winton for turning Sean on to learning 2.0 in his Scotland classroom.

Then there’s everybody who helped with the marketing. Thanks to Arthus for the idea (and creation) of the splash page, and for creating the countdown badge with his coding skills; thanks to Sean the Bassplayer and the entire s2oh team for creating the promotional YouTube video and original soundtrack; thanks to readers of this blog for playing along with the request to push the launch onto the del.icio.us hotlist, for blogging about the project and embedding the badge, and for the concerted Twitter-burst of del.icio.us bookmarks that pushed s2oh onto the hotlist in less than three hours.

Re: that Twitter marketing campaign, I said it then and I’ll say it again: it was fairly spontaneous, it unapologetically manipulated del.icio.us for a good cause, and it worked. It showed the power of a network of educators who can bother to take a couple of minutes of action to create a fairly impressive marketing sensation. For the skeptics and naysayers about this move, the question I ask is: Without this audience and this buzz, how excited and motivated would the s20h writers be to deliver a quality product and make this project a success?

Let me illustrate how effective this collaborative effort of everyone above was by comparing some basic stats about Students 2.0 – after only three weeks – with my own blog’s stats after one year:

• Del.icio.us bookmarks: Students 2.0: 450; Beyond School, 65 (for the main page only; I don’t know how to get a total that includes permalink pages);
• Technorati ranking (links from individual blogs): Students 2.0 150; Beyond School, 85 (new site, since Oct. 20) + 70 (old site, Jan. 1 – Oct. 20) = 155;
• RSS Subscribers: Students 2.0: 405; Beyond School: 401;
• Unique Visits for December: Students 2.0: over 12,500 unique visits (since December 8); Beyond School: 5,069.

Kevin Walter playfully accuses me of being a “stats whore” when I talk about readership, and I always reply that self-publishing is still publishing, and to publishers, readership matters.

So what am I trying to say here? I’ll quote from a comment I left on Steve Hargadon’s post on TechLearning:

[It all points to] the need to create more authentic publication spaces, with more authentic audiences for students that, like Students 2.0, require quality to reach that audience.

There are obviously other possibilities for such spaces, besides a student edublog, that might motivate students to “embrace the revolution” in their own education.

Music, film, photography, and writings on a broader range of subjects than education are a case in point.

In my own senior classroom, I’ve been pursuing an “authentic blogging pedagogy” that throws out prescribed curriculum altogether, and requires only that my students identify a passion-based path of inquiry and/or production, and pursue that through connective reading-and-writing, and through showcasing their own creative pursuits on their blogs.

After a few frustrating months of watching them flounder, I’m finally seeing signs that give me hope. One student had a “mission moment” in which he identified that his blog would henceforth be the space in which he published and discussed his own musical compositions, with the aim of producing a full CD by the end of the senior year.

Others have similarly chosen photography and design as their missions, and are advancing down their own paths in those directions.

I started Students 2.0 out of frustration with all the excuses we read for not pushing authentic learning with web 2.0 forward in education. Sean’s old English teacher in Scotland, “Mr. Winton,” put his finger on my ultimate hope for this enterprise when he wrote,

“This attempt to give students a genuine forum where they can give an end-users view of Education2.0 is, I hope, the thin end of the wedge.”

The “thin end of the wedge” indeed. We can, all of us, create more spaces that students want to earn their way into. The less “schooly” and egalitarian, the better – because maybe those unmotivated students Diane mentions are not motivated precisely because the types of publication they are offered online, in the end, still feel as inauthentic as the hallway displays of yore.

Thanks for taking these young people seriously, and not just giving them a pat on the head. I know I’ve been snarky on a couple occasions in comments on other posts about s2oh, but it’s precisely because those posts seemed to both miss the weight of the moment, and to coopt the revolution by taming it into a lower level of status in the edublogging caste system. It’s nice to see you and Ryan Bretag (he wrote about s2oh on TL first, as far as I know) avoiding that tone.

It’s early days for s2oh, and they have a learning curve ahead of them, but trust me: for engagement and motivation, and care for their work, they get an A+ for their work so far.

Or would, if this had anything at all to do with grades. The amazing thing, of course, is that it doesn’t.

To sum up, a few propositions:

1. We can create more spaces like this, with similar visibility to motivate quality, through similar means. You come up with the idea, and I’ll certainly return the favor you’ve given s2oh by blogging about it, helping you push it to del.ico.us’ hotlist, etc.

2. It doesn’t take a lot of work to make things happen. It does take doing, though.

3. We shouldn’t forget what this whole enterprise taught about the power of network marketing for education.

Thanks again to everyone. I’m pooped, so I’m signing off.

Lesson learned: if you start a digital video, finish it quickly.

I started this months ago as part of the “Visionary Student Blogging” project for my AP Literature seniors. Some crazy introductory idea that I hoped would help them see how blogging could be an escape from school-as-usual.

I didn’t finish it the way I wanted to, and life got in the way. I spent a bit of time this morning making the attribution titles at the end so I could post it. A couple of people had seen it on our AP Lit Ning and told me they liked it.

I think it’s kind of vague, myself, and imperfect in more ways than one. But educational fantasies are always a bit vague, aren’t they?

(I used Zamzar to convert YouTube videos for import into iMovie, by the way.)

(If anybody can tell me how to make my YouTube videos show up in RSS readers, by the way, I’d be so appreciative. I know it can be done because I see others do it.)

[Update 3 August 2008: If you want a written version of the same story, I did my best here.]

[Update 2: I've copied Stephen Downes' comments about this post, and my own response to them, in the comments, if anybody is interested.]

[Update: I've added the podcast to my Teaching Gallery page, in case you come across a student who might benefit by listening in the future.]

~  ~  ~

I was bullied for two years in high school. Every day.

I told the story to my grade 9 class last year – there was some stuff going on in the hallways that made me hope it might help – and recorded it as I told them.

And I thought, in the spirit of this season of good will, that I would share that story here. Here’s the enhanced podcast for download, with chapters for quick navigation.

But if you want to listen without downloading first, see the bottom of this post.

Most of the bullying content we see online tries to make bullying stop. It’s a nice goal. But this story does things differently.

It’s to the bullied.

It tells them that, for me, over 700 consecutive days of bullying in high school was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It just took me a couple decades to realize that. This does not mean those two decades were bad.

The audio quality is bad. Sorry about that. But I think you can hear it anyway.

It’s about 30 minutes long. My students still talk about it, a year later. And I’ve shared it with a few new acquaintances of mine recently – you may be reading some of them – and one of them said it was “as worth sharing as all the other drivel you read on edublogs out there.” (I loved that. And relax – it was a joke.)

It is a story. I tried to tell it well. And there are more than a few laughs along the way.

Call it my “Christmas Carol.” And tuck it away somewhere for that possibly tortured, possibly suicidal student we worry about here and there as teachers, as community leaders, as human beings. It’s really for them, again.

Here it is. Enjoy:

Photo credit: “the bully” by O Pish Posh

Graham Wegner tweeted about her a couple of weeks ago. I followed. And now, I am snared. I can’t get the vamp out of my mind.

Who is . . . “Taylor the Teacher”?

I can’t help but suspect that, like the Yes Men I wrote about a while back, those fantastic satirists and impersonators with a cause, Taylor is not the doll she seems at all.

In fact, I suspect she’s not a “she” at all.

Visit Taylor at your peril. You are warned.

(And “Taylor,” sorry I leeched your header image. Those eyes just slay me.)

Sometimes you just want to give up. Instead, I’ll go transparent and see what ideas, counsels, or commiserations come from sharing.

It’s about the “Visionary Student Blogging” connective writing project.

The problem? Little vision, little connective writing.

It’s partly senioritis, I think. College applications, SAT’s, too many commitments to too many extra-curricular activities (got to have those bullets for the college application, even if they come at the cost of destroying both my learning and my GPA), too many week-long sports trips, too many AP classes that were chosen not for interest but again for careerist reasons.

It’s partly Korean culture: parents sending students to night and weekend schools for SAT prep, AP prep, tutors. Students confusing memorization skills with academic excellence, trained to “be instructed” rather than to “construct” meaning themselves. Having no time to be, reflect, explore, wonder (or having no energy, rather).

And it’s partly my own fault: all the macho posturing of Advanced Placement courses as “college-level, rigorous,” etc – and Wes Fryer’s etymolological connection, in Shanghai back in September, of “rigor” with “rigid” and “rigor mortis” echoes here – led me to buy in to what now seems a sadistic and pedagogically pathetic imperative to overload AP students with A Mountain Of Homework. I’ve stopped that and changed courses after seeing that Paradise Lost was over most of my seniors’ heads. Instead, I’m now trying to save Milton from being Hated by Association with AP by simply playing the Bard and reciting my favorite parts to them, with full bardic savoring of Milton’s high style, and then gushing explicative about those heights as if I was talking about it on a summer road trip with friends. Call it modeling the Oral Tradition. They’ll be given the wheel for the later books, and expected to do the same. (See Carolyn Foote’s “How Long Does It Have to Be?” post about homework load for more on this, and read Alfie Kohn’s The Truth About Homework for some research data.)

And it’s partly they don’t know how to be writers. They’ve ever only written what teacher tells them in school, by and large.

So. Again, the result: little vision, little effort, little connective writing. Little writing at all. (There are exceptions, blessedly.)

So they’ve pulled me back from Beyond Schooliness into Threatening Teacher mode. I don’t like it. Below is my schooly post to them. Tell me what you would do? Here it is:

You’ve seen the “What Makes a Quality Weblog” guide. It’s the one you used to give feedback on each others’ blogs a few weeks ago. Click here if you need to see it again.

I’ll use it to assess your blogs for two “test” grades – the “Composition” part of this “Literature and Composition” course. Writing schooly essay assignments is only one form of writing (and the least authentic one, at that. You’ll never write literary analyses in the real world).

Connective reading and writing is the other half of your writing development in this class.

This project started on September 18-ish. You just finished your eighth week since starting it. The finish date will be Friday, December 7. That’s 11 weeks of writing you need to show you were doing.

The “Quality Weblog” guide is meant to be just that: your guide. It tells you how to make an A (”mastery” on the guide), a B (”above average”), a C (”average”), or lower.

Biggest factors for your grade: frequency, connectivism (linking to and discussing BLOGS that match your interests), writing quality (titles, ideas, style, voice, presentation – photos, font, links correct, etc), and tags (organization). There should be evidence of “self-directed learning” – call it your chosen, interest- or passion-based research project – in your writings.

So here’s the math, with a bit of generosity*:

If you want an A for these two test grades: by December 7, you should have

• 45 posts; 10 “long-ish”; 22 “connected” (linking to posts you’ve found interesting, but more importantly, discussing WHY you found them interesting); 44 “short-ish”.
• for examples of “longish,” see JoonPyo’s post (good, but not connective at all, so nobody will find it in the real world), Nicole’s post 1 and post 2 (both good AND connective – Nicole seems to “get it” more than most students, and is a real pleasure to read – much more pleasant than her schoolwork), Shim’s post (good, but connects to a website instead of blog, so nobody will visit and form a network relationship). Or for a non-student example, see this post on “Have Fun – Do Good” about “How to Get Someone Other than Your Mom to Read Your Blog” – connective, fun, informative, useful (you don’t need that many links in your “connective” posts – one or two is fine).
• for examples of “short-ish AND connective,” see Jane’s post.
• finally, too many 1- or 2- sentence posts really makes you look lazy Think a paragraph or two.

If you’ve been writing regularly, you’re okay. If not, you’ve got some catching up to do. Or you can aim for a C by using the guide.

Finally: if you still haven’t found feeds to match your interests, I’ll say it one last time: see me and I’ll help. Or don’t, and get what you deserve for not having your act together enough to problem-solve.

Note: I will help you write more by scaling back the Paradise Lost reading load. But you must yourself make the time – key word, make – to write regularly. You won’t go anywhere if you never start, in writing or in life.

—
*the “generosity,” for those who didn’t do the math, is that I reduced 11 weeks x 5 posts/week = 55 posts to only 45; I also reduced “11 long-ish” to “10″.

It just occurred to me I’ve been using my Twitterverse to solicit student blogger recommendations for the upcoming student edublog launch on December 1. See this post and especially the conversation thread below it for an idea how this project is taking shape.

Some very exciting contributors have already signed on, but if you know of any high-quality student bloggers out there who can add a new dimension to our adult echo-chamber through some quality writing, please send them this link and urge them to consider.

All available staff writers so far will be planning the launch this weekend on a Skype conference call – many states in the USA, a UK student, one or more in Korea. More are welcome.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned for more.

I’ve wanted to help this happen for the last five months. And I need your help to launch it with quality and good aim. Just a thoughtful comment consisting of a short list is all we ask.

First, a recap. Why re-write what was already obsessively written since May? So:

What would happen if we educators encouraged volunteer students to create a niche of learner edubloggers? That could be enlightening indeed.
– post from 6 May 2007

[Giving student presentations at education conferences] means less (next to nothing, I would guess) to students compared to their daily school experience, and their participation in the larger world generally. They should be participating in our edublogger conversations on an equal footing, as equal partners.
– post from 7 July 2007

[L]et the star student-writers with forward-thinking parents be the first members of the type of “LearnerVoices” [blog] Scott Schwister is envisioning. And make it pay off, for both the students and the edublogosphere, by inviting those young writers into our dialogue, and not only commenting on their blogs, but asking them to comment on ours. That’s a reality check worth inviting. . . . Because we need to get beyond this stage of adult-centered edutalk. It’s time to bring in the silent – and silenced – majority: our students.
– post from 8 July 2007

[W]e seem to be seeing a new milestone in the edublogosphere: the beginnings of democracy with the inclusion of our student Silent Majority. How freakin’ cool is that.
– post from 5 August 2007

The URL is bought, the WordPress is installed, and several student bloggers from different countries have agreed to contribute and serve as editors (feel free to pass an invitation along to any student edublogger you know to contact me here, by the way). We’re going to Skype this weekend to clarify the approach.

And that’s where you adult edubloggers can help. Since you’re the intended audience, it would be great if you could take a minute to look at this wonderfully tight list of categories from the aptly named A List Apart blog, and distill a list of the six categories you’d most like to read about in a collective student edublog.

Again, we’ll be laying the foundations this Saturday. You can help assure those foundations will be solid by leaving a thoughtful “list apart” of your own.

Comments beyond that list, of course, are welcome. If you were me, what other concerns would you have, what policies (if any) would you insist upon?

The target launch date is December 1. They’ll be reading you. I’m sure they hope you’ll be reading them too.
–

A special thanks to Scott Schwister and Scott McLeod here, by the way. His offer to support this idea back in August was somehow a tipping point for me.

(Apologies for the style. I’m overdue some sleep, but wanted to put the request out as soon as possible.)

–Image credit: “Megaphone Tank on a Barcode” by lyers on Flickr